A handsome dark-haired man, his neck tucked into his shoulders, walks around a museum gallery, scanning the art on the walls. A dozing guard fails to notice just how suspiciously this man is surveying the objects on view. The man, played by Josh O’Connor, snatches a Revolutionary War carving from a window case before exiting the museum with his two sons and wife (Alana Haim). This thief is a family man, and this petty crime paves the way for a much bigger one in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, which had its world premier at the Cannes Film Festival last month and will be released by Mubi later this year.

What heist O’Connor’s character, a carpenter nicknamed J.B., will be the mastermind is just part of the tension that binds together this quietly suspenseful movie. For much of the film, we know very little about J.B.; figuring out who he is and what drives him, becomes almost as important as knowing if he will get away with his master plan. At times, it seems like his motivation is simply boredom.  

The portrait of J.B. is revealed piecemeal, like a lens coming into focus. He seems to be an art aficionado, creating drawings based on four Arthur Dove paintings. When his accomplices start thrusting the artworks he’s been eyeing for months into the trunk of a stolen car, he orders them to be careful. He briefly displays them in his living room, taking a few seconds to observe them before storing them in a barn.

J.B.’s lack of purpose as well as his appreciation for art recall two characters from previous Reichardt movies. In Showing Up, which premiered at Cannes in 2022, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor and professor in Oregon who is preparing for a solo show. In Wendy and Lucy (2008), Williams is Wendy, an art school dropout strapped for cash who searches for her dog, Lucy. By contrast, J.B. appears at first to be determined and confident. He is quick on his feet and seemingly sure of himself as he plots the heist, but as the movie unfolds this facade begins to unravel.   

For The Mastermind, Reichardt drew inspiration from a 1972 robbery of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, in which two Gauguins, a Picasso, and a Rembrandt were stolen in broad daylight. The thieves were arrested and the paintings recovered days later.  (The film’s fictitious Framingham Art Museum is actually the I.M. Pei–designed, red brick Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus, Indiana.) At first, a Gauguin seems like it might be the object of J.B.’s theft, but instead he goes for Dove’s Tree Forms (1932), Willow Tree (1937), Tanks & Snowbanks (1938), and Yellow Blue Green Brown (1941). Reichardt has said that the choice of Dove, an American modernist known for his abstracted landscapes, points to J.B.’s lack of ambition.

Aesthetically, the 1970s of the Worcester heist weighs heavily on the film, from the influence of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston’s color photos of America during this era to the context of the Vietnam War. Special attention is also paid to each scene’s framing. The doors and windows, whether open or closed, seem to serve as a metaphor for J.B.’s potential escape or perhaps his incarceration. He is often shown through a door or window opening, giving the impression that we are spying on or tailing J.B.

At times, The Mastermind borders on comedy. The heist itself is hilarious: a couple of amateurs with nylon stockings over their heads are caught red-handed, not by the sleeping guard, but by a young girl who pretentiously describes the art on view in French—“ennuyeux”, “dépravé”, “factice” (boring, depraved, fake). They still manage to escape, though not without delays. Later, J.B.’s father, played by Bill Camp, observes, “It is inconceivable that those abstracts paintings would be worth that much trouble.” The Mastermind is a film where mystery, humor, and art gracefully interlock.

In the middle of a room full of working people, there’s a large bird cage-like structure made of cameras and cables. Someone is inside of it; a flash goes off. Just next to this structure there’s a dummy similar to the kind used in crash tests. On both sides of the room there are four plots marked out with black tape. Inside each plot, couples wear VR goggles. They walk backward and forward with their arms stretched out, and are being directed by assistants in black. 

This is your first introduction to Jordan Wolfson’s new work, Little Room, at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. This VR work requires two people to have their bodies scanned—though how exactly this scan will be used within virtual space is not made explicit at first. The wall text reveals little, telling viewers that what they will experience will be “morally and emotionally challenging.” With Wolfson, this disclaimer comes as a matter of course.

Wolfson made his name in the 2010s with puppets, violence, and controversy. Female Figure (2014) featured a sexy animatronic witch who danced in front of a mirror, locking eyes with her audience through the glass. Colored Sculpture (2016) was a nasty little boy doll repeatedly hurled at the ground, and Body Sculpture (2023) took the form of a titanium cube with exquisitely articulated arms that appeared to touch itself, even mime, in its own cube-way, cube-suicide. Little Room is an explicit mix of tactics derived from Wolfson’s puppet-centric art and one of his most iconic works, the VR piece Real Violence (2017). 

In that work, the audience member is dropped into an urban setting on a sunny day. The stillness is interrupted by the appearance of two characters, Wolfson and another man, who is kneeling on the ground, holding his hands up in a pose of supplication. Wolfson is holding a bat. He begins to beat this man to death in front of you. Blood splatters. Recalling the controversy that followed this piece at the Whitney Biennial, I approached Little Room with trepidation.

