At first glance, the ICA Miami’s sunny, second-floor galleries offer some jarringly eclectic views: Unpainted found wood is paired with monochromatic prints, and oversized triptychs butt up against unvarnished planks with industrial hinges. These are all the work of one artist, Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), whose recent exhibitions have worked around her wide stylistic variance by focusing on a single period in her life, as in the memorable 2018 wood-focused show “Against the Grain” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. This first comprehensive retrospective boldly links disparate styles and techniques across five decades.

Thompson’s identities were as complex as her oeuvre, and this exhibition, titled “Frequencies,” acknowledges her artistic evolution as she pursued education and audiences while moving back and forth between the United States and Germany. The eclecticism that risks being jarring turns out to be the show’s strength: It extends Thompson the courtesy to be complex, a courtesy not often afforded artists from marginalized groups. Indeed, though exhibition didactics address Thompson’s life as a queer Black woman, it is her artwork that drives the narrative, not her identities.

Across 49 pieces sourced from the artist’s estate in Atlanta and Galerie Lelong & Co.—the first gallery ever to represent her, starting 14 years after her death—the show expands her visibility following the 2017 “Magnetic Fields” exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., that reevaluated several overlooked Black abstractionists.

“Frequencies” features five groupings that balance a chronological progression with formal relations. The earliest works are a pair of 1959 etchings Thompson made in Germany as the first Black female student at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 1963. The etchings avoid racializing their subjects, opting for fleshy forms, delicate eyelashes, and oversize hair, with stockings and high heels underlining the figures’ femininity. These are the only fully representational images in the show, highlighting Thompson’s strong proclivity for abstraction that grew in tandem with her interests in space, science, and spirituality.

Her formal affinities with the German Expressionists are evident, presumably inspired by her instructors and social circles from Hamburg; the didactics mention Emil Schumacher, Paul Wunderlich, and Horst Janssen in particular. The curator also points out that Thompson met Louise Nevelson in New York, ostensibly inspiring some of Thompson’s wood assemblages created from found materials in the 1960s and ’70s, when she resided in rural West Germany and traveled throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. She steered clear of the US due to the tangible racism she faced there as a Black artist: One gallerist even suggested she find a white artist to front for her if she sought an audience and commercial success. Thompson’s expatriate period is largely represented in “Frequencies” by way of these sumptuous wood constructions in two and three dimensions, notably, the humble Stele (ca. 1963) with its stacked squares sporadically punctuated with orange, blue, and red. Another standout is the graceful Wooden Picture (ca. 1972) whose slats transition from vertical to chevron to reveal an inner skin of purple.

When Thompson moved back to the US in 1974 for an NEA-funded artist residency with the city of Tampa, she declared “America has changed. I am ready now for America and I am eager to see if America is really ready for me,” going on to describe her birth country as an on-again, off-again lover. Her “Window” series from 1977 is the first body of work she created after repatriating. Bold stripes and stacked blocks offer a view through parted curtains and raised blinds of the American landscape—physical and social—that Thompson was giving a second chance. The artist’s abstraction matured further in her intaglio print series “Death and Orgasm” (originally made in 1978, shown here as a 1991 edition reprinted with master printer Robert Blackburn). The works’ individual titles make gripping references to spiritual practices, mythical sites, and heavenly journeys: Ascension, Mandala, Montsolva, Mulbris I, Variation of Mulbris I, and Saturnalia. Representing experiences just beyond the visible world, these amorphous forms undulate and climb, almost composing a face or a countryside or a celestial body. Mulbris I especially is gorgeously composed: The top half of the image is free of ink, its tonality conveyed instead by a pillowy embossed form.

By the 1980s, Thompson was preoccupied with new research on Einstein and quantum physics during short teaching stints in Paris before relocating permanently to Atlanta. In Georgia, she taught at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Atlanta College of Art, and Atlanta University. Only a quartet of watercolors represents this period: While three are untitled, Pleiades III signals Thompson’s shift to exploring the universal—whether at the macro level of galaxies, or the micro level of molecules and quarks.

The final two galleries feature a suite of outsize paintings for which the artist is most well-known. In the larger gallery, two “String Theory” pieces evoke the staccato brushstrokes of Alma Thomas with compositions that are far more engaging than those in Thompson’s relatively subdued “Heliocentric” series from 1993. The second gallery features the show’s standout installation, Music of the Spheres (1996), which permits the viewer to stand at the center of Thompson’s universe. These impactful tableaux representing Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury are paired with the artist’s sonic vision for the planets, with sound emanating from speakers behind each painting, giving the impression of music pouring from each celestial body. Inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings, Thompson composed a soundscape for each painting, incredibly synthesizing early music software with musical instruments and even sounds from children’s toys. This is but a glimpse into her ability to work across media: She also published at least one children’s book and played in a blues band with her partner in Atlanta.

As Thompson’s first major retrospective, “Frequencies” succeeds in loosely threading together the abstraction in her distinct shifts across the decades, letting an expansive body of work feel complex and cohesive at the same time. While most of the larger paintings—specifically the “Heliocentric” series—are not particularly interesting individually for their simple compositions, the overwhelming scale and color repeated across the final two galleries are nevertheless compelling for the universe they create together. But Thompson’s universe was bigger than the show acknowledges: Though wall labels note her cosmopolitan life spent between Germany and the US, they neglect her time in Africa and the Middle East. The verticality and thin-limbed bodies in her “Vespers” series show clear references to West African popular sculpture, and key moments of Thompson’s life—like her romantic and professional relationship with Audre Lorde—trace back to her 1977 participation in FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. Should the ICA find future venues or develop a publication from the exhibition (which this critic would fully support), shoring up some of these biographic touchpoints would more honestly situate the particular and the personal notes of Thompson’s reach, as we reconsider the universal in our narratives of mid- to late 20th-century abstraction.

The emptiness of outer space incites a surprising kind of yearning in Brittany Nelson. “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” her 2024 show at PATRON Gallery in Chicago, drew on her interests in science-fiction archives, travelogue videos, and early photochemistry techniques—all soundtracked by a heartrending Bonnie Raitt ballad that mines the desire in unrequited love (“I can’t make you love me if you don’t / you can’t make your heart feel something it won’t”).

Nelson’s engagement with the erotics of extraterrestrial subject matter was inspired by an unusual muse: the storied Mars rover, Opportunity. “I call her a lesbian icon,” the artist said, adopting the feminine pronoun that NASA attached to the robot during its 2004–18 service on the Red Planet. “She’s one of the farthest-roaming robots we’ve ever sent off-planet, and she took an insane amount of images,” Nelson told me when I visited her studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “She was on an expedition alone, doing these butch rock experiments while [casting] glances across the landscape, which is an absolute lesbian trope: the longing glance, never to close the distance.”

