TO GET ACQUAINTED with Trenton Doyle Hancock’s work—or, better yet, his world—is to become versant in an origin story that the artist first conceived of when he was in the fourth grade. As a precocious ten-year-old, Hancock drew Me Turning into Torpedoboy, 1984, a prescient sketch of his morally indifferent alter ego/superhero. But what crisis would precipitate his superhero’s journey? What crimes would he avenge? Growing up in an evangelical Baptist church, Hancock had assimilated sermons on Black-liberation theology that spoke of a spiritual war in which Manichaean precepts on race dictated

The categories of work listed on Nina Katchadourian’s website include “uninvited collaborations with nature,” “charts and systems,” and “language/translation.” Stemming from these topics, the artist’s highly structured experiments often begin with found objects and absurd situations that she disentangles, only to find that they are part of the larger webs of identity and relationships. Her current exhibition at Fridman Gallery in New York, “Ification,” includes several of her best-known pieces in addition to The Recarcassing Ceremony, 2016, a video that revisits an old recording of a childhood

The New York–based artist Ben Morgan-Cleveland is perhaps best known for co-owning the Brooklyn gallery Real Fine Arts, which closed last year. His work has been exhibited at Shoot the Lobster, Eli Ping Frances Perkins, 15 Orient, Greene Naftali, and elsewhere. His upcoming solo show, “Gallery with Words,” will be on view at Kai Matsumiya in New York from March 22 through April 27, 2019. Here, Morgan-Cleveland discusses the sculptures he’s been making in the commons of a New York City park.

 

I’VE BEEN MAKING WORDS out of branches in a quiet part of Prospect Park. There’s a lot of rearranging, an

Longtime couturier Isabel Toledo, who had the distinct honor of designing Michelle Obama’s 2009 inauguration outfit, and her husband, the illustrator, artist, and stage designer Ruben Toledo, have been collaborators for nearly forty years. The pair, based in Manhattan, have embarked on another singular adventure: a show commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) for which the Toledos have created a new body of work that responds to the museum’s vast and extraordinary collection—which the duo talks about below. “Labor of Love” is on view through July 17, 2019.

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, Vogue

Bunny Rogers’s preferred email sign-off is a sentiment that rings true to her work: Sincerely. It is the slipperiness of connection, however, that allows her to calibrate so sensitively the inner illogic of our own narratives and memories in her practice, which spans sculpture, performance, coding, and writing. “Pectus Excavatum,” her solo exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, revisits familiar motifs from past work—animals, toys, mops, and ribbons—to excavate sites of personal and mass media mythology. The show is on view through April 28, 2019. 

I’VE MOURNED THE LOSS

Redoing histories—through essays, fiction films, and documentary forms—is a primary motivator for artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen. He restlessly interrogates the peripheral narratives he finds in the “non-aligned” and “socialist” movements during the Cold War. United Red Army (2011) revisits the surreal moment when Japanese left-wing terrorists hijacked a plane in support of Palestinian liberation in 1977; Tripoli Cancelled (2017) fictionalizes the condition of being stranded in stateless limbo; and Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017) follows the dramatic architectures in which third-world

Cutting, splitting, and reassembling, be it fake plants, national flags, musical instruments, or W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Jane Benson engages with the experience of displacement, and a sense of loss and longing. Her series of sculptures titled “A Place For Infinite Tuning,” 2015, consists of fractured objects that are tentatively balanced—they look like they might fall at the pull of a thread. Her first monograph, which shares the same title, will be published next month by Skira and contains texts by Steven Matijcio, Sara Reisman, and Nico Israel. Here the artist speaks about the making

One feels continuously jolted by an element of disjunction in Keren Cytter’s work. In her videos, for instance, subjects interact with each other, but the potential for intersubjectivity seems simultaneously to be stripped away. Things happen, sometimes over and over, but never within the breadth of typical temporality. Bringing together a selection of her videos, children’s books, animations, and drawings, Cytter’s solo exhibition at the Museion in Bolzano, Italy, “Mature Content,” is on view through April 28, 2019.

I MADE THREE ROOMS at the Museion in which to show my films, with the entrances

The fourteen paintings and drawings that comprise Maia Cruz Palileo’s debut solo exhibition in her native Chicago are, in essence, portraits of the Philippines, imagined as her family had once known it. But Palileo’s lurid, tropical scenes are equally somewhere and nowhere, bridging the continents of a real place and its memory, its histories and its myths, its hard facts and its folklore. “All The While I Thought You Had Received This” will be on view at Monique Meloche Gallery until March 30, 2019.

THIS SHOW’S TITLE comes from a letter that my grandmother wrote to me around ten years ago. I

Nathaniel Dorsky treats celluloid as a medium for ceremony—silence and light are concerns he has explored in his films since the 1960s. His latest work, Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle) (2018), will screen at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California on February 9, 2019.The entire Arboretum Cycle, which comprises seven films shot in the San Francisco Arboretum between 2017 and 2018, will also screen there on February 15, 2019.

THERE WAS A DROUGHT IN CALIFORNIA for five years, and then in the autumn of 2017 there was a huge amount of rain. I went to the San Francisco Arboretum

For over three decades, the London-born, Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker Charlotte Pryce has been making what she calls “observational reveries,” delicate, handcrafted celluloid miniatures that capture the beauty of nature and science through discreet cinematic techniques. A parallel interest in early alchemical processes recently led her to the magic lantern, a pre-cinematic projector that utilizes transparent slides (often painted, printed, or photographed) and a single light source to illuminate still-image tableaux. Following her recent shows in Los Angeles, Rotterdam, and Brussels,

Dora Budor’s current exhibition at 80WSE in New York blends historical fact with fable to tell the building’s story of transformation, reflecting a fascination with the ways in which subjectivity is inflected by reactive, evolving environments. Originally built in 1879 as a residence exclusively for single men, primarily artists, the so-called Benedick Building—nicknamed after the bachelor character in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing—was bought in 1925 by New York University, and turned into offices and dormitories as part of its accelerated expansion. Here, Budor speaks about starting with