Kate Green

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  picks November 09, 2021

  Chico MacMurtie

  We all saw the horrendous news photographs of United States agents on horseback, who appeared to be whipping Haitians crossing the Rio Grande. Such images of violence against those seeking refuge confirm the enduring injustice of America’s southern border policies and work to foreclose any visions of lasting structural change. “Border Crossers,” Chico MacMurtie’s exhibition at this Texas institution, acknowledges this grim reality while summoning a different future. The show features the largest presentation to date of the artist’s drawings as well as performances near several crossing

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  picks March 09, 2020

  Pia Camil

  Raw, emotional images—a grim reaper, silver scythe in hand, materializing from a black cloak; a ghostly, mustard-yellow figure crying white tears; dark-hued breasts engorged from nursing—course through the twenty-one new drawings that comprise this show in the artist’s hometown. Pia Camil is known for bright, tightly composed abstract tableaux of ceramics, canvases (both stretched and hung like curtains), and suspended patchworks of T-shirts that celebrate Mexico City’s commercial landscape and informal economies. Now, as the artist enters the age of caring for both children and aging parents,

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  picks November 15, 2019

  “The Sorcerer's Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn”

  For this timely exhibition’s catalogue, British and Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu contributed a 1978 snapshot of his brother, whose face is obscured by what looks like an African mask. The image presages Eshetu’s interest in using a lens to explore the intricacies of identity. It also points to a question central to this show, which features work by eleven artists sensitively curated by Heather Pesanti: How have artists, like anthropologists, not only problematized the concept of the “other” (especially as it overlaps with the colonial project) but also shaped it?

  Eshetu provides an exacting

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  picks July 15, 2019

  “Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine”

  The southern border of the United States has long been defined by those on the northern side, whose demands for contraband and low-wage workers are matched by their resistance to equitably reforming immigration policies. While xenophobia, hostility, and capitalism wreak havoc on the borderlands, this show includes three artists who highlight the strength of the region’s indigenous communities and traditions.

  Candice Lin’s installation on the back of syphilis mountain candelilla grows, 2019, features a clay fire pit glowing in a darkened gallery. Melting in and beyond it is a waxy substance

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  picks May 16, 2019

  Tania Candiani

  This rotunda-shaped museum was designed in 1963 by a Mexico City architect to anchor a new federally funded cultural district, Programa Nacional Fronterizo (ProNaF), three miles from the border city’s downtown area. Like NAFTA and the current border-security crisis, the desolate ProNaF and the aging structure are reminders of how national powers fail people: In the desert, the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez’s resin roof bakes, and its moat has become a watery mess.

  Within this context, Tania Candiani’s generous “Cromática,” first presented in Oaxaca, soars. Presiding over the rotunda is Colores

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  picks January 19, 2019

  Michael Smith

  Named for its founder’s juice brand, Museo Jumex is utterly corporate, surrounded by commercial towers, malls, and billionaire Carlos Slim’s museum. This makes it the perfect backdrop for the latest in Michael Smith’s twenty-five-year-old International Trade and Enrichment Association (ITEA) project.

  Outside, a billboard reads “Available Soon! Jumex Terrace,” while inside the spacious, windowed terrace gallery, ITEA offers marketing pamphlets and videos arranged in trade-show-style booths. With wit that advances critique-of the art world’s relationship to development, of middle-class aging-Smith’s

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  picks July 08, 2018

  Jessica Hankey and Erin Johnson

  Less than a half mile from the Rubin Center is a newly built section of US border wall, erected beside the Rio Grande, separating El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Given this context and the recent protests against inhumane immigration policies, this superb installation, featuring a three-channel video installation and a single-channel projection, carries extra weight.

  Shooting footage at city-run senior recreation centers in El Paso, Jessica Hankey and Erin Johnson conducted workshops (with Gina Sandí-Díaz) wherein the elderly played theater games (à la Viola Spolin and Augusto Boal)

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  picks January 19, 2018

  Mona Hatoum

  The first survey of Beirut-born Mona Hatoum’s work in a United States museum in twenty years is revelatory and destabilizing. Curator Michelle White has organized more than twenty major sculptures and installations and dozens of smaller pieces and works on paper made since the 1980s in several galleries and among the museum’s collection. The exhibition foregrounds Hatoum’s ability to shift the scale and materials of familiar and oftentimes domestic objects (hair, light bulbs, and cheese graters, but also grenades and maps) in a manner that suggests a relationship both to Surrealist pieces hanging

• 

  interviews December 19, 2017

  Charles Gaines

  Since the early 1970s, Charles Gaines has used the grid to interrogate the constructed nature of representation. His work is featured in “Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection,” a touring exhibition that historicizes how artists have responded to demands that they make “black art” since the 1940s. Curated by Christopher Bedford and Katy Siegel, the show is on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans until January 21, 2018 and then will travel to the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, from February 15 to July 15, 2018; the Snite Museum of Art in South

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  interviews November 21, 2017

  Rafa Esparza

  Born and based in Los Angeles, Rafa Esparza “browns” the white cube through performances that involve bodies—his own and those of his collaborators. Recently, Esparza has begun using adobe bricks—traditionally made by hand with clay soil and other organic material—to build structures in galleries. His latest exhibition “Tierra. Sangre. Oro.” (Earth. Blood. Gold.), features pieces by Carmen Argote, Nao Bustamante, Beatriz Cortez, Timo Fahler, Eamon Ore-Giron, Star Montana, Sandro Cánovas, María García, and Rubén Rodriguez, and is on view at Ballroom Marfa until March 18, 2018.

  MY

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  picks May 11, 2017

  Nina Katchadourian

  In 2012, Nina Katchadourian’s 2011 series “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style,” consisting of pictures styled after sober Northern Renaissance paintings and shot inside airplane bathrooms—including headdresses fashioned from toilet-seat covers—went viral. The artist’s wit and resourcefulness are clearly infectious, as confirmed by this midcareer survey comprising hundreds of photographs among other two-dimensional works, all organized by project, as well as several videos and sound pieces. “Sorted Books,” 1993–, features dozens of photographs of book spines and covers arranged to spell

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  picks December 12, 2016

  Cauleen Smith

  For those finding it difficult to see beyond a post-election haze, this show’s kaleidoscope of talismans, filmed utopias, and jazz sounds offers a welcome apparition. A room-size installation, titled Asterisms, 2016, is the most ambitious work to date by Cauleen Smith, an artist steeped in structuralist filmmaking and Afrofuturism. It conjures a future that is bright for all bodies.

  A constellation of four monitors facing radially outward forms the installation’s core. Each screen plays footage recorded by cameras looking upward and outward at natural and human-made Shangri-las, such as puffy