To lend pathos to Opportunity’s images, Nelson printed composites of them using the bromoil process, an early 20th-century technique that gives photographs a more ethereal, painterly look. Source pictures from NASA “are so amazing but are only shared on science-y, techno-fetishy blogs,” she said, noting that they tend to be treated as data sets more than aesthetic entities. “I wanted to put the romanticism back in the images.”

She also found metaphorical resonance in more personal terms. Recalling her upbringing in a “cultural vacuum” in Montana, Nelson said, “I started thinking about having to reverse-engineer what it was like to be a gay person stuck in a very isolated environment. Then all of these parallels with space exploration and sci-fi became apparent.”

In her studio, secreted within a former military supply base dating back to World War I, Nelson works with a giant Fotar photo enlarger from the 1950s—“we call it Lord Fotar,” she said—that moves along floor tracks to project negatives, allowing for prints of formidable size. (Her largest so far is three by seven feet.) But she also works with other technologies: everything but the signature is me (2023) is a typewriter she programmed to type a single word—Starbear—culled from flirty letters exchanged by sci-fi writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.

Nelson’s new work focuses on enormous telescope arrays, started as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit studying the presence of life and intelligence beyond Earth. Last year, she showed photographs of a telescope array in California in a two-person exhibition (with Joanne Leonard) at Luhring Augustine in New York. For a solo show next year at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she is making work inspired by one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. “I’m in the middle of it, struggling,” she said of her work in progress. “But I’m personifying the telescope in some way, almost treating it like an ex-girlfriend.”

Rosa Barba has a way of taking our world’s most magical and most fundamental elements, then folding them in on one another—taking them apart, making them anew. Since the 1990s, she has been remaking film into sculpture and astronomy into film, fascinated by how each of these things scramble time and space. For her latest exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she upped the ante, turning a black box gallery into a cello. Long wires stretch from floor to ceiling as film projectors pull strips of celluloid across them. Scotch tape that holds together these splices plucks the wires while passing over them, making low sounds, a celluloid symphony.

The exhibition, “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” is an unusual survey of 15 years of Barba’s work: over a dozen cinematic sculptures are displayed in one a room, arranged so that they almost become one installation. Central to the show is Barba’s latest 25-minute film, Charge (2025), co-commissioned by MoMA and the Vega Foundation. The film was shotat CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, and will be screened at Moynihan Train Hall and in Times Square, where the work is being shown as part of the “Midnight Moment” program throughout July.

At MoMA, the film builds to a crescendo of experimental music that is elegantly complemented by the mechanical clicks of various analog apparatuses Barba has used to make sculptures. Charge shows the sun through a telescope and a vast array of reflective solar panels in the Mojave Desert. Eventually, the screen cuts to white, illuminating the sculptures in MoMA’s black box. Here rigorous studies of light, whether solar or artificial, create a feeling of wonder. In a time of slick screens and black boxes, Barba’s mechanical tinkering feels refreshing, even urgent—a reminder that we have the agency to take things apart and put them back together anew.

You’re committed to analog film at a time when that’s kind of anachronistic. This is clearly about a lot more than just nostalgia. You mentioned in a conversation with Joan Jonas for Bomb that you couldn’t make your work using video.

It was never about nostalgia. Early on, I started to fragment the cinematic apparatus, partly as a way to go against immersion, trying to leave the viewer alert and activated, and in this mode of mentally changing gears. Mechanics are important for this kind of work.

There are many other reasons. I realized right away with my first film, Panzano(1990), that using an analog film camera really defined my work. It makes the process performative: you have to be very precise in how you deal with the limitations of the material and of time. Also, the object of the film projector has quite a presence in the room. Often, I work with non-actors, and I find that the big presence and loud sound of the film camera gives people a clear way of understanding they are being filmed, which makes them change gears and be who they want to be in front of the camera. That feels respectful, to me, and helps me get around some of the problems that come with filming people and voyeurism.

Even if I’m not filming people but rather the landscape, there is a kind of alchemy that comes from holding the camera, which has a certain weight that requires me to use my whole body. Questions like “how long can I hold a sequence?” start to define the length and the time of certain scenes. Increasingly, I have also been responding to various architectures, dismantling cinematic elements until they become sculptural, engaging the materiality of the machine.

Your work is thoroughly researched and often takes on scientific subjects, but it’s never didactic. It clearly resists telling people what to think and embraces mystery and unknowability. Often, it ends up being quite elegant. What role does beauty play for you?

My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and explores perception and how we look at things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic—like with my film Bending to Earth (2015), which shows a uranium field. But there is always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often very much linked, and I’m interested in walking this line. I’m also interested in the unstableness of knowledge, and in what we as human beings want when we try to reach beyond knowledge, and in how we want to inscribe ourselves.

It’s often beauty and enigma that get many people interested in studying things like astronomy. But many of the scientific formats like diagramming have this way of removing the mystery, whereas you retain the magic. You’ve long had an interest in the ways both astronomy and cinema can collapse space and time. That becomes almost meta in this exhibition, where you’re collapsing around 15 years of work until it almost becomes one installation. Where did that idea come from?

I’ve been working with this idea of creating a conference or dialogue between works for some time. When I was invited to curate an exhibition with works from the Reina Sofía collection in 2010, I showed different pieces switching on and off at different times. Before that, at the Venice Biennale in 2009, I made an installation called Coro Spezzato: The Future Lasts One Day, where different projectors were synchronized and the voices would turn off and respond to each other. But it was at the Neue Nationalgalerie [in Berlin] in 2021 that I really took off with this idea.

At MoMA, I wanted to focus on sound pieces and sculptural works that connect to the ideas in the main film, Charge. As I got to know the space, I became very attracted by its floor-to-ceiling window. Whenever I work with architectures, I look for kinds of membranes to bring the inside out and the outside in. I did that here on both sides of the space; if you look up to or down from the fifth floor on the ledge, the exhibition there spills in and out. I wanted to understand the space as an experimental laboratory and deal conceptually with the idea of the light—with having the space transform from morning until evening. In the beginning of the day, the sculptures are more prominent, but over the hours, the film gets brighter; there is no hierarchy as to which works are more dominant. I started understanding the whole space, with its incredible height, as an instrument. I tested the wire pieces for a long time in my studio, but had to retune them to the space as the whole gallery became a kind of cello body.