The process of being scanned, while similar in its gestures to going to the doctor or through the security line at an airport, is the first movement into another reality. Like an initiation rite, the piece begins with crossing a number of thresholds. The first threshold is finding a partner. Fortunately, I was quickly paired with another lone viewer, an artist with elfin features. “We’re about to get very intimate,” I told him. I had no idea. 

We were told to get ready to enter a full-body scanner, and that our silhouettes would be very important. Near the queue, there was a simple black vanity with a double-sided mirror, wipes, hair ties, and tape, as well as baskets for personal effects. People wearing long dresses or skirts were encouraged to put on a pair of grey sweatpants. I was instructed that I should tie my hair back by an assistant who was in the middle of taping someone’s flowing culottes tight at the knee. I was then passed off to the next assistant who was in charge of taking the scan. A platform inside the cage calibrated and raised itself slightly, responding to my measurements. Inside the cage, many cameras were pointed at me. I was told to prepare for the flash.

After our respective scans my partner and I sat at a table and made small talk as we watched the room for clues of what we were about to experience. In a square in front of me a man and a woman have begun the experience, their eyes obscured by the heavy VR headset. They had just finished the calibration. The woman suddenly stepped back, startled, and began to laugh, then to cry. An assistant put a pair of headphones over her ears while she wiped a tear with the bottom of her T-shirt. It dawned on me, too late perhaps: she was reacting to herself. Wolfson had made puppets and animators out of each of his audience members by having each couple don each other’s skin.

When Real Violence premiered at the Whitney Biennial, the piece sealed Wolfson’s reputation as an edgelord. Wolfson insisted that this work and others were not political, that his art was just about violence (despite the fact Real Violence did contain one culturally specific element: Hanukkah prayers that figured prominently on its soundtrack). Given the nationwide movements against gender- and race-based violence and a focus on representation and identity politics that defined the 2010s, his refusal to have his work answer to those terms cast him as a provocateur. Yet it was a role Wolfson seemed to play with pleasure. 

Post-pandemic, amid another Trump presidency, it’s difficult to find his edgelord persona quite so sexy or subversive—there’s enough to fear between the rise of the alt-right, ICE, and so much else. The mid-2010s were about debating what violence was—a microaggression, an artwork, a cop wrapping his bicep around a Black man’s throat and choking him to death. By 2020, the terror of fascism and genocide had reached a fever pitch, changing that discourse entirely.

If Wolfson is such an artist of his time, what is he now? I wondered this to myself as a headset was placed on my head. A white void, lined with a grid that seemed to stretch into infinity, began to appear. My partner in this piece was told by an assistant to calibrate the headset by walking and flipping his palms so that my skin can fit itself to his body. There were technical difficulties. The anticipation was difficult to bear. I had always been curious to know what it is to see myself as others do. The opportunity to do so had finally arrived, and I realized I was frightened.

My hands appeared before me with hair on their knuckles. Glancing down at myself, I saw my partner’s clothing: a striped shirt, beige pants, white sneakers. A figure—myself—appeared in my periphery. She was there, her eyes wide fixed in a bloodshot demonic stare, glitching, body folding and unfolding. Without meaning to, I said the word “stop” out loud.

From the hips down I was quite distorted, shorter and wider than I am, with very small feet. I tried to look up my dress, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, even as I wanted to flinch. Then a rectangular mirror appeared in the void. I could see myself wearing my partner’s skin. His face and gaze were all wrong, and I couldn’t get his arms to work, sometimes they disappeared completely. I tried dancing, and his body shuddered.

Male and female voices began chanting a poem with flat affect. My mouth was opening and closing to match its words: “God molested you.” The word “transparency” chimed as I looked down at myself in my partner’s body, seeing empty space ringed by the outline of his pants and sneakers. The mirror flipped, passed through us, and we followed it. There was a phantom feeling of touch as I skimmed my hand over the surface of the mirror, like trying to grab a beam of light. The poem continued: “Look at your hands, I love you. Look at your hands, I hate you.” We circled each other in that timeless void. The VR goggles suddenly began streaming reality. It was over.

After removing the VR headset and the headphones, my partner and I sat down and drank a glass of water. “You have spots,” he said, and I rolled up the sleeve of my sweater, which I had taken off when I was scanned. I looked at my own freckles, a bit dazed. I realized my internal monologue had gone completely silent during the duration of the experience, and in the moments afterward had to readjust to hearing my own thoughts again. My partner’s experience wasn’t as absorbing. The audio in his headset was broken—he hadn’t heard anything. 

It turned out that the body-switching experience made for a good bonding moment. My partner-in-art and I spent the next few hours wandering around the Beyeler talking about the work. The intensity of the experience, like a physical glow, eventually sloughed off, along with any frustrations with technical frictions. What remains are strong images of encounter, as when that twitching, uncanny body of mine appeared, followed by the moment I saw his face on mine, stiff, carved, and distorted. I’ve been left with a new memory.

Little Room could easily be read as an overly self-referential work, remixing the most obvious mediums and thematic aspects of his practice. But what makes this piece an elegant continuation of his body of work is that it is a quiet, compelling response to the criticism he received over the years. In Little Room, he tries to solve a problem: can the artist skirt the moralistic demands of representation?

