Since cake decorating led him to take up painting in 1994, Donald Moffett’s materially suggestive surfaces of extruded pigment and poured resin have addressed environmental collapse and political turmoil. But the artist, AIDS activist, and former Gran Fury member’s current exhibition, “The Hollow,” at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s Aspen location, circles back to pandemic time, when, once again, a virus has made touch deadly. Though our current crisis has traded the overt stigmatization of AIDS and its communities for a more collective-minded “we are in this together” spirit, the US government’s

For her first solo show in Los Angeles—on view at François Ghebaly from December 12 to January 9—Em Rooney unveils a new body of sculpture alongside her photographs. While Rooney is known for creating sculptural framing devices for her photos, this marks her first exhibition of stand-alone sculptures, almost all of which assume the form of flowers. An emphasis on tactility and process has always been evident in Rooney’s photographic “containers,” which deftly merge two differently valued modes of knowledge acquisition: sight and touch. Focusing on sculptural forms allows Rooney to continue

Jennifer Packer has most often painted the people who surround her, rendering the figures of close friends and classmates from observation as they kick back into couches and armchairs, nestled inside New York apartments and grad-school studios. Transmuted by textured washes and brilliant hues, their bodies and clothing blend into their plush environs, becoming one with the scene and most truly at home. The New York–based artist also applies a soft touch to her recent paintings of flower bouquets, each a sprightly study of color and form that serves as a requiem to the fleeting and fragile beauty

Organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “Beatriz González: A Retrospective”—the most comprehensive US display of the Colombian artist’s output to date—makes its final stop at the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU) in Bogotá, the city where the groundbreaking painter has long lived and worked. Spanning the early 1960s to the present, the exhibition’s more than one hundred paintings, drawings, and furniture pieces center on González’s trenchant, often playful commentary on life during Colombia’s five-decade war while tracing an aesthetic associated with Pop

Titled after English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus (1766–1834)—whose contentious prediction that the world’s population would grow more rapidly than its means of subsistence pointed to the limits of anthropogenic activity on our planet while also influencing social Darwinism and eugenics—Marzia Migliora’s “The Spectre of Malthus,” curated by Matteo Lucchetti at the Museo Arte Gallarate and on through December 13, explores the risks posed by the production system of industrial agriculture. This minimal installation makes its visual richness a secret: Nothing is revealed until the viewer

Following his inclusion in the group show “Intimate Companions” in Provincetown this summer, painter Luke O’Halloran is set to present his hypnotic oils of playing cards and carnie showmanship in his first New York solo exhibition, “Dealing,” opening at Kapp Kapp Gallery on Mischief Night (October 30) and on through December 31. The California-born artist’s symbolic strong suits will be on full display: Keep a weather eye open for a dead man’s hand. Nearby is his lively rendition of the woman sawed in half. Below, O’Halloran discusses his interest in legerdemain, luck, and the powers of suspense.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen has in recent years emerged as a maker of hybrid films that conjure national memories of displacement like magic spells, their layered narratives exerting a mesmeric pull on characters and viewers alike. The artist’s latest work, Crimes of Solidarity, debuted earlier this month in Marseille as part of the nomadic Manifesta biennial, which recently concluded a staggered six-week opening across as many landmark venues (all installations will remain on view through November 29). Produced remotely in collaboration with asylum-seekers who founded the city’s Squat Saint-Just, Crimes

New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that works with networks of informants and accomplices to create grounds for Indigenous futures, models itself in contradistinction to an older, extant secret society: the Improved Order of the Red Men, an American organization, revived in 1934 as a whites-only fraternity, whose redface rituals and regalia are inspired by the country’s most famous, foundational act of Indigenous appropriation: the donning of Mohawk disguises by the Sons of Liberty during the Boston Tea Party. If America is premised both on desires for indigeneity and the violent

After months of working under lockdown in Berlin, Jesse Darling recently traveled by train to Kunstverein Freiburg, in southwest Germany, to install Gravity Road, a “dysfunctional roller coaster” that consists of a suspended horizontal track, a ladder twisting to nowhere. Like the artist’s previous experiments in steel—such as The Veterans and Wounded Door 1, both 2014—the work’s anthropometric scale and distorted form suggest both vulnerability and potential. The exhibition opened on September 19 and runs through November 1, 2020. Here, Darling talks about the work’s genesis and installation,

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In The Inheritance, director Ephraim Asili presents a dramatic narrative based on his years in a West Philadelphia Black radical collective. The New York–based filmmaker’s first feature following a run of celebrated short films focused on the African diaspora, The Inheritance centers Black artists and activists in its fictionalized portrait of a young man who turns his late grandmother’s house into a shared space for socialist thought and creativity. Alternating comedic vignettes of collective living with scripted interviews, poetry readings, and archival footage—including images of the 1985

Stéphanie Saadé often traces her nomadic upbringing in her installations—spare and evocative meditations on memory, movement, and space. Like that of her “home” city of Beirut, Saadé’s past year in the Lebanese capital has been turbulent: The birth of her first child was closely followed by the explosion last month at the city’s waterfront that left 181 people dead and an estimated 300,000 homeless. Around the time of the blast, Saadé was developing a project for “A Few In Many Places,” a collaboration between artists and local shop owners from Montréal, Philadelphia, Berlin, Istanbul, and the

A New York­­–based artist who has previously lived in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Canada, Jesse Chun studies the way language—especially English—shapes cultural experience. From the tedium of bureaucratic boilerplate to the social attitudes embedded in the ESL curriculum, Chun manipulates the tools of English-language pedagogy and officialdom to expose the linguistic imperialism of this so-called common tongue. In the past, she has used children’s alphabet toys as molds for silicone and graphite sculptures, creating abstract, illegible forms. Other bodies of work build a visual lexicon from the