Yxta Maya Murray

  • print January 2020

    Octavio Abúndez

    The human race is better equipped to talk a lot of nonsense than to save itself from extinction. Octavio Abúndez’s exhibition at Kohn Gallery made the point with a resounding crash of cant. The main room was hung with some of the Conceptualist’s hard-edge “stripe” paintings, outfitted with the umbrella title “We Could Be So Much Better,” 2015–, and composed of stacked bands of color. Within each belt, Abúndez embeds text from adventure and catastrophe films whose hammy dialogue mirrors the way we live now—which is to say, the way we collectively react to sure signs of environmental collapse not

  • print September 2019

    “Pope.L: Conquest,” “Pope.L: Choir,” and “Member: Pope.L 1978–2001.”

    “POPE.L: CONQUEST”

    Public Art Fund

    September 21, 2019

    Curated by Nicholas Baume

    “POPE.L: CHOIR”

    Whitney Museum of American Art

    October 10, 2019–Winter 2020

    Curated by Christopher Y. Lew with Ambika Trasi

    “MEMBER: POPE.L, 1978–2001”

    The Museum of Modern Art

    October 21, 2019–January 2020

    Curated by Stuart Comer with Danielle A. Jackson

    IN 1991, the artist Pope.L dragged himself and a potted flower through Tompkins Square Park (Tompkins Square Crawl). The next year, while wearing a Santa hat, he spent three days trying to lift a bottle of laxatives with his mind (Levitating the Magnesia). In 2000, he gorged

  • picks June 27, 2019

    Adee Roberson

    In her paintings and built environments, Adee Roberson cathartically deploys colors to clear the air of white supremacy’s curses. But in “Tamarind,” her exhibition of sacralized portraits of black figures at the Women’s Center for Creative Work, she seeks more to fashion a place for remembrance.

    Within the small gallery, the walls pulsate with pink and teal paint. One wall is papered over with screen-printed menus offering items such as cucumber juice and cow foot stew; although the restaurant is unidentified, the tessellation of its offerings implies the artist’s intimacy with its dishes.

  • picks May 10, 2019

    “Unraveling Collective Forms”

    The ancient Inca people used quipus, systems of knotted strings, to record precious data. When the Spanish conquerors arrived, many quipus were burned and, with them, the ciphers’ keys. Today, scholars are still working to translate this language. Our imaginations must fill in the blanks.

    “Unravelling Collective Forms” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions brings together women artists and artists of color engaging with the form and history of the quipu to process and reimagine the impact of colonialism, patriarchy, and Western imperialism. Mercedes Dorame’s The Wind Is Speaking – Ahniiken

  • print May 2019

    OPENINGS: IMANI JACQUELINE BROWN

    MORE THAN A DECADE after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is still far from having recovered. Many survivors of the 2005 disaster could not afford the liens accumulating against their water-damaged properties and today find themselves displaced from their ancestral homes. Households and shops remain gutted. Legal forfeitures have been normalized, and officials have resold lost homes to whiter, wealthier people. In 2014, to bring attention to the dispossession of lower-income communities of color, Imani Jacqueline Brown and her compatriots in the collective Blights Out (Mariama Eversley, Bryan C.