“Not I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE–2020 CE)” was not about ventriloquism. Rather, curator José Luis Blondet made the act of talking with your mouth shut and manipulating a dummy the basis for a set of broad themes around which he drew from the museum’s vast holdings. Organized into several nonchronological sections, the exhibition of some two-hundred-plus objects ran on associative trains and chance resemblances. Under the heading “Dolls, Dummies, Surrogates, Pygmalion, and Plugs,” we found a Netherlandish Madonna and child, ca. 1510, painted by Aelbrecht Bouts hung beside Adrian Piper’s Ur Mutter

Over the past few years, Star Montana has framed presentations of her photographs as chapters, arranging them into tightly conceived groupings that reveal something of the lives of her neighbors in East Los Angeles and chronicle the experiences of Montana’s family among them (most profoundly in a series exhibited at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles in 2016 and revolving around the untimely death of the artist’s mother). Montana stays close to her subjects, and there is a mutuality of recognition. She images vulnerability in a way that remains resolutely personal even as she insists

Roland Reiss died at ninety-one in December 2020. His career spanned sixty years, and he was actively making art until the end of his life. Two solo shows in 2018 and one in 2019 featured his recent “unapologetic” (as he deemed them) flower paintings alongside newer iterations of his “small stories,” the boxed Plexiglas dioramas he became known for in the 1970s and ’80s. “Roland Reiss: The Castle of Perseverance” at the Diane Rosenstein Gallery was a presentation of objects made between 1962 and 2020, with a focus on the sculptural. Included were six of the artist’s tableaux from the series “