There are three-and-a-half minutes in the film where you just hear the sounds of the wire pieces becoming louder, the scotch tape plucking the wires pizzicato. The scotch tape returns in this kind of prismatic circular sculpture that is also based on an early experiment about how to make our colors visible for our eyes. 

You’re always combining film and sculpture, and here, the installation itself becomes kind of time-based. Tell us more about the new film.

As in all my films, I was interested in how we as human beings inscribe ourselves: in how we want to reach beyond, in how we want to understand more about the universe. There’s so much that we don’t know about. I wanted to explore light in this vein, continuing my work on the overlap of astronomy and cinema, and taking it further, to the physics laboratory. I had this relationship [as an artist-in-residence] with CERN already; a few years ago, I filmed their cloud chamber and these collusions of light that they produce. Then I learned of this incredible radio astronomy lab[Nançay Radio Observatory] in the middle of France, on a piece of land was bought in the 1950s and kept free of all kinds of disturbances, so that scientist could just collect radio waves and gather knowledge. Light is used there to translate it all into code: in the middle of the film, a lens moves at the speed of the earth and reinforces the faint signs of radio waves. I’m interested in the space that is all around us, and its many dimensions and layers.

I filmed some experiments, one after the other, each introducing a different light source. The process was kind of alchemical: I was filming with a 16mm camera, having the light inscribed on material. I was able to capture things that were not visible with the more standard digital recording of the experiment—which was pretty exciting.

Tell us about the performance, too.

I’ve been developing this shutter system that reacts to drums for 9 years now: shutters open up in response to different frequencies. Recently I started working with a choir, because I’m also interested in how every human has a different scale of frequencies, and in how all these different frequencies produce different kinds of cinema. This is my first time working with one vocalist, Alicia Hall Moran, and one percussionist, Chad Taylor. I’m on the cello. I play the cello with the film projector, pressing the cello against a film that is running, and meanwhile the wire piece plays, too.

You can catch Barba’s performances at MoMA June 26–29.

On the second floor of a building in São Paulo suffused with sounds of the city and fumes from an auto shop below, Aislan Pankararu’s studio teems with reminders of his rural home in the sertão nordestino, Brazil’s northeastern hinterland. Leather hides sent by his father hang from the ceiling beside a bundled mass of dried croá stalks. Large paintings lean against the walls, marked by evocative abstractions and undulating lines that suggest subterranean networks of roots. Dots and plus signs in other works look like energy fields that radiate from nucleic cores (or “cellular universes,” as Pankararu called them during my visit).

Since moving to the city in 2021, Pankararu has maintained a dialogue with his more remote homeland through a practice that pulls from his studies in medicine, references to the flora and fauna of Brazil’s interior, and the charged ritual drawings of his people, the Indigenous Pankararu. (He adopted his surname to proudly acknowledge “an ancestral legacy that must be well cared for,” he said.)

Licensed as a physician after years of study in Brasília, Pankararu returned to his childhood love of drawing while completing his medical residency in 2019. Just a few weeks before the outbreak of Covid-19, he opened an exhibition of drawings at the Hospital Universitário de Brasília, where he worked. By the end of 2021, Pankararu had appeared in 10 more shows, and he has since participated in exhibitions at the Museu Nacional da República in Brasília and Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Last year, he received the prestigious PIPA Prize, which celebrates emerging Brazilian talent.

Pankararu’s subdued color palette evokes northeastern Brazil’s Caatinga biome, where dry shrubs and thorny trees are gestural marks against the sepia tones of sandy earth. The environment is deeply entwined with Pankararu culture. “There is no Pankararu calendar without the Caatinga,” the artist said of his people’s relationship with the seasonal cycles of different plants.

In a series of works titled “Soil” (2024), painted in clay-pigmented acrylic, Pankararu blurs micro- and macroscopic views while evoking cell membranes, wave forms, arboreal growth rings, and topographic maps. In his “Touch” series (2024), white and black dots vibrate over planes that peel from raw linen to reveal a russet-painted ground. Other works like A Redescoberta (The Rediscovery, 2024) burst with energetic colors such as fuchsia, violet, and green—not unlike a landscape springing to life after summer rains.

Pankararu’s technique of painting with clay also alludes to the Toré, a ceremonial dance for which performers’ bodies are covered in emblematic designs. Painting his canvases as he might a dancer’s skin, he evokes a feeling of movement and aligns his work with sacred ritual—but more suggestively than directly, so as to maintain a sense of secrecy essential to Pankararu tradition. “There is a mystery called silence,” he told me, “and I will walk hand in hand with it.”

Editor’s note: Joel Shapiro died June 14, at age 83. In the final weeks of the sculptor’s life, Max Norman interviewed him for a career-spanning profile. What follows are some of Shapiro’s reflections on his storied legacy. This article will also appear in the annual “Icons” issue of Art in America, due out in late August.

Alongside the larger sculptures in what turned out to be Joel Shapiro’s last show in New York, at Pace Gallery this past fall, there were a few roughly painted, pin-studded models about the length of your forearm, perched on rectangular white plinths. They shared a room with small insectoid bronzes, so it wasn’t clear whether these wooden models were meant to be read as documents of Shapiro’s process or as its product. But the ambiguity was perhaps the point. “It’s when you’re doing the work that transformation happens,” Shapiro told me in April. “It’s actually physically working with wood, looking at it, cutting it, changing it, altering it, until it somehow satisfies some aspect of your unknown intent.” That’s what attracted him to sculpture in the first place, “It was a fact and a form,” he said.

To walk through Shapiro’s Long Island City studio—among the works in various states of undress beneath the lofty ceilings of the ground floor, up to the menagerie of smaller pieces on the third—was to be surrounded by facts and forms. In one sunny corner a branching cactus grew in a pot atop a dolly, held up with an armature of plywood and a green pole. At first glance, I thought it might be a work I’d never seen, or some caprice Shapiro threw together and then abandoned in another of his numerous experiments. It was, in fact, just a cactus.

But I wouldn’t have been too surprised, since Shapiro’s long career was sustained by constant inquiry into the most fundamental artistic questions, a kind of sculptural Manhattan Project that left no aspect of his medium unexamined. From gargantuan to Lilliputian and back again, from austerely abstract to cheekily representational, from the floor up onto the wall or onto stilts and then into the air, from senseless just across the threshold to meaning—with unashamed sincerity and unrelenting focus, Shapiro pushed sculpture to new places.