Wolfson has often used white characters—including versions of his own body—to create supposedly apolitical scenarios in which violence isn’t racialized. But by putting the bodies of audience members into the work, something hyper-specific is achieved. 

VR has often been touted as an “empathy machine,” with the potential to create understanding and care across disparate groups, as anthropologist Lisa Messeri noted in her recent book In the Land of the Unreal. It seems too neat to think that Wolfson has used VR in this way. Rather, with Little Room he seems to give imagined critics exactly what they want—not to think of the artist anymore, of what anything represents, but to experience themselves, that entity we are all obsessed with. As for your role puppeting the Other, good luck with that burden, because it’s not on Wolfson anymore. If there is violence in that room, it’s something you brought with you. Can you handle that?

The easiest—and laziest—way to describe Raymond Saunders’s bewitching paintings, now surveyed in a small but potent retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, might be to call them “Rauschenbergian.” Just as Robert Rauschenberg once did, Saunders displays a penchant for messy scrawls and dirty canvases that he adorns with collected trinkets and pictures clipped from the media. Also à la Rauschenberg, Saunders produces artworks that feel like riddles, their surfaces rife with mysterious symbols and visual puns.

You can crack Rauschenberg’s codes if you work hard enough at it, but Saunders’s puzzles are a lot more elusive. The longer I stared at the 35 works in his Carnegie show, the less I seemed to understand them.

I must have spent a half-hour gazing at Passages: East, West 1 (1987), one of the many paintings here making extensive use of black for a background. Passages is monumentally scaled, just like many of its companions in the show, and features three chess boards, one drippy mustard-colored paint stroke, one appropriated reproduction of a Jan Brueghel still life (seemingly pinned to the canvas by a strip of tape but actually affixed to the surface by other means), one paintbrush (lightly used), several soap dishes (dirtied), what looks like wallpapering, and a whole lot more.

Divining all the connections between all these disparate objects is nearly impossible, but the key to the painting may be the Brueghel poster, which depicts a vase stuffed with flowers. Nearby, in chalk, Saunders has naturalistically sketched roses of his own rendering, placing his perennials beneath a magazine spread with a picture of a bouquet. Saunders seems to be playing representational games, asking: What’s the right way for an artist to portray a floral still life? Will any of those pictures ever measure up to the real thing?

But wait, there’s more. He’s crossed out the most finely rendered image here—the chalk one—as though he’d failed at his own exercise. Just when you think you know what Saunders is up to, you realize you haven’t gotten his art at all.

Clearly, Saunders is successful at being evasive. But it takes a special artist to make that slipperiness feel rewarding, and Saunders, thankfully, is that rare talent. He shows that good paintings shouldn’t give away their meaning so easily, since art is a fiction and fictions can only move us so close to the truth. He makes it feel nice to be led astray.

Saunders has never received a retrospective until now—a fact that feels astonishing, considering his importance. “Black Is a Color,” his 1967 essay refuting Ishmael Reed’s notion that Black art ought to evince a distinctly Black aesthetic, has been read widely, earning admirers such as art historian Darby English, who once wrote that Saunders’s text had “lost none of its pertinence.” Saunders showed with Terry Dintenfass, the New York dealer who also represented artists like Arthur Dove and Horace Pippin, and he appeared in Kellie Jones’s game-changing 2012 show “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980.”

But until last year, when Saunders joined the rosters of Andrew Kreps and David Zwirner, there was a sense that he had not quite achieved mainstream recognition, even though institutions have steadily acquired his art. Nearly all the works in the Carnegie exhibition are on loan from major museums in this country, from the National Gallery of Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That’s a sign that Saunders’s work has plenty of appreciators—even if many of those institutions have rarely, if ever, exhibited these wonderful paintings. His Carnegie show is solid proof that he deserves canonization.

The exhibition, curated by Eric Crosby, is partly an attempt to reclaim Saunders as a hometown legend. Saunders was born in 1934 in Pittsburgh, where he grew up visiting the museum’s institution’s Carnegie International exhibitions as well as the nearby Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Later on, he would recall taking in paintings by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, as well as exhibitions of dinosaur fossils and dioramas filled with fake birds. Seeing all these disparate sights in one museum complex seems to have instilled in him the omnivorous sensibility evident today in his art.

Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, an art teacher in the Pittsburgh school system who would later count Andy Warhol among his students, took Saunders under his wing and pushed him toward becoming an artist. Saunders began taking art courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, then moved to Oakland, California, in 1960.

There, he began producing works defined by their smudgy, inky strokes, including Night Vision (1962), in which a cloud of blackness stands in for what appears to be a marsh, with several barely-there reeds peeking through the surface. The painting is one of the earliest in the Carnegie show, and it suggests that Saunders was already trying to confuse his viewers’ eyes. It is impossible, after all, to see in the dark.

