The modest proportions of the six paintings in Kaye Donachie’s latest exhibition served only to sharpen the focus of the gaze she turns upon her subjects—a gaze that makes visible a kind of fruitful incoherence (to use artist Susan Hiller’s endlessly useful and provocative term). To say, then, that Donachie’s subject here is women’s contributions to modernist thought and practice would be to oversimplify. What it is to be present, to be active, to have a voice, and to assume, ultimately, some measure of control over the fate of one’s productive labor are all questions that these paintings bring

During the five decades of Anna Maria Maiolino’s career, she has left almost no artistic medium unexplored, from sculpture to reliefs, drawing, film, and performance. Her early artistic experiments date back to the 1960s and Brazil’s artistic ferment at that time: the New Figuration movement, Neo-concretism, and New Brazilian Objectivity; she worked alongside such renowned artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Later, she was associated with various neo-avant-gardes in Europe (particularly Italy, where she was born) and the United States. Then, in 1989, after two decades of diverse work in

Zebra finches are small, variously colored birds native to central Australia. They live in groups, enjoy plentiful singing, and often exhibit elaborate striped plumage and fanciful markings. In artist and sometime musician Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s recent commission, forty zebra finches occupied one end of the Curve, the Barbican’s semicircular, corridor-like gallery wrapped around the outside of a vast concert hall. Revisiting an idea explored in some of his earlier works, Boursier-Mougenot provided the birds with food, water, and grass—plus nine electric guitars and three basses, all plugged