He is best known for his sculptures of the human figure, most often fashioned from long rectangles of painted wood or cast bronze, gracefully frozen in a gravitational in-between that tickles your brain and tightens your stomach. He developed not just an unmistakable style but also a signature sculptural language, a syntax of loose connections and obscurely intuitive forms, like the recognizable lines but unfamiliar harmonies of Schoenberg’s music.

Very few of his sculptures have titles, but the Pace show was something of an exception. At its heart were three large new works made of wooden volumes covered in fast-drying casein paint, which Shapiro has used on wood and paper since the 1970s. In one corner, the more than eight feet of Splay (2024) splayed back: Two narrow blue rectangles formed a kind of body, and at its base were red and black fins resembling short legs, with a yellow sprout on top joined so loosely as to seem impossibly tangential. It was mirrored, on the other side of the room, by Wave (2024), an eight-foot-tall sculpture whose broad horizontal forms gave it a winglike quality relatively rare in Shapiro’s oeuvre.

Between the two hovered the artist’s last masterpiece, which bears the weighty name ARK (2020/2023–24). At more than 18 feet long and nearly 12 feet high, the piece is Shapiro’s biggest wooden sculpture. Yet unlike Splay or Wave, ARK rests on just three tiny points of contact with the ground, as if en pointe. Two enormous rectangles the color of dried blood spelled out its core; nestled behind one was a long narrow turquoise wedge, while two longer, narrower ones extended upward, like masts or feelers. This big sculpture has lots of room for surprises—not least a shock of orange on the internal face of one rectangle, with blue on its narrowest edge.

“The work makes you more aware of your body as your body moves around it,” sculptor Rachel Harrison told me. For the young British artist Jesse Wine, Shapiro “keeps it soft in places and hard in others. It’s almost a type of pacing.”

An ark—whether Shapiro’s ARK or the Bible’s—is a vessel of preservation, a means less of conveyance than survival. It’s an uncanny note to end a career on, but a fitting one. Roberta Smith, in a 1982 essay, once suggested that Shapiro, a bit like a latter-day Noah, “helped bring sculpture back from the brink of extinction.” In the sublime but infertile desert of Minimalism, Shapiro saw a path forward for his medium: It would take repurposing sculpture’s past, and his own.

SHAPIRO’S STUDIO IS HOUSED in a surprisingly stately former ConEd substation in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The situation is apt, and not just because Shapiro, who was born in 1941, grew up just a couple of miles away, in the left-leaning working-class neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. For one, what he described to me as his “first really radical” piece was a diminutive 1973 sculpture of nothing other than a bridge. And Shapiro himself was something of a bridge artist, spanning the Minimalism of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith and the Postmodernism that followed. That’s why he is often classified as a Post-Minimalist, a term that describes artists like Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Morris, who brought the maker’s process and psychology back into sculpture.

It took time, though, for Shapiro to figure out that he could be an artist in the first place. His mother was a microbiologist, and his father a physician who once sewed up Robert G. Thompson, chairman of the New York State Communist Party, after he was stabbed. There was art around the house (African, Indian, Indigenous), and as a kid Shapiro took classes in ceramics, drawing, and painting from a local artist. But up until his graduation from NYU, where he arrived after an abortive year at the University of Colorado Boulder, and then night classes at Queen’s College, it was assumed that Shapiro would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. “The idea of being an artist didn’t seem possible,” he told art historian Lewis Kachur in 1988, in an oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Two years in India with the Peace Corps changed that. Following in the footsteps of his sister, who had married an Indian man and lived in Bombay, Shapiro spent 1965 to 1967 teaching gardening techniques in rural areas as part of an effort, begun by Gandhi, to encourage Indians to grow their own food. Stationed in Andhra Pradesh, he traveled widely and made friends with locals and like-minded expats. He was surrounded too by sacred Indian sculpture, whose dense designs and endless variations on the human form he photographed on tours across the country. The experience “heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time,” Shapiro reflected in 2007.

Back in New York, Shapiro talked his way into the MFA program at NYU and started working in earnest. He also married Amy Snider, the founder of Pratt’s Art and Design Education department; the two had a daughter, Ivy, now an art adviser. To support the family, Shapiro worked polishing silver for a then-decent $3.25 per hour at the Jewish Museum, at the time, a radical force in New York, having mounted “Primary Structures,” the first real institutional show of Minimalism, in 1966. Brice Marden and Mel Bochner worked there as guards.

In his studio, then downtown, Shapiro went through “an idea a week.” These experiments first became public when Marcia Tucker selected a piece for the Whitney’s 1969 “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Material” show: a five-foot square of dyed nylon monofilament stapled to the wall. (After the show, Tucker wrote, the piece “becomes an art corpse set to rest in a plastic bag in a corner of the artist’s studio.”) The monofilaments, which he made for about a year and a half, “had an intensity and … a sensual aspect that was peculiar,” Shapiro told me.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he created a series of drawings (one now in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection), made only of messy grids of repeated impressions of the artist’s fingers. In 1970, for his first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Shapiro installed small wooden shelves in a straight line across two adjacent walls. (Shapiro moved to Pace in 1992.) On each shelf rested an identically proportioned rectangle of different materials—steel, plaster, gum rubber, Homasote wall board, and copper. With his fingerprint works, he had isolated the most basic gesture of drawing: mark-making. The shelf works similarly isolated the most basic gesture of sculpture: the presentation of material to be read by the viewer.

For his next show, in 1972, Shapiro produced process works like One Hand Forming (1971), a stack of sausage-shaped clay cylinders formed with one hand, and Two Hands Forming (1971), balls of clay formed with both hands arranged à la Hesse in round groups on the floor. 75 lbs. (1970), in a clear nod to Andre, juxtaposed 75 pounds of magnesium and 75 pounds of lead; the latter form was, true to its material, much smaller. Looking back, Shapiro reflected that he was “basically figuring out where something, at least for me, became more than a pile and had some real intent or purpose.”

These works shared the Minimalists’ ambition to isolate what Judd called the “specific object,” devoid of reference to anything beyond itself. Yet they bore what Judd sought to banish: the literal mark of their maker. Beneath the surface, they also reflected Shapiro’s exposure to craft in India, where he had taught locals to build ovens out of clay, and once recalled observing “cow dung patties on the wall, conic displays of pigment and spice… endless rolls of fabric. All raw material.” A 1970 photograph of Shapiro’s worktable—strewn with pieces of hammered copper, balls of clay, and stacks of river-rock-like lozenges—could easily be mistaken for a disorganized display in an anthropological museum. “His works of this period [the 1970s] exude emotions as vehement as a child’s fears combined with something akin to the austere discipline of a scientist,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1993.

