Around the time British Pop artist Joe Tilson moved from London to rural Wiltshire in 1972, following time spent in Hannover, Germany, his work underwent a major shift in iconography and style, or so the story goes. Gone were the strategies of mass-media critique that had defined his seminal series “Pages,” 1970, which had been nurtured by the countercultural politics of the 1960s and the print revolution at London’s famed Kelpra Studio. Instead, Tilson embraced a pastoralist lifestyle—tending the land, growing his own food, and joining peers such as Peter Blake in what amounted to a major exodus

Both meanings of the word plot—a storyline and a parcel of land—overlapped in Kapwani Kiwanga’s complex exhibition “Cache.” Fifty years ago, Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter brilliantly drew a connection between the two disparate meanings: Both kinds of plots, Wynter observed, were transformed by the founding of a market economy. Small single-family holdings that connected humans to the earth through cultivation, ancestry, and folklore vanished with the rise of vast, single-crop, labor-intensive estates. Around the same time, the novel innovated literary narratives centering on protagonists freed