As a student, Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999) thought she might become a “minor poet,” as she put it. Fortunately, fate had other plans. By the time she graduated with a major in English from California’s Pasadena Junior College in 1930, the Great Depression had set in, leaving no extant funds for young Lundeberg to continue her education at a four-year university. Instead, a sympathetic family friend, noting her talent for drawing, offered to send her to art school. Yet the surreal paintings in Lundeberg’s exhibition “Enigma of Reality” made clear that her literary inclinations never went away, as

“Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers,” Donna Haraway once said, arguing that humans are the product of all kinds of earthy assemblages. This notion provided a fitting entry into Maria Maea’s deeply personal and technically impressive exhibition “All in Time,” a bighearted meditation on the present tense and its lived expressions. This show, one of the artist’s most ambitious projects to date, included two wall-based works and four sculptures that were produced with the help of Maea’s mother and brother, Susan and Martin Tuilaepa. (Three of the sculptures function as portraits,

Miles Coolidge has long been associated with a strain of photographic practice that arose in Germany during the interwar years under the banner of Neue Sachlichkeit. Exemplified by the work of Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt, this approach involved the renunciation of arty pictorialism in favor of a sober inspection of the object world with large-format cameras and the highest degree of resolution possible. In the 1960s, this mode was aligned with the structural tenets of Conceptual art by the team of Bernd and Hilla Becher, famous for their gridwork typologies of industrial architecture,