Black also prevails in a painting produced just a year later, Something about Something (1963), which aligns Saunders with the prevailing avant-garde modes of his day. It features a nonsense string of numbers and letters that appear stenciled but are in fact painted—a gesture clearly cribbed from Jasper Johns, another artist with a wonderful sense for optical illusions and aesthetic encryption.

Something feels a bit too much like Johns-lite, but Saunders came into his own by the end of the ’60s with works such as Post No Bills (1968), in which a blazing red monochrome plays host to a painter’s palette affixed to the canvas. Streaked with blue, the palette interrupts the purity of this long crimson rectangle, which also contains two strips of red tape at its top—a makeshift cross, perhaps, or more likely a crosshair.

Not so long before Saunders made Post No Bills, painters treated their craft as something sacred—the Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman once called his chosen medium a “religious art.” Saunders took a much more sacrilegious tack, and did so, in part, by making crucifixes out of unevenly sliced tape in his paintings of the 1970s and ’80s. One such work, from 1975, is even called I Don’t Go to Church Anymore.

And just as Saunders does not worship at the altar of Christianity, he does not seem deferential to art history, either. Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, American (1988) is named for two great Black modernists, both of whose names are written by Saunders onto his surface. Like an insolent child at a blackboard, Saunders has scribbled over their names, instead paying more mind to torn-up posters, kids’ drawings, and a Dots candy box that he has also included. A piece of ephemera from Tail of the Yak, a legendary (and now defunct) Oakland boutique known for its idiosyncratic offerings, is more visible here than any allusions to Bearden or Lawrence.

With works such as that one, Saunders seems to have intentionally crafted art that was illegible. But might not the Carnegie show have made his work more inscrutable than necessary? Quotes by Saunders constitute the bulk of the wall texts here; no catalog was produced for the show. The dearth of explanatory material makes these puzzling artworks even tougher to comprehend.

It’s true that Saunders’ art speaks well enough for itself, particularly his works from the ’90s, which have a more explicitly political character. Not Always Invited to Dinner (1995), for example, addresses racism and acceptance, placing appropriated images, including a photograph of Malcolm X, beside an advertisement for hand soap—a piercing juxtaposition that suggests that Black Americans will always be a part of the picture until someone decides to scrub them out of it. You don’t need to know a lot about Saunders to gain that much from this painting.

But it is sometimes less obvious what Saunders is up to, which is partly because he’s always been clear about one thing: he isn’t trying to make art that’s easy. “i’m not here to play to the gallery,” Saunders wrote in 1967, in his all-lowercase essay “Black Is a Color,” and if you didn’t get it, stop by the show’s greatest treasure, The Gift of Presence (1993–94). Composed of several dirtied doors adorned with all sorts of objects, The Gift of Presence acts like a manifesto for Saunders. The handwritten Lawrence and Bearden references return, as do the ready-made religious images and allusions to Johns (here in the form of a sloppily painted American flag). Beneath, a scrawled list of names paying homage to jazz legends, Saunders has included a wooden sign that reads “I IS RETIRED.” “WHEN I FEEL THE URGE TO WORK—I LAY DOWN TO THE URGE PASSES,” the sign reads. Saunders won’t perform the labor of explaining this work to you, and he shouldn’t have to, either.

Adam Pendleton has spent the better part of two decades making art in a language only he can speak fluently, in which mark-making, pictographs, and short, all-caps texts converge into a form of abstraction that hovers somewhere between early modernism, protest signage, and graffiti. While it’s a language that isn’t wholly discernible at first, it’s worth spending the time to learn how to appreciate it. Pendleton’s project is less about delivering clarity than it is about encouraging close inspection and deep introspection.

These efforts are on full view in his sprawling exhibition, “Love Queen,” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (through January 3, 2027). Looping through the museum’s inner-ring galleries like a liturgy, visual fragments echo throughout the circular room, building toward an aesthetic and emotional implosion the way that a series of metaphors do in a parable. At times, they feel less like paintings than blackboards at mid-lecture or fragments of a futuristic text. 

Indebted to Conceptualism’s long shadow, Pendleton emerged in the early 2000s­ at a moment when painting felt as if it were once again up for grabs. He chose not to resurrect it exactly, but to redirect it, treating the canvas as a stage for linguistic and cultural conflict instead. Art historical influences, from Franz Kline to Glenn Ligon, are filtered through Pendleton’s cool, steady logic. His process begins with gestures in ink or watercolor on paper—drips, splatters, shapes—that are then photographed, layered, and screen-printed onto large black-gessoed grounds. Blending references to signage and typography, poetry and Xerox art, his canvases, while not always quite legible, are never silent.

The best paintings in the show are more organic, in particular the works from the “Untitled (Days)” series, begun in 2020. High contrast, white on black, the markings repeat and build into a crescendo. The exhibition also includes Pendleton’s latest entries to his “Black Dada” series (2008–ongoing), representing a departure from his previous mostly black-and-white canvases. With swaths of garish gold and neon green cutting through the black, they are bolder and louder than their predecessors in a way that feels somewhat distant and cold—maybe even a bit alien. His inclusion of letters, one hidden per canvas, however, are equally as indecipherable as his earlier works. That is until the light hits the canvas just right.  

