Curated by Catharina Manchanda

Featuring some twenty works from the past decade, this will be Robin Rhode’s largest solo exhibition in the US to date. A striking new installation will fill the museum’s lobby, but the show’s focus is the young South African artist’s distinguished work in photography, film, and animation. These pieces, tinged with a sly, lyric humor that recalls silent-film classics, portray individuals, often Rhode himself, interacting with drawings crudely rendered on streets and buildings. Two hands in the photographic suite Snake Eyes, 2004, for example, mime rolling a pair of dice drawn in chalk on a sidewalk curb behind them. Rhode adopts the role of trickster enamored with the fragmentary transcendence offered by illusion; such sleights of hand are linked to the artist’s deeply personal meditation on the slippery struggle for social justice within his native country.

— Tom Breidenbach