In Taylor Davis’s recent exhibition at Samson Projects, low cratelike forms with peepholes and slightly gaping panels; objects resembling drawers fallen out of a dresser; an unsteady, solitary eight-foot plywood phallus; and hay bales caged by wood or silver fabric made up a loose grid on the floor. Untitled, 2005, containing one bale of sweet timothy like a chicken in a roomy coop is paired with Farmer’s Daughter 2, 2005, a crate built tightly around another bale. Together they exemplify the themes of containment and control that ran through the show. Jackie Winsor’s cubes-with-apertures are

“FRANK STELLA 1958” is a prequel. It extracts twenty-one works, some rarely or never before exhibited, from the genetic soup of a remarkable evolution. Your degree of interest may hinge on how invested you are in the outcome: 1959, the “Black Paintings.” Viewing Stella’s brightly striped canvases from 1958, it’s hard to avoid mental comparison with the absent dark ones. But life doesn’t conform to the calendar, and Stella was making “Black Paintings” toward the end of his evolutionary year of color. It remains a matter of discrimination, both aesthetic and critical, as to what’s black (the