The show’s final work, Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?), is a rare moment of emotional clarity. Projected floor to ceiling, this single-channel video assembles documentation of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, the protest encampment that took over the National Mall in the months after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. But Pendleton treats the material here less as historical fact than a series of compiled memories, infused with emotion and transmitted into the present. Triangles and circles flash across the screen, sometimes obliterating faces, sometimes lending them an accidental halo. He zooms so closely into subjects they appear out of focus, which he then contrasts with a panoramic shot, giving the point view of an inquisitive bystander. Stitched together, a narrative slowly coalesces out of a million interrupted images. 

Pendleton’s work may never fully resolve for his viewers. Its meanings shift depending on where you stand, how long you stay, what you’re willing to say back. “Love, Queen” doesn’t explain; instead it asks you to keep looking. It requires your undivided attention and patience. In doing so, you can feel yourself open up to new understanding. And if you’re patient, the grammar of Pendleton’s visual language slowly unravels. 

Last month, I encountered a piece of institutional history—a disused piece of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exterior—within the galleries of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. This dirtied window once appeared in the Met’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, where it was meant to guard hallowed Oceanic artifacts from the sunlight that spilled in. Artist Gala Porras-Kim has put it on view in her current solo exhibition, appropriating the slanted glass pane as an artwork.

Within the Met’s galleries, this human-size window previously aided in creating a sense of majesty. But at the Carnegie, it looks more like the wreckage of a decaying building. Porras-Kim, a conceptual artist known for questioning what museums really communicate when they collect and display art, is showing that the Met’s famed home for art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas is akin to a rusting prison to the objects held within, flaunting these artifacts for visitors from far and wide while also ensuring that the objects are siloed from the cultures where they originated.

The reason Porras-Kim was able to obtain this window at all was because the Rockefeller Wing has been shuttered since 2021. This week, following a $70 million renovation, the wing will reopen to the public in a totally new form, with the galleries significantly rearranged. With the exception of one big Oceanic art gallery, this wing was dark and cramped, and in that way quite unlike the rest of the Met, from which these galleries felt isolated. Now, the wing feels airy, gorgeous, and energizing. It’s a masterpiece, and not only due to Kulapat Yantrasast’s redesign, which enlivens a set of galleries that had begun to blunt the power of the art on view.

Accompanying the redesign is a rehang—which may not be entirely unexpected, given how often museums are switching out their collection displays these days to account for prior gaps. But many of those rehangs have focused on modern and contemporary art, and this one, with its attentiveness to new research surrounding non-Western art from centuries ago, feels like something new. It may well act as a model for other institutions to follow.

The most readily apparent shifts here occur in the stunning Oceania galleries, which have been a main attraction at the Met ever since they first opened in 1982, some 13 years after they were donated by Nelson Rockefeller in honor of his son, who acquired the majority of these objects prior to his disappearance in New Guinea in 1961. The galleries’ central ceremonial house ceiling, commissioned by Kwoma artists in Mariwai, Papua New Guinea, and produced between 1970 and 1973, returns; the many paintings on its sago palm sheets look just as exquisite as they had for decades. But the ceiling has been altered: descendants of the painters worked closely with the Met to reconfigure the sheets, so that the ceiling’s composition now better reflects the intentions of its original makers.

A group of wood Asmat funerary poles were once sited beneath the ceiling, towering above the heads of viewers. Now, they have now been moved to a separate gallery focused specifically on Asmat culture, and in their place are several astonishing nioge (bark cloth) paintings produced by members of the Ömie people in Papua New Guinea. One is by Ilma Savari (Ajikum’e), whose work here features dot-like patterning that historically has been passed down for generations in the form of tattoos on men’s bodies. Her work has been newly acquired by the Met, and it is exhibitable here because Yantrasast has covered part of the nearby windows, protecting it from the sunlight that once endangered the art on view here.

There are less immediately visible changes throughout the wing. The wall texts have been reworked, and now perform the double duty of better explicating most objects’ individual cultural contexts while also more transparently laying out the provenance of what’s on view. The latter gesture is a clear response to the calls for museums across the West to repatriate looted objects—and a result of the Met’s recent efforts to build out its provenance research department. (The Met, for its part, sent objects violently plundered from the Kingdom of Benin by British troops back to Nigeria several years ago. That return is now explicitly mentioned in wall text in this wing, but the museum is still exhibiting other works from Benin, which raises thorny questions about whether there isn’t still a lot more justice to be done.)

“Our research is ongoing,” one wall panel notes, “and existing gaps are filled in as new details come to light.” The curators, working under the leadership of Alisa LaGamma, seem more determined than ever to treat the art on view with greater respect, naming creators who previously went unmentioned in wall texts and exhibiting videos of rituals formerly only described in catalogs.

