Glowing with subtle gradations of color, the singular visions that Miyoko Ito (1918–1983) committed to canvas throughout the 1970s conflate interior and exterior realms, simultaneously evoking desolate vistas and sun-drenched rooms. Her improvised but methodically built-out compositions—populated with archways, windows that could be mirrors, and pictures within pictures—confine as often as they reflect, refract, or open onto sweeping panoramas. Untitled, 1970, embodies this confusion: One seems to look at, into, and through the depicted space. At the painting’s center is a depthless, diagonally

Buck Ellison’s shrewdly destablizing “Little Brother,” the most recent installment of his ongoing conceptual deep dive into the construction and presentation of white privilege, took as its subject Erik Prince—wealthy heir, former navy SEAL, founder of infamous private military contractor Blackwater, alleged arms trafficker and disinformation operative. The son of a profoundly conservative Michigan businessman (and younger brother of former US education secretary Betsy DeVos), Prince and his private security groups have reportedly won billions of dollars in government contracts while participating

Just a handful of the fourteen paintings in Josephine Halvorson’s “Unforgotten” called on trompe l’oeil conventions. But with the show following hard on the heels of the controversial “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was hard to avoid focusing on the connection. Halvorson has long depicted vertically oriented tableaux parallel to the picture plane (corkboards or just wooden walls) with pinned-up receipts, sketches, letters, and flyers, as in New England Blacksmiths, 2021, or Important Notice, 2023, both of which were on view here. Her intention

The art of Noah Purifoy (1917–2004)—political, avant-garde, outsider—defies easy categorization, as did his way of working. In an essay for the catalogue that accompanied “Junk Dada,” Purifoy’s 2015–16 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Franklin Sirmans described him as both an “artist’s artist” and an “artist-activist.” The terms would seem to contradict one another—the first suggesting a hermetic disposition, the second an inclination toward direct action. Purifoy, however, shifted between the two. In addition to being the first full-time African American student at LA’s

How can we take pleasure in beauty, knowing the cruelty that goes on all around us? In this exhibition, Melvin Edwards asked this question in earnest, seeking an answer in the foundational American contradiction between our stated ideal of freedom and the violence underlying it.

The show was named for its largest work, Lines for the Poet, 1970/2023, a sculptural installation mounted in a corner of the room. There, lengths of barbed wire cascaded from adjoining walls. They met in the middle; these strands hooked into the long arm of a steel beam, forming a hammock-like support to suspend it just

Protean artist Camille Billops (1933–2019) is perhaps best known for Finding Christa (1991), a film she codirected with her husband, historian James V. Hatch, about her decision to give up her four-year-old daughter for adoption in 1961. The fifty-five-minute picture won the 1992 Grand Jury Prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, and its success was accompanied by the public’s unforgiving and racist pigeonholing of Billops as a “bad mother.” Fortunately, that never stopped her.

Billops was well aware of cultural erasure and was a lifelong mainstay of the Black artist community in

Limned by reflections of a low sun off the Hudson River, the Kitchen’s temporary gallery at 163B Bank Street in New York offered a perfect foil to the black-box ambience of the institution’s permanent space, which is currently under renovation. A row of eight-foot-high, west-facing windows cast a flush of late-afternoon light into the fourth-story loft at Westbeth, a Bell Laboratories building renovated by Richard Meier in 1970 when it became housing for artists. Echoing the space’s external fenestration was a diagonal arrangement of ten cathode-ray tube televisions showing grainy footage of

Rich brocades embellished with labyrinthine beadwork, florid bouquets of antique buttons and glittering swaths of sequins, mythical figures and ancient symbols gloriously wrought by an unrepentant maximalist: This is what Ken Tisa’s Dream Maps are made of. The eight on view at Kate Werble Gallery were the first textile works of this kind to be shown by the artist since the late 1980s. Their return after so many decades out of sight may be why their leonine dazzle gives off a melancholy aura, but time has also been Tisa’s coconspirator. From the intricacy of his handiwork to the vintage materials

Cool blues and vivid oranges, the colors of seas and sunsets, offered moments of sumptuous splendor in Eileen Quinlan’s “The Waves,” an elegantly austere show of eighteen primarily abstract photographs. The works, printed on aluminum-framed mirrors, seemed lit from within, allowing for subtle interactions between spectator and subject. Interested in photography’s power to seduce, with an emphasis on disrupting passive viewing—aspects the artist has explored, through a Brechtian lens, over the course of some twenty years—Quinlan here had folded these long-standing concerns into a pleasure-filled

Markus Brunetti’s photographs depict the facades of Europe’s sacred architecture—synagogues, monasteries, and cathedrals—all of which have managed to live through, to paraphrase James Joyce, the nightmare of history. Brunetti’s images breathe fresh life into these majestic edifices of the past: Just as decades of devotion were needed to build these stately wonders, Brunetti had to put in years and years of devotion to make his photographic masterpieces. His work is informed by the persistence, patience, diligence, and dedication of the ingenious architects who designed these heavenly buildings—and

“An aristocrat by inheritance, an anarchist by conviction, a seducer by nature, and a wanderer by vocation,” Kati Horna—as eulogized by artist Juan Luis Díaz—was born Katalin Deutsch Blau on May 19, 1912, in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She died at the turn of millennium, leaving behind a vast and slippery body of work that, perhaps due to its roots being in photojournalism rather than in fine art, has thus far eluded much of the fanfare recently extended to her best friends Leonora Carrington and, to a lesser extent, Remedios Varo. The first gallery exhibition in New York devoted