It was these vehement emotions and a child’s fears that seem to have pushed Shapiro away from conceptual questions and toward an intensely personal figuration. The pieces in Shapiro’s 1973 show at Alanna Heiss’s Clocktower Gallery in New York are viscerally affecting, coming just after the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Snider the year before. The centerpiece was Bridge (1973), a simple milled cast-iron structure just 3½ inches tall. (It superseded a balsa wood version shown earlier that year in a group show at Paula Cooper.) The bridge was displayed by itself, marooned on the vast floor beneath a high ceiling. In the same show, an 11-inch-tall ladder leaned against the wall and two rough birdlike shapes, formed in clay by Shapiro’s right and left hands and then cast in bronze, rested on a shelf at waist height. The following year, again at the Clocktower, a mangled drawing mannequin splayed in one corner, right by the scuffed baseboard—a disturbing work critics immediately linked to Giacometti’s chilling bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). Around the same time, Shapiro produced a three-inch-tall chair in bronze (it “looks as if it were conceived by Gerrit Rietveld for a dollhouse designed by Plato,” Robert Pincus-Witten, who coined the term “Post-Minimalism,” once quipped) and, perhaps most iconic of all, a five-inch-tall cast-iron polygon that resembled a house.

“There were all these prohibitions about representation and anything that had reference,” Shapiro said of the art world’s attitude at the time. He didn’t care. These figures “were a record of my emotion, of my anxiety.” Indirectly, they may have reflected his sense of powerlessness; directly, of course, they represented home, and his role as creator of more than just art. “I was also building doll furniture for my daughter,” the artist remembered. “All of a sudden I’m looking at this three-inch chair on the floor and it does something spatially on the floor that I hadn’t seen. That really engaged me. It seemed like a real place to go.”

The simple fact of these sculptures’ smallness—the opposite of the maximalist scale favored by the likes of Morris, Serra, and Tony Smith—was profound. Had they been larger, they would have lost their power. “It was dragging you into this interior, almost ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stuff,” Shapiro observed. “I wanted them in your space.” These works were intimate but nonetheless impersonal, imbued with equal parts pathos and irony. “If these sculptures locate the contents of memory within a public space,” Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1976, “it is in order to show that the privacy of our memories is what is most trivial about them.”

Beginning in the mid-’70s, forms like chairs, stools, boxes, houses, birds, horses, and even coffins were rendered so elementally as to hover between figuration and abstraction. Teasing the plinth—considered, like cast iron, retrograde at the time—Shapiro mounted houses on small shelves or on tabletops. In one of the most famous iterations, from 1974, he mounted a small rectangular house, cast in bronze (and with a gently sloped roof whose angle he lifted from the helmet of Donatello’s David), on a narrow bronze shelf that protruded about two and a half feet and then dropped down at 90 degrees, a physical embodiment of the sightline—and the out-of-sightline. These pieces still exert a mysterious force, like Etruscan funerary objects or Cycladic figurines, evoking the near past of our own childhood and, somehow, childhood itself. Our desire to read these stubbornly suggestive shapes is as innate and reflexive as the desire to make sense of our inchoate feelings, to love the family that wounds us.

Some of the forms were themselves wounded: Shapiro made a series of small, hollow rectangular volumes with apertures of various sizes; most were orthogonal, but some were organic, more abrasions than openings. It was one of these that Antony Gormley saw in 1980, on a formative visit to the Panza collection in Varese, Italy. “Here was something that immediately by inference engaged your body,” he recalled to me. “They referred to shelter, the human need for habitat, but without overplaying it.” Gormley—who also spent time in India, and who made his debut at London’s Whitechapel Gallery a year after Shapiro made his in 1980—views this early work of Shapiro’s as “playing with Minimalism while making one very aware of what Minimalism has declined to engage with.” It was a “really useful irritant.”

SHAPIRO HAD FLIRTED with the human form from the beginning, with the mannequins strewn in corners. But his now instantly recognizable manner of representing bodies took root in the second half of the 1970s. In 1976 Shapiro cast in bronze what looks like a fallen bough, with a pair of limbs stemming from a slightly thicker rectangular trunk; one was bent into a kind of knee, the other extended straight. Both divide, like wishbones, into two smaller branches. That was the same year his sister died by suicide. “I was looking at trees, trying to find some image that might convey that,” he told me. The bronze tree “was very much about her.”

Around the same time, he cast in bronze a nine-inch-tall running man and, defying another Minimalist taboo, painted it in stripes of black and red—a color here reminiscent of Rodchenko’s Constructivism, which the body’s rectangular figure evokes. Experiments ensued, with mannequins posed like caryatids and with sitting, lying, and crouching figures. But he found his stride—or his balance—in 1980, with a figure made of four-by-fours straight from the lumber yard leaning forward on one “leg,” as if frozen on its way to a yoga pose, or halted mid-trip. On one “arm,” a sawmill’s stamp is still visible, like a tattoo.

In the decade that followed, Shapiro’s work was “figurative with a vengeance,” as Schjeldahl put it. Crucially, almost all of it stood vertically in space instead of lying on the floor. “Somehow the ground, the wall, the table, they became a frame,” he remembered.After working beneath the weight of so much grief in the ’70s, Shapiro’s work was literally elevated by “a kind of enthusiasm,” tending increasingly vertical. Even the floor works from the decade, which include fragmentary figures (a rectangular “torso” sometimes with just a “head”) cast in iron, or made from wood or plaster, reach up into space, or lift themselves up as far as they can. Around 1980, he began mounting small, brightly colored reliefs on the wall. By the end of the decade, he was elevating volumes on long dowels, like spider crabs, and hoisting forms on poles.

These sculptures, whatever their form, are decidedly off-kilter, “sidestepping all of the hubris that has marked all of sculpture in the Western canon,” as Gormley observed. Shapiro tapped back into sculpture’s tradition of figuration, but slantwise, making light of what might otherwise have been monumental. He drew inspiration from Degas, whose sculpture, he once said, “is so refined and elegant in his projection of form into space, whereas Rodin builds from the ground up.” And while he employed materials—beams in bronze or wood or aluminum—evocative of industrial modernity, he made all the heaviness seem light. His bronze and iron casts often preserve the grain of their wooden molds, even the traces of the saw. Metal makes for permanence, but not always perfection.

By the 1990s, Shapiro was experimenting regularly with doubling bodies, seeing how, in combination, they come even closer to abstraction. And his work scaled up with time, as he received ever more public commissions. Among the most important was Loss and Regeneration (1993), a monumental installation on the steps of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., comprising a 25-foot-tall figure that seems to plunge earthward, its head down and a long arm extended into the air, and, some 40 feet away, a nine-foot-tall house poised, like a dreidel, on one corner of its roof.