Yantrasast’s redesign emphasizes openness, making it so that you can peer through glass walls in the Oceania galleries and look directly into the spaces for African art. Implicitly, the architecture suggests that none of these cultures existed in total isolation, a rejoinder to the way art history has commonly been taught and studied in the West. The effect is most obvious in the African art galleries, a parade of thrilling mini-presentations centered around specific cultures. With sculptures unevenly arrayed amid a maze of walls and vitrines, these galleries are prismatic and pleasantly dizzying. You can view peoples separated by centuries and geography refracted through one another, warping the conventional flow of time and space.

It’s still possible to find beloved objects here—most notably a 16th-century ivory sculpture depicting Idià, mother of the King of Benin, that has been one of the Met’s crown jewels ever since the ’70s—but they get lost amid a sea of objects that haven’t been given as much due. That’s a good thing: one barometer for the success of a rehang is how many surprises emerge, and there are plenty of them here.

In that vein, the star of this wing—for me, at least—is the gallery devoted to work by Yoruba bead artists based in what is now known as Nigeria. Included here is a puppet depicting a deity known as Òsanyìn, his body made fat by a thick suit formed from zigzags of pink and green beads. There’s also a wonderful crown, its surface adorned with bug-eyed faces whose pupils pop out toward the viewer. If these pieces had been on view before, I don’t recall them. Now, I think I’ll never forget them.

Likewise impressionable is all the fiber art on view. In a gallery devoted to art from modern-day Ghana, there’s a ca. 1910–40 kente cloth by an Asante-Akan artist who has alternated bands of maroon with tremoring yellow and green patterns. This marvelous cloth wasn’t necessarily meant for a museum like the Met—it would’ve been donned by a man and trotted out into the world. But it looks at home here, especially when seen in the context of another cotton-heavy stunner in the nearby Sierra Leone galleries, which feature a 13-foot-long kpoikpoi textile that would have been used as a wall hanging. Both works act as reminders that crafts such as these have long been a fixture of everyday life in many cultures.

Fiber fever continues in the Americas galleries, which unfortunately get a bit less space than the galleries for African and Oceanic art. Here, the Met is showing off light-sensitive weavings that are only exhibitable because of Yantrasast’s renovation. There’s a remarkable Wari tunic from Peru that abstracts teeth, eyes, and arms into a tumble of pinkish blobs. It shines just as brightly as the golden sculptures from Caribbean peoples viewable nearby.

Adjacent to the Americas galleries is a section for small temporary exhibitions, with the first devoted to Iba Ndiaye, a Senegalese-born modernist who spent time in France. The exhibition outlines the ways that Ndiaye drew on the Western canon and then harnessed its stylings to his own advantage. It places his self-portrait, a cluster of nervous chalk scrawls that cohere to form a face, beside another by Edgar Degas that the curators say inspired Ndiaye’s. Juxtapositions such as that one exemplify this wing’s desire to bridge timelines and cultures.

The curators stumble while trying to establish a linkage between the Met’s antiquities wings and these galleries. The art of ancient Egypt is still separated out in a wing of its own halfway across the museum and never mentioned once here, as though Egyptian art isn’t African art. Meanwhile, one of the oldest objects in this rehang is a Nubian stele from the 2nd century BCE that is awkwardly sectioned out in a gallery of its own. Rather confusingly, the stele doesn’t even belong to the Met, which borrowed it from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, so it’s unclear what will happen to this gallery after the latter museum reclaims the piece.

The wing is more successful at relating its holdings to the 20th century art galleries, which are just steps away (and which are up next for a total overhaul). It makes sense, then, why modern and contemporary art appears frequently in the rehang. A 1980s abstraction on vellum by the Ethiopian-born modernist Skunder Boghossian looks gorgeous beside a 19th-century scroll bearing messages of healing for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, and a 2006 El Anatsui aluminum tapestry is particularly striking in the context of the Asante-Akan kente cloth.

The inclusion of these works reminds viewers that influential African artists such as Boghossian and Anatsui are part of the same art-historical continuum as everything else on view on this wing, much of which was made in the 19th and 20th centuries. No longer does the Rockefeller Wing seem so separate from the rest of the Met. No longer does it feel like the timeworn prison alluded to by Porras-Kim’s piece at the Carnegie Museum. This wing has fully come alive.

Some of the contemporary artists commissioned to create art for this wing clearly want it to remain that way. Taloi Havini, a member of the Hakö people, has created a jaw-dropper of a copper piece that she has patinated with cobalt blue, then etched with arrows, concentric squares, and squiggles that mimic Hakö patterns. Havini has hung her 2025 piece, Nakas: Marks of Matriliny, on a wall facing the windows that once let in UV rays harmful to the art on view. At the Met, Havini’s art acts as shield, ensuring that the works behind it survive as they ought to.

Lorna Simpson’s paintings draw you right in, their rich blue tones washing over you like a cresting wave. From far away, her largest paintings, measuring nearly 10 feet tall, can appear cool, even a little foreboding, but upon closer inspection, they offer much to admire. You can marvel at the painterliness of these works—their trailing drips, their swooshed strokes made by a squeegee.

