IN 1972, under cover of night, three members of Asco, the Chicano conceptual-art collective from East Los Angeles, tagged the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with their last names. The work was prompted, so the story goes, when a LACMA curator told Harry Gamboa Jr.—who founded Asco (“nausea” in Spanish) with Willie Herrón III, Patssi Valdez, and Gronk (Glugio Nicandro) in 1971—that Chicanos were not represented in the museum because they were gang members, not artists. Asco’s graffitied signatures were at once a fuck-you defacement and a sly Duchampian appropriation—claiming authorship of an

Hovering before visitors to British artist Toby Ziegler’s recent US solo debut was True North (all works 2007), one of several sculptures made by joining planes of corrugated cardboard into faceted, volumetric forms. Painted white and suspended from the ceiling, True North seems abstract at first glance, but eventually yields to a figurative read. Its combination of geodesically domed buttocks and cleanly severed thighs and waist suggest both a fragment of classical statuary and the harshly truncated torso of a Brancusi. But if one rotates the object in space, one finds that its provocatively

The first and most monumental of numerous black monochromes featured in this timely and well-edited survey of works by Wally Hedrick, who died in 2003 at the age of seventy-five, is War Room, 1967–68/2002, a massive volume enclosed on four sides by eight huge, vertical canvases bolted together. The backs of the paintings’ stretchers face outward so that the work resembles a theater set, and a door inserted in one of the canvases allows viewers to step inside the tomblike vault of a space. The tarlike oil surfaces of Hedrick’s paintings are heavy—in multiple senses of the word: They are visually