Catastrophe worked strange magic on Shapiro. Divorce, grief, a world-historical tragedy that haunted his secular Jewish upbringing—all stimulated his art. And so it was one morning as he was in a cab on his way to the Newark airport, when his second wife, painter Ellen Phelan, called to tell him that a plane had collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In the years following 9/11, Shapiro’s geometric compositions became increasingly complex and contingently joined. He began breaking up models and recombining them into dynamic and unstable forms, strung together and suspended with metal wire that had all the jumbled eloquence of rubble. (It figures that a sculptor would see the collapse of the Twin Towers a bit differently from the average New Yorker.) In the wake of that event, Shapiro “recognized—it’s a harsh thing to say—the limitation of what I was doing previously,” he said. The trauma worked to “push my work beyond a kind of representation,” to study “collapse and joining.”

His fragile, mobile-like assemblages begun in the 2000s look back to two of Shapiro’s long-standing influences, Calder and Miró, whose lightness is often subtended by darkness. But they also point to where Shapiro would go in the coming decades.

IF SHAPIRO’S FIGURES linger in the rich limbo of balance, in the 2000s, he burrowed into the density of contraction and collapse. A high point came in 20 Elements (2004–05), an 11-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide, 10-foot-long cluster of 20 brightly painted wooden rectangles, commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, that responds to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Dance (1865–69), a virtuosic academic relief originally intended to adorn the facade of the Paris Opera. (A study for the piece was on one of the models on display at Pace.) Mirroring the central, leaping figure in Dance, the heart of Shapiro’s composition is a large yellow rectangle, which he characteristically lofted at a diagonal. Responding to the dynamism of Carpeaux’s sculpture, none of the 20 elements is joined along an edge but instead seem to be magnetized to some core. This refusal to let the shape of the volume dictate its mode of connection to other shapes—a hallmark of Shapiro’s later style—is of a piece with his desire to resist the ways architecture could wind up framing, even constituting, so much of Minimalist sculpture.

Shapiro then “overwhelmed the architecture” altogether in his 2010 show at Pace, which included works like Was Blue (2010), composed of six painted rectangles of various dimensions, suspended with taut fishing wire as if in antigravity. “Of course they were dependent on the wall and floor,” Shapiro said, “but they weren’t organized around it.” In a 2016 show at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Shapiro suspended irregular polygons, including two in crimson that resembled houses, echoing a volume in a dark-blue sculpture that sat on the floor below. This work represented a “real sense of abandon,” he said. If his sculptures had always insisted on being viewed in the round, these new installations compelled the to move through them, within them—what Andre called “sculpture as place.”

“I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO DRAW,” Shapiro told me. But that’s not exactly true: He often sketched forms that eventually turned into sculptures, and even scribbled a series of unsettling etchings in the mid-’70s of couples dancing, or fighting, or both. Shapiro produced numerous drawings in charcoal and pastels, plus gouaches and woodblock prints, many of which reflect his sculptural preoccupations.

In the ’80s, he drew geometric forms in smudgy black charcoal on white paper—like blueprints for his houses, or X-rays of his stick men. (These bracing monochromatic pieces clearly left a mark on Christopher Wool, who served as Shapiro’s assistant for several years in the early ’80s. “His work is something I still think about all the time,” Wool told me.) Shapiro made blobby gouaches in bright colors around the time he started putting small, bright sculptures on the walls. He also started making collages, and collage-like geometric patterns, just as his sculptures themselves began to work more through juxtaposition than straightforward joining.

In his final years, Shapiro rapidly assembled pieces of wood using epoxy resin and one-inch pins shot out of a chunky, green-enameled pneumatic gun, made by the Italian company Omer. It was a kind of drawing in three dimensions, not so far removed from playing with blocks. “Even if it’s miserable, it’s playful,” Shapiro told me. To make ARK, for example, “I remember jamming pieces of wood into the vice, and compressing them,” he said. “I wanted layers of compression.” At some point, Shapiro’s longtime collaborator and woodworker, Ichiro Kato—who got his start crafting Donald Judd’s furniture—might translate a model into a finer maquette, which would then be translated once again when Shapiro chose to produce a piece at scale. In this iterative process, which sometimes unfolded over years, composition and contingency blended together. A sculpture might be transformed when a model got knocked over or fell apart; scrap snatched up from the floor might look like an invitation.

At the end of our meandering conversation, Shapiro and I spoke about two of his most towering predecessors, the totemic David Smith and the somewhat more puckish Anthony Caro. “I think David Smith really had to prove he was an artist in some way,” Shapiro said. “Caro not quite as much.”

I asked him if he still felt that he had something to prove. “I still think I do,” he replied. “But I think at this point I can be light-handed,” he added. “I think that’s a privilege of years.”

Faye Wei Wei’s ethereal figurative paintings made a splash as early as 2016, when she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Especially on Instagram, her self-image and romantic visions—full of motifs of hearts, lovers, flowers, bows, and rosaries—introduced a sort of fantasy painter unburdened by fear of external judgment.

Ready for a change after notable shows at Situations in New York and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna, Wei Wei enrolled last year in the MFA program at Yale. During a recent visit to her studio in New Haven, Connecticut, the floor was covered with book pages and image references, along with a pair of halved baseballs with fluffy guts, a clay model of an imagined city, a doll’s bed, and other found objects and sources of inspiration. “They are not necessarily any messes or obstacles—they are there for me to walk through,” she said of the disarray that doubled as a portal for improvisation and transformation.

In one of her recent paintings, Calcium Stars (severed romanesque ears), from 2024, streams of confetti exude from three floating ears above a figure reclining mischievously, undressed and in an ambiguous state between ecstasy and dread. The ears are loose studies of Romanesque sculptures that, in Wei Wei’s poetic imagination, serve as an invitation for whispered secrets. “I love architectural creatures, forms that exist as spaces rather than just objects,” she said, adding that the ears also reference a scene in Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000). “There’s this idea [in the movie] of digging a hole in a tree and whispering secrets into it. I love the motif of hidden messages through storytelling.”

A Telescope Made of Champagne Glass (2024) features a resting figure surrounded by miniature architectural forms made to look like lace floating against a vibrant orange plane. “I was experimenting with texture in this piece, using a sponge,” Wei Wei said. “I think of paint almost like a substance with its own value, like music. It carries deep emotion.”