But these surfaces seem to hide more than they reveal. In some sections of her paintings, she embeds strips of illegible text or the barely visible images of women’s eyes, gazing back mirthfully. Those details are what make her work so alluring. I keep coming back to a blue-gray cloud of smoke or mist in the corner of her diptych For Beryl Wright (2021), and I keep thinking I see the faintest semblance of mouth, smirking in the fog. It’s that enigmatic quality that makes her paintings tick.

For Beryl Wright, dedicated to the late curator who championed Simpson’s work early on, is one of the more than 20 paintings in the first exhibition to survey Simpson’s output in this medium. Those paintings span a decade of production, between 2014 and 2024, and are on view through November 2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in a show titled “Source Notes,” a nod to the reference images that animate her practice. The exhibition aims to give an overview of her painterly practice, while also relating it to her collage work.

Even despite having worked as a painter for a while now, Simpson remains best known as a photographer. She made her name in the 1980s with works that married images of Black women with cryptic texts. These works force viewers to question their own preconceived notions while also never fully revealing what they mean. And so, when Simpson debuted her paintings at the 2015 Venice Biennale, organized that year by her friend, the late curator Okwui Enwezor, it came as a surprise to some. The Met show makes the case that these works were merely a continuation of what she’d started in photography.  

The exhibition successfully accomplishes the goal of showing how her collages inform her paintings—two vitrines with her collage work make clear there is fluidity between the two practices. But the show doesn’t feel big enough or comprehensive enough to entirely make the case for Simpson as a great painter. Museum exhibitions always leave a lot on the cutting room floor, but in this case, doing so does a disservice to the artist surveyed.

This small grouping of monumental paintings feels cramped, without the necessary room to breathe. And the selection of works by curator Lauren Rosati also seems random. There’s only one work, for example, from a series about meteorites that was recently on view at Hauser & Wirth, in one of the most significant New York exhibitions of her paintings to date. That work, did time elapse (2024), is from the Met’s own holdings; it also happens to be the least interesting of the bunch.

The catalog features images of works that are more useful examples of her practice than what’s on view in the galleries. One explanation is, of course, the spatial constraints: the Simpson show is much smaller, for example, than a blockbuster exhibition for John Singer Sargent (on view in the spacious upstairs galleries through August 3). That speaks to the Met’s priorities. Thankfully, this will be the last exhibition the Met mounts in this space, as it prepares for construction on its forthcoming $500 million Tang Wing, though that won’t open for another five years. 

Simpson absolutely deserves a show that can take her seriously as a painter, but the Met show fails her. Its primary focus is to survey her usage of blue and to show off the monumental scale of her paintings, yet it isn’t very convincing in that way. I found myself drawn to more modestly sized works such as Ghost Note (2021), which features a black square to one side. References to art history and Black culture abound in Simpson’s oeuvre, and the allusion to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) is obvious. Simpson, however, sees these “black boxes,” as she likes to call them, as “a container for memory, … a ledger to hold the past and mark the unreliability of its recall,” per Rosati’s essay in the catalog. That these containers are blacked out and obfuscated only adds to the poignancy of this metaphor: what and how do we remember—and to what extent? That the painting is relatively small compared to the rest suggests that this work can itself be easily overlooked.

Simpson’s best painting remains her first foray into the medium, Three Figures (2014). Here, three figures at the center of this composition are drawn from a famous 1963 photograph depicting a high-pressure water hose being turned on civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama. The visible Ben Day dots and marble-like swirls of black and white add to the fuzziness of the tableaux. Most interestingly, Simpson has offset the rightmost three panels, breaking the chain of linked arms. You can see the promise of her experimentation—and get the sense that this artist had made a big pivot and actually pulled it off.

Simpson used this approach of collaging and abstracting history again in Detroit (Ode to G.), a 12-panel painting from 2016 that hangs next to Three Figures at the Met. One of the source images is a view of the 1967 Detroit Uprising. Something has happened here, but what? The city might be on fire; perhaps the fog of memory has muddied the scene.

But in Simpson’s hands, violence isn’t replicated—it’s abstracted, though not in a way that turns away from history’s most brutal moments. Her use of multiple panels is important. It creates a jumbled experience in which memory is cloudy and refracted. There are streaks of black, as though these were only partially remembered images. Some traumatic memories never fully come together, just like Simpson’s paintings.

Her exploration of history grows subtler in the works that come next, as she mines references that themselves are obscure and underknown. Both her “Ice” and meteorite paintings allude to underknown histories about Black men whose contributions to science, both large and small, were at one point purposefully erased, only to be recently resurrected. The “Ice” series, featuring images of Arctic vistas, refers to Matthew Henson, an African American explorer who discovered the geographic North Pole in 1909 but whose discovery was largely credited to the voyage’s white commander, Robert Peary. The meteorite works refer to Ed Bush, a Black tenant farmer who discovered a meteoric stone in 1922 in Mississippi but went unnamed in the account reporting its discovery; the farm’s white owner, Allen Cox, was thanked in the historical record for its discovery as it fell on his land.

