It was difficult to read Mia Westerlund Roosen’s 18-ton earth sculpture Madam Mao, 1995, as anything but giant genitalia. In previous works, Roosen used undulating concrete to suggest human forms, but, in Madam Mao modest innuendo finally surrendered to outright literalism. The huge dirt vagina dominated a large gallery space and filled the room with its fertile odor, the mound rising from the floor into a tapered peak. Running down the center was a small canyon, lined with sinuous slabs of pink, curved concrete. This labial, fluted furrow greeted viewers at eye level, offering them an unobstructed

This retrospective of Margaret Nielsen’s work provided an overview of the myriad tactics and formats she has deployed to interrogate the tradition of American landscape painting, a genre little explored in hip artistic circles these days. Grappling with the legacy of 19th-century “masters” from spiritualists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole to the mystic Albert Pinkham Ryder, Nielsen lifts the sublime veil of Romanticism to reveal the imperialist, masculinist mentality of conquest that destroyed the landscape so lovingly idealized.

A series of Nielsen’s drawings from the ’70s address the