Spread across the Matthew Marks Gallery’s two locations in this city, Gary Hume’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in more than twenty-five years revealed the tenacity of certain long-standing concerns and the emergence of others. Among the eight recent paintings (enamel on aluminum or paper) and three painted-steel sculptures on view, a giant trompe l’oeil of vertical boards crisscrossed with super-glossy white x’s suggested the flattening of a barn’s side and the sliding plane of its door. Titled U.S.A., 2018, it recalled Hume’s other portals, the big rectangular slabs of the “Door”

Throughout his career, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke and wrote about his search for the “elsewhere,” which he defined as an alternative to the “anthropologically mutated” West. Indeed, his unfinished five-part film Notes for a Poem on the Third World—which was to be shot in the late 1960s in Africa, India, Latin America, the Arab world, and “the black ghettos” of the United States—would have attempted a revolutionary and anticapitalist political positioning of the real. Glenn Ligon takes on Pasolini’s mode of postcolonial, essayistic storytelling in his sculpture Notes for a Poem

Have you ever introduced your occupation with a hyphen, slash, or conjunction? Yes, I’m an artist-writer-curator, homemaker and entrepreneur, DJ/activist. You might string together nouns as a feeble form of pushback against the inevitable reductivism of identity’s shorthand. Still, even these linguistic acrobatics fail to offer an account of how your different careers might interrelate. D’Ette Nogle’s objects, videos, and performances emphasize a natural affinity between art work and other kinds of labor, often foregrounding the professionalization of artmaking.

Take, for instance, her most recent

Amid the swelling civil unrest that would culminate in the international protest movements of 1968, a nun in Los Angeles was wavering in her faith. “I’m really frightened to say this,” Sister Corita Kent (1912–1986) wrote in a letter to a friend, “but everything appears different to me, even God, and I’m so afraid that I’m losing the foundation of my belief.” Soon thereafter, Kent took a sabbatical from her chairship of art at her order’s college and absconded to Cape Cod for the summer; by the end of her time there, she had decided to leave the order and renounce her vows. During this soul-searching