The only meteorite painting in the Met show, did time elapse, sizes up a stone that weighed less than a pound to be more than 10 feet wide. As groundbreaking objects go, the stone was miniscule, but Simpson has rendered it at the scale of history painting. In diving deep into the archive, as a collagist might do, Simpson is able to extract the essence of these stories, showing that though they seemed miniscule, they are actually important. The irony of the Met show is that it accomplishes the opposite: it has the feeling of being a major show, but it diminishes the work.   

In 2015, an Eritrean teenager named Saron told Vice News of her harrowing journey from her war-torn home country to Europe via the Libyan capital of Tripoli, a 4,000-mile odyssey that included imprisonment, endangerment, and bearing witness to the torture of fellow female migrants. The Vice story continued to linger with the painter Michael Armitage, so much so that he returned to this agonizing tale nine years later in a work called Path (2024), which is making its debut this month in a haunting solo show at David Zwirner in New York.

In Path, hooded figures—the women whom Saron saw get tortured with nails, possibly—are huddled together behind animals at a trough. A man joins those animals, smashing food into his mouth while a baby looks on. Many of those details aren’t in the Vice report, and few would even know that a journalistic investigation inspired this piece, had Armitage himself not mentioned it at a press preview on Thursday.

But there is one detail in Path that is also mentioned by Vice: the endless sea, visible through a tiny aperture in the painting’s black and blue. “We know a lot of people died there,” Saron told Vice. The painting summons that knowledge through a poignant mix of fact and fiction.

All of the works in Armitage’s Zwirner show are about migration, and many of them could even be counted as history paintings, placing him within a longstanding genre through which generations of artists have rendered major real-world happenings onto canvas. Most of the time, though, artists working in that tradition tend to present their work as a form of reporting: Robert Longo’s 2018 drawing showing migrants sliding along a gigantic wave, for example, is hyper-detailed depiction of this ongoing crisis, suggesting that it is realer than the truth itself. That work is a clear allusion to Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), one of the most famous history paintings of all time. For his part, Armitage presents his own homage in the 2024 painting Raft (ii), in which a boat filled with refugees navigates roiled waters.

Yet unlike the Géricault and Longo works, Armitage’s painting is blurry: one yellow-shirted figure, having apparently fallen overboard, now melts away into the tide. The work appears hazy, like a half-remembered dream. It’s unstable, just as history and memory itself often is, particularly in its most traumatic moments.

Armitage’s palette goes heavy on dandelion yellow and vibrant azure, recalling the color compositions of the Post-Impressionists and the Nabis artists of the late 19th century. Both movement’s artists used their hues to create internal landscapes that existed beyond reality, and Armitage’s hues work toward a similar goal, moving his paintings out of our world, into one that is only semi-imagined. His colors look particularly strong at David Zwirner, where they are exhibited in a new Annabelle Selldorf–designed gallery filled with natural light—a precious resource in New York.

Selldorf, the architect behind the Frick Collection’s recent renovation, has previously conceived many other galleries in Zwirner’s empire, including several in New York. But she was not initially expected to do this one, which came about only after another, to be located two blocks over, fell through. This just-opened venue has just one story and measures 18,000 square feet. It’s modest by mega-gallery standards, and puny in comparison to the five-story, 50,000-square-foot behemoth Zwirner initially planned. Zwirner blamed his developer’s “financial headwinds during Covid” for the about-face, but it turns out those headwinds have steered him in the right direction: his spare new gallery is a pleasant place to see art.

Not counting the atrium, the gallery has three spaces, all of them currently occupied by Armitage. One has new sculptures that appear like wood carvings, even though they are done in patinated bronze. Each represents an episode from the life of Jesus Christ, whom Armitage said he views as a migrant. One depicts two disembodied, gnarled feet bound together; it could represent the deposition from the cross or the dead body of a refugee shown elsewhere here.

The bronze works have cold and austere surfaces, and therefore are not as interesting as the paintings on view here, which are all done on lubugo bark cloth. Unlike canvas, the cloth does not naturally take well to oil paint: it tears upon being stretched, and its textured surface makes for uneven terrain. When painted, the cloth often looks a bit like skin, especially because of the way that Armitage stitches together his pieces, leaving behind visible scars, perhaps ones accumulated along an arduous journey.

The London- and Nairobi-based artist has related the cloth to its use by the Buganda people of Uganda, who utilize it as funerary shrouds, and to its sale by merchants in his home country of Kenya, where he once found coasters made of lugubo at a Nairobi tourist market. “Different cultural pressures result in the loss of some things, whilst other things are kept and others are brought back,” he said in the catalog for a 2023 Kunsthaus Bregenz survey of his work. His paintings, like his materials, are about what gets altered in transit.

Yet the curious thing about Armitage’s depictions of harrowing subject matter is that they are often also beautiful. One figure in an untitled 2024 painting here is shown clutching a baby amid swirls of blue. There are holes in the figure’s thigh and head, where they appear like gashes or bullet holes. But perhaps there’s another way of looking at these ruptures. Maybe they’re also portals to alternate dimensions, small windows into worlds beyond our own—worlds in which humans care more deeply for each other.