Inside velvety-black curtains shaping an oblong chamber between the concrete columns of the gallery, a checkered black-and-white carpet led to a curved film screen whose gravity appeared to warp the gridded pattern. Sit down for a while—the kudzu are dancing.

Immigrant vine, Southern cliché, official noxious weed: This widely reviled plant hungrily crawls with almost preternatural speed across landscapes to soak in sun, covering just about anything in its flurries of leaves. Once spilled, kudzu loves to spread, only ever given shape by the structures it covers which, in Aria Dean’s video installation

In the late Anita Steckel’s large-scale gelatin silver print My Town, ca. 1969–74, a busty recumbent nude stretches out across several city blocks on Manhattan’s East Side, resting her elbow on a squat little building just to the right of the United Nations. Nonchalantly making the skyline her own chaise longue, the woman possesses a body transparent enough to reveal the architecture behind her. Pictured with Steckel’s own face, the figure collapses images of private and public during the same time that “The personal is political” became a feminist rallying cry. In an emphatic assertion of

Although Lee Bontecou remains better known for her sculptures—such as the bulbous, seamed, and multipaneled wall reliefs organized around a central cavity, or the chitinous insectoid objects that hang from ceilings—her career-spanning works on paper have generated due attention in the past few years, most notably in the 2014 exhibition “Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds” at Houston’s Menil Collection, curated by Michelle White. The Menil show spanned fifty years and presented drawings done in soot—a welding-torch by-product the artist discovered while on a Fulbright Fellowship in Rome in 1957 and used

“Landscapes are culture before they are nature,” art historian Simon Schama reminds us, but the relationship can be tangled, blending sign and referent, making both new meanings and new worlds. Laurie Nye’s oil-on-linen landscapes reside here, between the quotidian and the fantastical, creating a lush commentary on the ways in which we see, imagine, and experience an idea of nature. Her visual references are wide ranging: Echoes of Art Nouveau permeated the show, and we were reminded of the long-lost dreams of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where pattern and form were meant to build a better future. Nye’s