Geles Cabrera, now ninety-seven years old, was the focus of a 2018 exhibition at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City titled “Mexico’s First Female Sculptor,” in recognition of her trailblazing determination to enter a discipline almost exclusively practiced by men. Following her art-school training in Mexico City and Havana, she emerged in the early 1950s and was associated with the Generación de la Ruptura (Breakaway Generation), a group of artists who distanced themselves from the nationalistic and political motifs of the Mexican muralists in pursuit of abstraction.

Cabrera embodied

The seven artists in this exhibition, all born during the 1980s, address a number of issues—political, social, sexual—in a variety of media. But at the core of their investigations is a desire to understand what Chinese identity might look and feel like today. As she did in her seminal 2018 book, Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise, Barbara Pollack, the show’s guest curator (along with Hongzheng Han, a guest curatorial assistant), examines this “post-passport” group of artists, whose practices are influenced by international travel, global views on society and history, and

The first time I encountered John Gerrard’s work was five years ago, when he showed his X. laevis (Spacelab), 2017, at New York’s Simon Preston Gallery. An example of the Irish artist’s so-called simulations—immaculately made, confoundingly credible digital animations built on the backs of programming-rich game-engine technologies—it featured the eponymous creature, an African clawed frog, floating before a pair of gloved hands in zero gravity. (From time to time, the animal would spasm as an imaginary camera hovered around it.) The initially inscrutable piece actually turned out to be a conceptual

Every time we touch something, evidence of the encounter persists. Even if the trace is a nearly imperceptible veil of oil, the disturbance of a layer of dust, or, reciprocally, the activation of nerve endings in the fingertips, this haptic relationship indicates the nature of sculpture. For more than half a century, Italian artist Giuseppe Penone has found ways to elaborate upon this bond between flesh and the material world, and his exhibition here highlighted the enduring complexity of these human-thing entanglements.

Upon passing through a third-floor gallery containing devotional gold-ground

From Christoph Jamnitzer’s buxom amoretti to Wolfgang Hieronymus Von Bömmel’s scrollwork beasts, from François Boucher’s conchiferous Rococo to Robert Adam’s gentrified classicism, from Louis H. Sullivan’s Midwestern mandalas to Prophet Isaiah Robertson’s millenarian millwork, from Wendy Red Star’s critical interpolations in the photographic archive of Apsáalooke costume to Tom Hovey’s faithful renderings of cakes from The Great British Bake Off (2010–), “The Clamor of Ornament”—billed as “the most ambitious omnibus exhibition The Drawing Center has undertaken in a decade”—embraced its topic

Joan Snyder’s abstractions, bold and delirious responses to nature, are imbued with intense feeling. Take Symphony of Pain and Joy, 2022—one of the seven canvases in “To Become a Painting,” her exhibition at Franklin Parrasch Gallery—a prismatic, taxonomic display of exuberant mark-marking and sensuous form that is at once steadied and explosive. A kind of theatrical grandeur is evident in Snyder’s work, some of which includes elements of the outside world (of course, she uses paint—oil, acrylic—but she also incorporated twigs, grasses, dirt, flowers, and other sylvan items into a few of the

Yes, this is a disheartening era we’re living through. I didn’t really need the text accompanying “Criers”—poet and artist Simone Kearney’s exhibition here—to remind me that we’re living through a “time of global pandemic, war, and ecological catastrophe”; most days I feel like Anthony Quinn at the end of Fellini’s La strada. Au courant in that sense, Kearney’s show took its name from a series of ceramic heads, twenty-five of which occupied the main space at Brooklyn’s Undercurrent gallery. A roomful of weeping faces, however far from realistic in their rendering, might sound like a lugubrious

Each of Connor Marie’s slick quadrangular canvases here showcased a young female face, closely cropped, the surfaces of the paintings pressurized by the subjects’ glazed-over eyes, their expressions at turns kittenish, vengeful, or Vecna-afflicted. Some of her femmes exhibited facial features reminiscent of prefab anime action girls. Others evinced a prepubescent softness, à la Nabokov’s Lolita. Together, the brood stood guard over an aquamarine fiberglass slab at the gallery’s center: the sarcophagic sculpture Cavity (all works 2022), inside of which rested a hollowed-out cast of a doll-like

Hard-core nightlife denizens are not necessarily archivists or librarians—though legendary drag journalist and bingo maven Linda Simpson is clearly an exception. On two separate visits to this presentation of Simpson’s seminal queer zine, My Comrade—which was also a celebration of the periodical’s thirty-fifth anniversary—I was able to revel in the aftershocks and ephemera of downtown Manhattan’s queer nightlife scene, spanning 1987 to the present.

The exhibition featured blown-up copies of pages extracted from the magazine and its sister publication, Sister! (the latter, nestled into several

In Abbas Zahedi’s exhibition “Metatopia 10013,” a hanging loculus posed architectonic questions. This centerpiece, Waterphone & Automatic Sprinkler Prototype (10013) (all works cited, 2022), was a distillation instrument composed of brass and stainless steel. Above it dangled its counterpart: a quasi dehumidifier with a polystyrene base, which filtered the room’s moisture through calcium chloride. Later, in a performance, the instrument would be played like a viola, a makeshift bow on the metallic sternum generating an echoing screech.

On the gallery floor, Zahedi had placed two sets of hand-cut

Raphael Montañez Ortiz was a key member of the Art Workers’ Coalition who, along with artists Faith Ringgold and Tom Lloyd, pushed the collective to make museums accountable for their racism, classism, and elitism. In 1969, the same year the AWC was established, Ortiz became the founding director of New York’s El Museo del Barrio. At the time, the artist was known for his Fluxus-inspired piano-destruction concerts. A consummate New Yorker, the Brooklyn-born Ortiz studied at the borough’s Pratt Institute, taught at the High School of Music and Art on Manhattan’s West Side, and received a doctorate