After exhibiting in New York and beyond throughout the ’60s, Lee Bontecou (1931–2022) receded from the art world’s view by the early ’70s: She moved out of the city, left the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery, and showed her work far less frequently. Reviewing Bontecou’s highly anticipated retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum for Artforum’s January 2004 issue, the curator Elisabeth Sussman concludes that the show “makes a strong case for Bontecou’s taking a major place in a much-needed historical reevaluation of the history of late-twentieth-century American art.” Presenting the sculptures

Tiepolo’s oval-shape Apotheosis of Admiral Vettor Pisani, ca. 1743, depicts our Italian military hero being introduced by Venus to Jupiter and Mars; all float together amid auroral light, puffy clouds, and cute putti. Two of Kehinde Wiley’s most recent paintings, Apotheosis of Admiral Vettor Pisani #1 and #2 (all works 2003), center a handsome lone black dude in a field of color against a pattern at once heraldic, Islamic, and Gucci-esque. Vettor Pisani #1 mugs in a white T-shirt and baggy jeans against a vibrant red ground with turquoise fleurs-de-lis while six blush roses make a sort of arch;

In her inaugural exhibition at this thoroughly expanded gallery, Sharon Lockhart presented a group of distinct yet interrelated works: two sets of large-scale color photographs involving the hyperrealist sculpture of Duane Hanson, a body of smaller images involving brussels sprouts, and a 16 mm film, the latter two inspired by the Japanese art/philosophy of flower arranging.

The film, NO, 2003, records from a fixed vantage point the gracefully orchestrated activities of husband and wife farmers at the close of the harvest season in Japan. Tidy piles of mulch, arranged one next to the other with

Los Angeles–based artist Kori Newkirk’s first show at this gallery’s West Coast venue greeted viewers with cast urethane dorsal fins installed on the floor—suggesting a school of man-eating sharks lay just below the surface but also pointing the way toward a freestanding “white cube” display space built inside the gallery’s own rough interior.

The classic gallery setup became both context and object as Newkirk toyed with connotation-laden objects of desire, high and low. Within this area, a world of “whiteness” was multiply incarnated. Fake snow, with its intertwined implications of whiteness,