Grotesque props, crude puppetry, absurdist costumes, fake blood, and noise characterized Johanna Went’s riotous and scatological performances from the late 1970s and ’80s. A central figure in the Los Angeles punk scene of the time, Went was well known on both US coasts in her heyday and gained a cultlike following in LA underground art and music venues such as Al’s Bar, Club Lingerie, Hong Kong Café, and the Whisky. Alongside her collaborator, the composer Mark Wheaton, and a revolving cast of musicians, performers, and stagehands, Went blended experimental music, sculpture, spoken word, and

In 2012, Helène Aylon published Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, which gives some indication of both where her life started (she was born in 1931, raised within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Borough Park in Brooklyn, and later married to and widowed from a rabbi) and where she has ended up. In between, Aylon produced significant series, process-oriented material abstractions that gave way to, among other things, large and fiercely accusatory installations stemming from her antinuclear protests. As was true last year in

In a glowing fifteen-foot-wide projection, a figure walks into the video frame, taking measured steps despite the fact that the individual’s orange sneakers are on backward, such that the toes are awkwardly pushed into the shoes’ heels. Over the next nineteen minutes, four other performers move in and out of the slowly tracking frame, carrying out various other reverse gestures in brief vignettes. The premise of the film, titled Moving Backwards, 2019, is explained in a letter written by the artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz on the occasion of the work’s debut this past summer in the

In the 1960s and ’70s, art in America was radicalized—mostly by women, many hailing from the West Coast—to skewer normative constructs of gender; sexuality; the family as a social unit; and the home as a site of control, a microcosm of the authoritarian state. A particularly anarchic strain of feminist art production, by turns indicting and emancipatory, was a crucial influence on Paul McCarthy’s practice. Salient in this regard are the performances of Linda Montano, Barbara T. Smith, and, in particular, the artists involved in the Womanhouse project, which was mounted in a residential home in

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye knows how to capture decisive moments. In her show at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, which was curated by Hilton Als and traveled from the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, a group of six paintings document her black sitters, who are often deep in thought or on the verge of connection. Yiadom-Boakye limns her subjects with energetic brushstrokes, usually finishing her canvases in a single day.

In The Needs Beyond, 2013, a bearded man looks out at the viewer with shining eyes, his mouth neither smiling nor frowning, as if he is awaiting a