“Peripheral Vision,” a forty-year retrospective of photographer Uta Barth’s work at the Getty Center, included selections from thirteen phases of the artist’s career, beginning with her early experimentations as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and concluding with “. . . from dawn to dusk,” 2022, a yearlong study of the Getty’s facade, commissioned by the museum, to commemorate its twentieth anniversary. The exhibition’s title underlines Barth’s enduring interest in the act of looking and refers us to the mechanics of human vision: We have a relatively small focal

Let’s begin at the end, with a group of four untitled watercolors that Hannah Wilke made in 1991, at the age of fifty-one, while slowly dying of lymphoma. Each drawing features an outline of a magenta flower (perhaps a zinnia or dahlia) rendered with long, dripping strokes, allowing the white of the paper to stand in for the lanky wilting flesh of each petal. Wilke used the medium to great effect: In one image, a deep black-purple becomes a wine-stain burgundy that bleeds into the dark crepuscular yellow of the central floret—the same color as bruised pale skin. The petals sag downward, causing

In 1980, two years before the publication of her now canonical experimental novel Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) began work on a film called White Dust from Mongolia. With grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of California, she traveled with her brother to South Korea, where the filming was to take place. The trip was ill-timed, as it coincided with an especially draconian moment in the country’s four decades of right-wing authoritarian rule: the consolidation of power by Chun Doo-hwan and the brutal suppression of the Gwangju Uprising, a popular revolt