Based on writer and artist Edmund de Waal’s acclaimed 2010 memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, this show is a poignant history lesson about assimilation, anti-Semitism, dispersion, and exile. Images, objects, and words are deftly woven together to create a portrait of de Waal’s ancestors, the Ephrussis, a cosmopolitan Jewish banking family who famously owned a collection of Japanese netsuke—miniature carved sculptures from the Edo period, used to fasten pouches to the sashes of a kimonos. These exquisite items were passed down from generation to generation and traveled to

Hilma af Klint’s numinous, farsighted output never fails to illuminate. She believed that her art would be understood only by people of the future. Perhaps that was why her 2018–19 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was the institution’s most attended exhibition ever. Miraculously, af Klint (1862–1944) consistently has more to give. Consider the eight delicate drawings from the Swedish artist’s 1913–15 “Tree of Knowledge” series, a recently unearthed body of work that made a rare public appearance at David Zwirner’s tony space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. An

That Milford Graves (1941–2021) was one of the most mesmerizing, energizing, and vibratory percussionists of our era was already evident in 1965, the year of his first recorded appearance on the New York Art Quartet’s debut album. For the next five decades, musicians would pilgrimage to witness Graves’s unique physical approach to the trap set, his elbows in a reverse-akimbo position. Word of mouth brought the uninitiated to experience his transporting ability to sustain two rhythms or more at the same time—to play in polymeter. What has taken longer to be fully absorbed, however, are the results

One of the members of the California Light and Space movement that emerged in the 1960s, Helen Pashgian made her mark with translucent abstract sculptures crafted from pigmented acrylic resins—forms so seemingly perfect that they tested the limits of retinal vision. She and her cohorts, including Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin, John McCracken, and DeWain Valentine, were keen to explore the plethora of new industrial materials ushered into commercial applications after World War II and, notably, were pioneers with polyester resin after it appeared on the market in 1966. In those days, their approach

Perhaps it’s his artworks’ eye-popping colors, antiseptic corporeality, or intractable otherness—or, for that matter, the difficulty of speaking about abstraction to begin with—but something leads viewers of Matthew Ronay’s carved-basswood sculptures to consider them initially as products of citation: as accumulations of formal motifs or references that the spectator is tasked with identifying. Ren and Stimpy, “Cow Tools,” Frederick Kiesler’s biomorphic Surrealism, anatomical models in the urologist’s office, Yves Tanguy, undersea coral. And while dutifully surmising such “influences,” real or

I’d never given much thought to Hedda Sterne (1910–2011) until 2015, when her painting New York, N.Y., 1955, wowed me in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s inaugural show in its then-new downtown home, “America Is Hard to See.” Prominently installed on the building’s seventh floor alongside works by more famous New York artists of her generation, the canvas stood out and apart. Its sense of speed and gestural energy resonates with Abstract Expressionism, but its architectonic construction does not. While Sterne’s mark-making felt impervious to her colleagues’ cult of personality, it also

In a 1991 review of Colette Lumiere’s work for this magazine, painter and critic John Miller declaimed: “[Her] contribution to feminist esthetics has been underrated. Perhaps this is due, in large measure, to the fact that her frankly narcissistic posture unleashes several traits—self-indulgence, childishness, and seduction—that are anathema to mainstream feminism.” At that time, Lumiere—who, as part of her ever-evolving performance of self, has taken on many different names since then—had just returned to New York, where she began her career in 1971 after a seven-year period of living and

Pat Passlof (1928–2011) was an important figure in the development of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. She was there from the beginning and, indeed, one of its incubators. In 1948, she studied with Willem de Kooning at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the place to be if one wanted to become an avant-garde artist. That was also the year Arshile Gorky committed suicide; his Surrealized take on abstraction, along with that of his friend de Kooning, remained an influence on Passlof. But as “Memories of Tenth Street: Paintings by Pat Passlof, 1948–63”—a presentation at Eric

Two locomotives billowing black smoke dart in and out of mountain tunnels, snaking through a psychedelic topography of strobing parabolas hatched with delicate traces of yellow pencil. The drawing, Untitled (trains and tunnels) A, B (all works cited, ca. 1958–61), was perhaps the most electrifying piece in “Memory Portals,” an exhibition of Martín Ramírez’s art at Ricco/Maresca. The train as motif, inset here with dark windows that echoed the punctured building facades appearing throughout the show, is a recurring feature of Ramírez’s work, an emblem resonant with the themes of itinerancy and

If you found yourself thinking that the artists included in “8 Americans”—Hyegyeong Choi, Tishan Hsu, Byron Kim, Antonia Kuo, Timothy Lai, Jennie Jieun Lee, Kang Seung Lee, and Jean Shin—had anything in common . . . well, that was on you. And therein lies the question and provocation of this exhibition: What does it mean to mount a show featuring Asian American artists without overlaying any sort of semi-homogeneous subjectivity upon the work on display? And were these artists to be understood as Asian American in the first place? Or of East Asian descent? Of Chinese and Korean heritage?

Such

THE WHITE COLUMNS ANNUAL is a local thing, a super-subjective précis of the previous year curated by an interesting person or group. It risks, by virtue of its premise, the appearance of an insider-y take on the New York scene, but the context of its host institution—the city’s oldest surviving alternative space, whose eclectic programming is indifferent to the market and the mainstream—and the open sensibilities of those tapped to organize the show reliably save “Looking Back” from that fate. Initiated by White Columns director Matthew Higgs in 2006, it returns after a four-year pause; this