The Jewish Museum’s boisterous exhibition “New York: 1962–1964” is stuffed full of energy, focusing on a three-year period in New York City when sundry creative realms coalesced in a delirious apogee of full-blown American vanguardism. In addition to the “new art” of the era on display here, there is an abundance of contextualizing material drawn from advertising, media, music, dance, film, magazines, fashion, poetry, and interior design, ostensibly documenting a so-called common cultural pulse that fomented in Gotham and spread across the land.

The presentation’s time frame, aligned with the

I confess that before seeing this breathtaking exhibition, I was unaware that Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) made paintings, more than one hundred of them, all self-portraits. The works are teeming with gorgeous interplays of Cimmerian shadow and light; vivid cadmium reds and cobalt blues; sharp reconfigurations of Renaissance-era imaging techniques, such as illusionistic space creation (via single- and three-point perspective); and heavy underdrawing. After 1949, Bourgeois unceremoniously ceased producing these haunting “nostalgia pictures” and began working in other mediums—drawing, printmaking,

I have nothing new to say about Sturtevant. This feels almost fitting, given the artist’s own vexed relationship to newness. Her perfectly imperfected “repetitions” of other artists’ art, ignored for decades, have in recent years inspired an avalanche of interpretation, much of it superb and none of it able to pierce the rattling mystery of her work’s origin and abiding prescience. As if cautioning potential reviewers, the press release for an exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery—her second solo show in New York since her Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 2014, the year she died, aged

Where are they now? I wonder of the pimply young men in William E. Jones’s seminal video, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, 1998. Perhaps at a rally for Fidesz, the far-right Hungarian party, or guarding the dacha of Vladimir Putin. Recalling the making of that breakthrough work in his new novel-cum-memoir, I Should Have Known Better (2021), Jones notes the “atmosphere of coercion” that pervades the gay-for-pay tapes—at the time, freshly imported from Eastern Europe and rented from a Los Angeles video store where he worked—on which he found his subjects. “When poor white people

Natalie Ball, an artist of Native American (both Modoc and Klamath) and African descent, is drawn to assemblage. She crafts raucous wall hangings and wily sculptures out of materials sourced in and around her home in Chiloquin, Oregon. Some of these items, such as beads, quilts, various textiles, animal hides, and bones, carry great ancestral significance. Others come from the realm of synthetic consumer kitsch, including cowboy paraphernalia, varsity letters, and images of sports mascots. All of these things present her lifeworld without necessarily explaining it. For Ball, the value of assemblage

In the 1990s, Portia Munson’s scatter-art installations hit a collective nerve. Her manic assemblages of secondhand objects—often organized around a single color, such as pink—critiqued both the politics of consumerism and the reproduction of gender norms through mass-produced items. Over the years, the balance between feminist and ecological concerns has fluctuated in the work. Yet this triumphant show set her preoccupations with gender and commodification on equal footing.

The exhibition’s largest installation and namesake, Bound Angel, 2021, is a cutting take on patriarchal order and feminine

Enlarging upon the commodity fetish in Das Kapital (1867), Karl Marx characterized a simple wooden table as an animate monstrosity. “So soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent,” he wrote. “It not only stands with its feet on the ground . . . it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.” For Marx, who likely had the then-recent innovation of mass-producible bentwood furniture on his mind, the “table-turning”—a form of séance popularized during the nineteenth century—that

Frank O’Hara contrasted the art of Norman Bluhm (1921–1999) with that of Jasper Johns, saying, “Johns’s business is to resist desire, Bluhm unconsciously inspires it.” Perhaps the poet’s remark helped turn Bluhm’s instinctive aesthetic goal into a more deliberate project. In any case, by the end of the 1960s, Bluhm’s imagery had swerved from the gestural abstraction for which he’d become well-known to a mode of painting that, while still nonrepresentational, was nonetheless highly evocative of the body; the work’s aggressive energy had morphed into a more seductive sensuality. This, apparently,

Painter Frank Owen, now eighty-three, is still making dramatic and complex works charged with spontaneous gestures, bold geometric forms, and surprising juxtapositions of luminous color. One is supposedly less active and able in old age, but not Owen, as the paintings in “Retrospection,” his solo presentation at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, clearly affirm.

His compositions are remarkably energetic and acknowledge his debt to Abstract Expressionism. Although the artist was struck by Jackson Pollock’s art when he was a young man, he goes his own exuberant way, eschewing Jack the Dripper’s more death-inflected

“Remarkably Clear, Almost Invisible” is a lesson in the substance of language. Crafted by Monia Ben Hamouda and Michele Gabriele (both artists are based in Milan, though Ben Hamouda also lives and works in Al Qayrawān, Tunisia), the show presents a generous dialogue between two kindred spirits who nonetheless carve their own distinct paths. Since 2016, the artists have scoured the terrain that connects communication and silence, finding common ground in their use of fabricated objects to create tactile sculptures rich in both history and fantasy. The exhibition here, their first in the United

Anyone who has seen the inside of a hospital—in all of its bleak, harshly lit linoleum blandness—would likely not recognize the places depicted in “Bedside Histories,” this exhibition of paintings by Sharon Madanes, in which liquescent bodies seemingly coagulate within warm and overstuffed compositions of Fauvist color. But then again, maybe they have. The artist’s subjects all seem to telegraph the same type of exhaustion—their bodies stooped, their faces drawn.

Madanes is not interested in realism. Presumably she has her fill of that at places like Bellevue Hospital, where she is a psychiatry