Expressive brushwork filled with musical energy—lively staccato notes, flowing legato melodies—sweep across many of her paintings. “In music, you have structure, like a sequence or a movement, and I think painting can mirror that,” she said. In A Theatre on the Moon (2024), long, fluid strokes cloud the bell of a trumpet that turns into a sort of tempest, as if excavating the interior space of the instrument while activating its sonic charge on the canvas.

Looking at Wei Wei’s work, one can feel both bewildered and beholden. It envelops you at once in the viewpoint of a performer on an instrument as well as that of an audience member peering at the same performance on stage. In that way, her style evokes a multiverse where painterly gestures, like music, play on emotions that can range from stoic to melodramatic, whimsical to melancholic, and slightly antiquated to refreshingly modern. 

“Is that a real Monet?” asks a visitor to Takashi Murakami’s new exhibition at Gagosian New York, “JAPONISME → Cognitive Revolution: Learning from Hiroshige,” on view through July 11. The Japanese artist has subjected the French Impressionist to his characteristic screen-printing technique in Claude Monet’s “Water Lily Pond” And Me, Submerged in the Pond Like Gollum (2025), a slick copy that from a squinting distance might fool you. Conveniently, squinting distance is a popular suggestion for the best way to view Impressionism. Murakami knows his audience; he knows they are always looking at and through screens, and that the lure of the apparently famous now pulls harder than the onetime aura of originality.

The same fate has befallen Murakami himself, known more as a celebrity figure than a serious artist. But both his skill and his knowledge of art history, which includes a PhD in traditional Japanese painting, are evident in this exhibition. Despite appearances (and the inclusion of several examples of his Louis Vuitton monogram canvases, allusions to the artist’s collaboration with luxury brands), this show seems less about outward attraction and more about inward exploration. The bulk of the work comes from Murakami’s take on Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (1856–58), a series that began with his 2024 show at the Brooklyn Museum (which houses a set of Hiroshige’s prints). Murakami scaled up the prints to made them into immersive canvases, adding glitter and some of his signature characters to create a “spot the difference” effect, but he was essentially devoted to retracing one of the great treasures of Japanese culture. Copying, in this instance, is a form of reverence and even inheritance: Muarakami has described using the copies to understand his place within the history of art, claiming in an interview with ARTnews that “maybe I wasn’t outside the story—I just hadn’t seen how the thread connected yet.”

That story isn’t limited to the art of Japan. What’s new here is Murakami’s copying of European artists including Monet, who were themselves drawing on Japanese influences—what was termed “Japonisme” by the nineteenth-century French critic Philip Burty. Like Murakami’s own aesthetic, Superflat, which can be traced to the decimation of Japan’s economy post-WWII, Japonisme came in the wake of Western aggression against the formerly closed state. By the 1860s, gunboat diplomacy resulted in asymmetrical treaties that forced Japan to engage in unfavorable trade with the West and that prompted an influx of Japanese art, which appeared radical to European eyes.

Artists newly exposed to Japanese prints including Hiroshige’s adopted the flat planes of strong color, vertical orientation, and emphasis on patterning that they observed in Japanese art as they worked to develop a mode of modern painting. Recognizing a fresh sense of truthfulness in this Japanese influence—one based in the essence of things, rather than an illusionistic imitation—brought another critic, Théodore Duret, to declare “Before Japan it was impossible; the painter always lied.”

What truth is at stake in this new iteration of Japonisme? At a time when cultural borrowings are more likely to be condemned as appropriation, Murakami seems to be intervening in a debate about who has the right to copy whom. The Japonaise of Claude Monet’s “La Japonaise” (2025) takes on Monet’s 1876 portrait of his wife Camille dressed up in a kimono. (The Monet was the subject of controversy in 2015 when the Museum of Fine Arts Boston exhibited it alongside a kimono visitors were invited to try on, as if identity can be assumed and dropped like a garment.) In addition to Monet’s copied signature, Murakami added his own in conspicuous Latin script in what may be a gesture of reclamation but one that also implicitly undersigns the initial borrowing. He similarly recreates the cover of a French illustrated magazine dedicated to Japan (Fig. 2 Paris Illustré Cover of the May 1, 1886 issue Butterfly, 2025), featuring a reproduction of a print of a Japanese geisha. Van Gogh (whose work Murakami also copies for the show) had traced the woman’s body from that same cover in 1887, aligning Murakami with a mode of modern art that made liberal use of whatever was available to it.

Still, cultural borrowings have consequences, including potentially transforming the actual people who make up those cultures into consumable motifs. Murakami may allude to these consequences in his inclusion of UFOs in several of the copied works: a small vessel floats above the bridge in James McNeill Whistler’s “Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge” Then a UFO Flew By (2025). Beyond introducing an element of surprising strangeness, the UFOs invoke current issues around so-called “illegal” aliens, asking what aspects of other cultures we are willing to accept and what degree of difference is tolerated. A more searing response is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of “Monstrous Beauty,” a superbly curated show on “chinoiserie,” another instance of Europeans drawing influence from Asian cultures. At the end of a series of galleries showing Asian women’s bodies adorning everything from teacups to mirrors, Patty Chang’s Abyssal (2025), a porcelain massage table shot through with holes referencing the 2021 Atlanta spa massacre, makes those bodies real, and renders their appropriation a deadly serious matter.

On the eve of Justin Allen’s live reading to celebrate his debut book, Language Arts (2024), published by Wendy’s Subway, we gathered over tea at a boutique café on New York’s Lower East Side. Just a few blocks away, at Performance Space, the writer, artist, and musician would soon recite his poem “140 BPM”—a sonic reenactment of nights spent at Bushwick’s Bossa Nova Civic Club—in a deep, resonant bass, mirroring the frenetic energy of bodies moving to techno. Language Arts manages to capture that energy in a book, merging music, dance, performance, and language to capture the reverberations of sound off walls. All the while, he transforms thunderous lyrics into leftist critiques: “We don’t get paid / until next Friday and / our rent is due / tomorrow.”

Allen grew up in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where he began performing after discovering tap and hip-hop dance in his adolescence, and having inherited his father’s diverse music tastes, which spanned Parliament-Funkadelic to Green Day’s Dookie. As a high schooler, he encountered experimental punk bands that pushed his musical boundaries, and found solace in the chaotic fever dreams of the Blood Brothers and in the loose expressive rhythms of Saetia, which draws on jazz.

But it was Allen’s move to York City that would shape his political consciousness. In the city, the artist was immersed in the world of indie sleaze artists like Santigold and M.I.A. He found in their music a framework for critiquing the United States. “It was a weird moment when everyone was scared for different reasons,” he reflected. “Whenever people are scared, interesting things happen in culture.” In Language Arts, these “interesting things” take the form of text filled with sci-fi-inspired scenes, speculative essays, and “Hatnahans”—a language Allen created himself.

