LA-based artist John M. Miller has been painting the same painting since 1973: alternating rows of diagonal lines staggered across the canvas to occupy pictorial space as an allover pattern—a crowded tally of leaning digits that, like so many tick marks on the wall, allude to the occupation of time. Produced in 1993 and 1994, the seven works on view in this show, wistfully titled “Yesterdays,” demonstrated the artist’s superlatively disciplined approach. Each painting had been meticulously handpainted with Magna acrylic on raw canvas in monochrome according to a finely tuned palette,

Mike Kelley, in a curatorial statement written to accompany a small retrospective he organized in 2005, described James Hayward as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters.” That show, however, was only Hayward’s fourth solo in New York, and he hasn’t exhibited in Manhattan since. Compare his situation with those of some of the most widely acclaimed LA artists (Kelley for one) who regularly exhibit in New York but sometimes leave their hometown feeling neglected. It could be said that Hayward’s West Coast–ness is part of what makes him great, but operating peripheral to the postwar

Among Mike Kelley’s 1976 series “Untitled (Allegorical Drawings),” a sketch shows a bony nude figure crouching on the mutating head of another; the caption below reads, CRUDE PEASANTS STANDING ON THE GLORY THAT ONCE WAS ROME—UNAWARE OF A RICH HERITAGE. The understated drawing, one of many from this period included in Prism’s exhibition “Return of the Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973–1977,” seems emblematic of the attitude behind the protopunk/art collective founded by Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, and Jim Shaw. With inborn eccentricity, subtle aggression, and faux naïveté, the four