Nathaniel Donnett’s “To Know a Veil” caught you unawares. Brimming with abstract images, structures, and sound, the exhibition revealed its real aesthetic and intellectual pleasures slowly and unexpectedly. If ever there were an exemplary illustration of aesthetic cognitivism—the concept that the material stuff of art both conveys and generates knowledge—this was surely it.

The show’s title was a pun on that phrase of exasperation, “to no avail,” while simultaneously referencing the metaphorical “veil” discussed in W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) and