Creating a language is no small feat, but for Allen, it was second nature. An aspirational polyglot—having tried his tongue at French and Spanish—he discovered David J. Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention (2015) at the Strand bookstore near Union Square. After studying indigenous African languages like Zulu and Xhosa on YouTube, he began to craft a language of his own. Hatnahans has open vowels, genderless words, and an invented alphabet.

But the ethos of Language Arts is as punk as it is academic. Lyrics and notes from his band, Black Boots, are scattered across fluorescent green pages, infusing the work with the irreverence of club culture. In his opening essay, “Into the City,” Allen presents a manifesto for the imaginary island of Hatnaha, blending urban life and nature in a vision of creative and ecological harmony. It conveys a sense of buoyancy, describing a luscious tropical climate surrounding a vibrant city center unspoiled by infrastructure issues and imperialism. Moving between these climes, at its core Language Arts creates a world as fluid as the languages we speak.

Within Rhea Dillon’s studio cubicle at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), the artist and writer talked quietly about preparations for three exhibitions, opening weeks apart over the summer: her ISP group exhibition; a solo show at the Heidelberger Kunstverein; and a booth in the Statements section of Art Basel Switzerland. Famed for Marxist-leaning, theory-rich seminars, the ISP is a clear fit for the 29-year-old artist, who has temporarily transplanted from South London; her work engages a canon of Black and Caribbean historians, novelists, and poets including Kamau Brathwaite, Beverley Bryan, June Jordan, and Sylvia Wynter.

A second-generation British citizen with family in Jamaica, the artist often draws from her correspondence with the Caribbean, and critiques the sociopolitical ceilings inherited with diasporic identity. Sculptures such as Caribbean Ossuary (2022)—included last year in “Tituba, qui pour nous protéger?” (Tituba, who protects us?) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris—suggest an immigrant’s aspirational longing for Old World luxury. The work presents a mahogany cabinet, echoing one owned by the artist’s grandmother, tipped on its back and seeming to float like a ship across the gallery floor. Within, items from a cut-crystal tea service (for when “the queen came”) hover atop a mirrored backing.

Dillon often produces sculptures like this one, crafting visceral portraits of postcolonial Black experiences from everyday objects, symbols, and language. Reflecting on her work’s territorial politics, Dillon said, “I think about land very physically now—soil, as opposed to geographies or trajectories,” citing American anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones.

Dillon’s 2024 exhibition “An Alterable Terrain” at Tate Britain bridged the body and its diaspora through fauna. She presented a fragmentary Black woman, abstracted in a sparsely arranged constellation of sculptures representative of eyes, mouth, lungs, hands, feet, and reproductive organs. In Swollen, Whole, Broken, Birthed in the Broken; Broken Birthed, Broken, Deficient, Whole—At the Black Womb’s Altar, At the Black Woman’s Tale (2023), dried calabash gourds are mounted on an angled plinth of sapele mahogany; some fractured, some whole, they stand in for womb, breasts, and vagina. Dillon calls out the commodity equivalence slavery drew between human flesh and wood, and underlines the parallel migrations of Black people and plant life.

Complementing her theoretical rigor with “poethics” (per the artist, borrowing poet Joan Retallack’s term), Dillon imbues her artworks with linguistic slippages and nonsensical evasions. Dillon’s writing favors elision and repetition, the latter shaping sections of her libretto for Catgut—The Opera, performed at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2021. Pointing to photographs in her studio, Dillon explained this linguistic approach through a series of drawings central to “Gestural Poetics” at Paul Soto Gallery in Los Angeles last year. Originating when Dillon learned that “spade” was a racial slur, the oil stick drawings repeatedly rehearse the contours of the playing card icon, distorting the derogatory expression into a tree, a shield, or a pair of breasts. Looking over the recurrent symmetries of her drawings, the artist wondered, “Can I extend a definition? Or can I create a new definition through repetition?”

When it’s business as usual in the United Nations General Assembly, debates over international laws and their global impact are coolly waged, their real-time minutes of interest largely to diplomats and reporters. But lately, these summits have gained an unexpected follower in Coumba Samba, an artist who is fascinated by the possibility of so many representatives of different nations gathered in one room. A livestream of these summits in 2024 even constituted a piece unto itself in Samba’s show at Empire, a tiny gallery in an office building located a 20-minute walk from the UN’s New York headquarters.

Within the UN, these emissaries’ words were of great importance, with the potential to impact the world more broadly. At Empire, their statements acted as background noise to the show, titled “Dress Code.” It consisted of little more than several poles, green carpeting, and the phones and speakers that played footage of live UN meetings. Samba procured the poles from construction companies, then painted them with colored bands of irregular sizes referring to national flags. One of them prominently featured red, white, and blue, which Samba said gestured toward “colonial powers,” the flags of so many colonizer nations sharing these hues. “I’m interested in color and power,” Samba said when I met with her in New York.

Samba has exhibited canvases as well as found objects— wooden pallets, discarded radiators—painted in hues that pay homage to highly specific yet sometimes elusive sources. Stripe Blinds (2023), for example, is a broken set of Venetian blinds whose slats were painted lime green, mustard yellow, and gray, the colors of an ensemble Samba’s sister wore during her modeling days. But without these sentimental details, the work can feel cold and impersonal. In converting these stories into the ostensibly universal language of abstraction, all the intimacy is lost.

That’s deliberate. Samba’s interest in the way things get lost in translation derives from her transnational lifestyle. Born in Harlem, she was raised in Senegal for 5 years before her family returned to New York; she now splits her time between that city and various European hubs, including Basel, where, in September, she will show new work at the Kunsthalle. Shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, she said, has allowed her to observe what she called a “cause-and- effect” phenomenon, referring to trash: The refuse of European nations commonly washes up on the shores of African nations like Senegal.

A 2024 solo show at London’s Arcadia Missa featured a set of wall-mounted radiators that Samba painted in monochromes, so that they resembled the squares and rectangles one might associate with Russian Suprematist painting. The Russian connection was deliberate: An accompanying booklet featured an essay by dealer Mischa Lustin addressing what he called “red gas,” or the petroleum exported from Russia to warm homes around the world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in sanctions on oil, Lustin pointed out, and a European energy crisis ensued. Samba’s radiators may have been monochromatic, but they were “not supposed to be complete abstraction,” she said. Instead, they spoke to global supply chains, both material and ideological.