Lynne Cooke is senior curator for special projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She is currently at work on “Braided Histories,” a planned 2023 exhibition that will explore affiliations and interchanges between abstract artists and textile designers and producers.
1
“NOT I: THROWING VOICES 1500 BCE–2020 CE” (LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART; CURATED BY JOSÉ LUIS BLONDET)
Taking its title from Samuel Beckett’s short play, in which an isolated mouth delivers a monologue on a darkened stage, this inspired exhibition foregrounded voice-casting as theme and methodology. Premised on Blondet’s claim that ventriloquism aligns with the logic of the encyclopedic museum, in that objects are “forced to speak on behalf of an entire culture, age, or region,” “Not I” brilliantly probed the museum’s authoritative framing of artworks. Who is channeling whose voice?
2
ISAMU NOGUCHI (BARBICAN CENTRE, LONDON; CURATED BY FLORENCE OSTENDE)
Born in Los Angeles, his childhood spent in Japan, Noguchi came to regard himself as a world citizen, belonging anywhere and nowhere. His interdisciplinary oeuvre, created over six decades, encompasses sculpture, playscapes, stage sets, and gardens, along with a 1936 antifascist mural in Mexico City; the design of an arts-and-recreation center for the Poston internment camp in Arizona, where he was voluntarily incarcerated during World War II; and a memorial for the dead of Hiroshima, which he hoped, in vain, would be installed on American soil “as a gesture of regret and a sign of opposition to this devastating event.” Politics and aesthetics for this biracial nisei were intimately imbricated. As beautiful as it is authoritative, the presentation at the Barbican memorably juxtaposes volumes of light—his famed Akari lamps—with freestanding sculpture in marble, bronze, wood, plastic, sheet brass, terra-cotta, and more.
On view through January 9, 2022.
3
SENGA NENGUDI (PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART; CURATED BY STEPHANIE WEBER)
Spanning five decades of multimedia work at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and performance, “Topologies” allowed viewers to take the measure of an artist only recently given sustained attention. The capstone was Warp Trance, 2007, a remarkable video installation in which footage of a Jacquard loom in production is projected onto an armature composed from cards utilized in the weaving process and accompanied by a soundtrack rhythmically blending the mechanical with the computer-generated. Staged so that visitors exited the show through a gallery animated only by the play of shadows cast by the tripartite structure, Warp Trance conjured aspects of Japanese architecture, art, and dance that affected Nengudi decisively at a formative moment in her career.
4
“LOUISE BOURGEOIS: FREUD’S DAUGHTER” (JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK; CURATED BY PHILIP LARRATT-SMITH)
This small but brilliantly selected and installed show freshly illuminated Bourgeois’s work and vision. A range of texts drawn from her extensive but hitherto largely unknown writings, produced while she underwent intensive psychoanalytical treatment between 1952 and 1985, was counterpointed by artworks, for Bourgeois regarded artmaking as itself a form of psychoanalysis. The decision to sequence the exhibition so that visitors began with her last works, still relatively little studied, was ingenious. Highlighting the period beginning circa 1990, when the focus of her identification shifted from her father to her mother, the show revealed the originality and incisiveness of her sparring with Freud’s theories, in particular his ideas about female sexuality.
5
“ARTIST'S CHOICE: YTO BARRADA—A RAFT” (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK; COCURATED WITH LUCY GALLUN AND RIVER BULLOCK)
Taking the writings and practice of French social-work pioneer Fernand Deligny as her polar star, Barrada charts a series of pathways through and across the two floors on which the show is installed. The heterogeneous ensemble of works from MoMA’s collection illuminates Deligny’s attempt to live “outside language” when, in the late 1960s, he and other volunteers engaged in an informal network with children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The circuits the nonverbal children made daily through the property in rural France where they lived, motivated by impulses that remain largely unknowable, are suggestively materialized in the generative dialogues Barrada sets up between the exhibits—dialogues that in turn probe the regulatory discourses that classify and order artworks in an institutional collection.
On view through January 9, 2022.
6
NEW RED ORDER (ARTISTS SPACE, NEW YORK; CURATED BY JAY SANDERS)
An artistic collaborative that recruits informants to work together as needed, NRO examines what it calls the “desire for indigeneity in the myths, dreams, and foundations of the so-called Americas.” “Feel at Home Here” interwove videos, installations, and text-image works whose diverse roots lie, inter alia, in corporate models, advertising and branding, and real-estate marketing. A standout in the full-on immersive exhibition was Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality, 2020, which employed renowned monuments, notably the ubiquitous equestrian sculpture End of the Trail by the white nineteenth-century academician James Earle Frasier, to call out the violence of settler-colonial propaganda.
7
OLGA DE AMARAL (MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON; CURATED BY ANNA WALKER AND LAURA MOTT)
In the early 1970s, Amaral more than held her own in the efflorescent-fiber-art world alongside Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks, and Magdalena Abakanowicz. By decade’s end, however, her presence had begun to fade, as she worked primarily from her hometown studio in Bogotá. In the ’80s and ’90s, she devised a singular technique, combining weaving with sewing and employing gold leaf in tandem with linen, one of her preferred textiles, in compelling wall hangings that were the equal of her earlier signature work. Surveying a still protean practice, this revelatory retrospective accorded the eighty-nine-year-old artist a timely visibility.
“Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock” is currently on view (through February 13, 2022) at Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
8
TACITA DEAN, THE DANTE PROJECT (ROYAL BALLET, LONDON)
With newly commissioned designs by Dean, music by Thomas Adès, and choreography by Wayne McGregor, The Dante Project charted the Florentine poet’s odyssey through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Playing to her strengths, Dean deployed drawing, photography, and film for the three realms respectively, eloquently defining their visual ambience and affective tone while setting the stage for her collaborators’ contributions.
9
LORRAINE O’GRADY (BROOKLYN MUSEUM; CURATED BY CATHERINE MORRIS AND ARUNA D’SOUZA)
This much-anticipated retrospective, with its invaluable catalogue, highlighted the signal contribution O’Grady has made to the discourse of identity politics over five decades. Turning to visual art in her mid-forties after stints as an intelligence analyst for the US government, a translator, and a rock-music critic for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, O’Grady was keenly aware of the pressure of time and, consequently, the need to make every project count. The thirteen projects featured in “Both/And” variously straddled Conceptual art, performance, video, and photo- and text-based works. Identifying as a diasporic subject, O’Grady not only challenged second-wave feminism for its marginalization of Black women, she focused on racial exclusion in the art world more generally in fiercely intelligent, subversive work laced with wit and humor.
10
ROSIE LEE TOMPKINS (BERKELEY MUSEUM OF ART, CALIFORNIA; CURATED BY LAWRENCE RINDER AND ELAINE Y. YAU)
A breathtaking overview of the textile work of one of the greatest artists of her era, much of which she executed in relative seclusion in the later part of the past century. While quilt making is arguably the preeminent American vernacular art form, very few who have taken it up—whether as a hobby or (as Tompkins did) a vocation—have worked with comparable freedom and inventiveness. Though the retrospective revealed her practice to be more diverse than hitherto supposed, the heart of the show was her signature works made from sensuous velvet. Responsive to the slightest changes in light and visitors’ viewpoints, they are without equal in their nuanced, rhythmically structured harmony.