Over the past five years, Terry Allen’s “Youth in Asia”—an ongoing series of mixed-media tableaux and installations—has provided a poignant and conceptually complex investigation into the legacy of the Vietnam War and its impact on the American psyche. While this might sound like familiar territory, Allen offers a fresh reading of it, juxtaposing the idealized signification of ”home" with dark symbols of alien cultures dismembered by war. Allen’s oeuvre defies easy analysis because it refuses to be either didactic or apologetic. With its dislocated, stream-of-consciousness combination of narrative

“Material Fictions” was the collective title of this exhibition, comprising five large-scale oil paintings on abutting panels and an accompanying suite of small oils on paper, all from 1988. Sabina Ott continues her esoteric couplings of symbolically charged objects, but with less of the gestural, neo-Expressionist rhetoric that urged her earlier diptychs in the direction of stylish angst. Ott subtly varies her handling of paint from one panel to another, adding another level of disjunction to the retinue of juxtaposed images that give her work its poetry of signification.

Among the prominent

This show was a miniretrospective for Judy Chicago; it contained recent paintings and drawings, as well as works in some of the traditionally undervalued mediums the artist has championed by her use of them (including porcelain-plate painting, tapestry weaving, embroidery, and cloisonné). The show included pieces from all of Chicago’s major projects, notably such ambitious, collectively produced work as “The Dinner Party,” 1977–78, and “The Birth Project,” 1984–85. The show offered an accurate and balanced representation of her concerns over the last decade, as well as an exposition of one of

George Stone’s work is distinguished by a gloomy unpredictability, yet the wariness it engenders partly accounts for its originality. The four installations here struck the viewer in markedly different ways; each piece had its own provocative characteristics. Entering the gallery, one was immediately assaulted by an aggressive monster, Fault Line, 1986–88. Roughly 64 feet of glass is divided into 16 panels and bolted to the wall by creaky metal arms that move the panes in an undulating motion: this is a maniacal artwork, physically and technically overwhelming. It’s remarkable how intricate the