THE MONOCHROMEis by definition dedicated to one hue. And so it is the modernist format most allied with purity, negation, substance—everything that is not external to the picture, everything that is not decoration or history or politics. But with this exhibition at the Secession, Kerry James Marshall used the monochrome to examine the question of color in all senses of the word, from its role in the history of modernist painting to its historical and even iconographic relation to past and present African American visual culture.

Marshall structured his presentation, which included sixteen

What the golden records launched into the unknown with the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 have in common with Andy Warhol’s cardboard boxes of ephemera is that they exemplify the mid-twentieth-century craze for the time capsule. No foundation could be laid, no international exposition opened, without some message being left for the future. Christian Mayer’s exhibition “prezjnt” (present, in the sense of now) was an exploration of the category of the time capsule through various media—video, photography, collage, and sculpture. In this work, the artist stands in the midst of an ongoing flow of