Richard Long tends to be a bit predictable— another ring of rocks, another circle of mud. If you were to find someone unfamiliar with his work, you could make an easy penny by wagering just before entering a Long exhibition that you would soon be in the presence of basic geometric forms and materials pulled raw from the earth. But you shouldn’t bet on anything other than the generalities: In the nuances and subtleties, Long always surprises, and his trademark motifs are always fresh.

Long recently had his first LA show in almost a decade, and it reiterated his devotion to the designs and media

Sabina Ott exhibited for years in Los Angeles before an audience that generally failed to greet her work with the enthusiasm it deserved. Recently, however, there has been great excitement about the emergence of a handful of LA artists who bridge various painting practices, as Ott always has, hip or not. Her most recent homecoming show (she relocated to Saint Louis in 1996) served as a reminder of her tenacious painterly investigations of the overlaps between language, abstraction, representation, and high and low culture.

Ott’s new panels, though effortless looking, are carefully worked and

This exhibition offered the perfect opportunity to overturn clichés about modernism in the periphery. Featuring the work of five of the most relevant South American avant-garde artists of the postwar period, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Gego, Mira Schendel, and Mathias Goeritz, the show included about one hundred pieces from the late ’50s to the ’90s. But what the curators hoped to demonstrate—that the South American avant-garde developed in close dialogue with the legacy of Constructivism; and that through “the creative experience” the artist reconstitutes “his or her own subjectivity” and