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.”
As revolutionaries often do, the feminist collective known as Guerrilla Girls began its battle against sexism in the arts with a list of names. Their first posters appeared overnight in May 1985, wheat-pasted onto walls and kiosks throughout SoHo, New York’s primary gallery district at the time. Along the upper border of each print ran a question, emphatic in all caps: “WHAT DO THESE ARTISTS HAVE IN COMMON?”
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Emblazoned black on white in bold, sans-serif font, the subsequent dossier enumerated interdisciplinary artists known for their vanguardism, all successful, all male: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, the list went on. At each sheet’s lower edge, an answer to the headline question was given: All allowed their work to be represented by galleries who showed 10 percent or fewer women artists. The public service announcement was signed, “Guerrilla Girls, Conscience of the Art World.”
Since then, the Guerrilla Girls have lambasted cultural producers, galleries, institutions, and collectors alike in splashy, provocative posters broadcasting uncomfortable realities about gender and racial inequality. Appropriating marketing aesthetics and radical distribution tactics, they follow a statistics-driven approach; as outlined in the press release that announced their formation, “Simple facts will be spelled out; obvious conclusions can be drawn.”
This year marks the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, celebrated by retrospective exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Bulgaria in Sofia. Reexamining their incendiary trajectory in the arts and on the streets, one thing is clear: Their uncompromising activism hits as hard today as it did when they began their practice four decades ago.
All accounts place the Guerrilla Girls’ origins in the summer of 1984, with the opening of the exhibition “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” curated by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Of the 169 participants, only 13 were women and even fewer were people of color. To protest discriminatory curatorial practices, several feminist activist groups—including the Women’s Caucus for Art, the Heresies Collective, the Feminist Art Institute, and the Women’s Interart Center—organized the Women Artists Visibility Event (WAVE) in front of the museum. However, the demonstration did not have the desired impact. Visitors were all but oblivious to the picket line and walked around it to enter MoMA’s lobby.
Realizing that the methodologies of an earlier generation no longer resonated with the general public, several women began to meet to discuss other ways of responding to the sexism and racism blatant in the cultural sphere. “The art world isn’t avant-garde; it’s derriere,” reflected pseudonymous Guerrilla Girls “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz” in a 2008 oral history interview with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Despite greater equality in the marketplace writ large, at the time of the collective’s founding, male artists still out-earned women two to one (the subject of another Guerrilla Girls sign from 1985). During their first convening in April 1985 at 513 Broadway in SoHo, “Kahlo” and “Kollwitz” suggested the framework of their first poster, taking their male peers to task for complicity with a system that privileged men above all others. Similar designs keyed to exclusionary galleries, critics, and museums soon followed.
The Guerrilla Girls’ direct, confrontational stratagems were palpably alluring, winning them an audience even while their accusations antagonized the upper echelons of the arts ecosystem. Within five years of their debut, they had been covered by the Village Voice, New York magazine, New York Times, and Artforum. By 1992 they’d also sneaked into the pages of Vogue.
To protect their personal lives and careers from backlash in the face of attention both good and ill, the art world vigilantes adopted noms de guerre and, during public appearances, donned gorilla masks (a mascot born from a typographic error). These pseudonyms now number in the sixties—counting all the members from 1985 to today—and represent an informal revisionist canon of deceased women artists and writers.
Speaking by phone about their aliases, “Kollwitz” said, “They honor these women of the past, many of whom had been forgotten when we started so many decades ago.” After our conversation, she sent me a roster that featured Zora Neale Hurston, Shigeko Kubota, Ana Mendieta, Liubov Popova, Alma Thomas, and Chiyo Uno.
Across the Guerrilla Girls’ career, the focus of their activism has gradually expanded, first encompassing the visual arts and, later, a world beyond. Through 1989 their attention remained trained on the New York art scene as they attacked the misogyny they found there. It was during this period that they conducted their iconic audit of the Metropolitan Museum, which resulted in the bus banner Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Musuem? (1989).
Beside a recumbent female figure lifted from Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814)—in their revision, wearing a snarling gorilla head—black and hot pink text blocks reveal that women represented only 5 percent of the artists in the museum’s Modern wing yet 85 percent of the nudes. This focus on gender equity went hand in hand with an intersectional alliance with racial minorities. For example, in a 1987 poster, they asked, “What’s fashionable, prestigious, and tax-deductible?” The answer: “Discriminating against women and non-white artists.”
In the 1990s the group’s self-appointed jurisdiction began to grow, its members speaking out on U.S. politics and urgent issues such as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, the environment, and censorship. Guerrilla Girls’ Pop Quiz (1990) questioned the merit of government-instituted markers of social justice, challenging national awareness months as glorified lip service. The print asked, “If February is Black History Month and March is Women’s History Month, what happens the rest of the year?” The pithy riposte: “Discrimination.” During the pro-choice march on Washington in 1992, members of the group carried another wry sign, Guerrilla Girls Demand a Return to Traditional Values on Abortion (1992), which highlighted that early pregnancy termination was legal up to the 1850s.
In the 2000s, with changes in design and print processes brought on by the digital revolution, the Guerrilla Girls traded in the monochrome and grayscale of earlier decades for an explosive world of color, while also tapping into an increasingly international network of platforms and co-conspirators. Reflecting on this most recent era in their practice, “Kollwitz” added with zeal, “Now we have the power to put our work up all over the world.” One such international arena was the 2005 Venice Biennale, the first to be organized by women curators, María de Corral and Rosa Martínez. When invited to participate, the Guerrilla Girls created an installation of six 17-foot banners that underscored the absence of women artists in the biennale’s history and the city’s exhibition spaces.
For a group famed for institutional critique, the museological reification of the Guerrilla Girls over the past 20 years poses its own conceptual challenge, as their works have been collected and exhibited by international art museums including MoMA, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the Tate Modern in London. Rather than fighting these endorsements, the Guerrilla Girls have leaned into them as opportunities to produce new, research-based artworks and engage directly with the audience that is poised to care most about equity within and beyond the arts.
For example, as part of their retrospective at the National Gallery of Bulgaria this year (running through August 6), they produced a poster responding to the paucity of women in the national Council of Ministers (only 1 in 20). Beside an image of a banitsa—a traditional Bulgarian pastry—from which a meager portion has been cut, Cyrillic lettering announces, “Women of Bulgaria put on a crash diet! Don’t they deserve more than a thin slice of government?” Young women and representatives from the Guerrilla Girls carried the poster in banner form as part of the procession for women’s rights that took place in Sofia on March 11.
Their current survey at NMWA, Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble, on through September 28, is particularly resonant in light of the parallel history of the institution, also founded in the 1980s to champion female artists. On a recent phone call, exhibition curator Hannah Shambroom remarked, “The formation of the Guerrilla Girls and the way that NMWA was developed really came out of a similar recognition of both exclusion and also undervaluing of the art of women.”
In tribute to their shared mission, the museum honored the collective at its annual gala, which was scheduled to coincide with the show’s opening. Drawn entirely from NMWA’s collection, the retrospective presents work from 1985 to 2024, including a wall-scale reproduction of Guerrilla Girls ManifestA: For Art Museums Everywhere (2024), which recalls street interventions ranging in scale from bumper stickers to billboards.
“I wanted to highlight that the group was at the forefront of artist advocacy work,” Shambroom said, reflecting on the Guerrilla Girls’ legacy and her curatorial process. “One thing I was really struck by as I was looking through our collection and their more recent works was how relevant many of the issues they were addressing continue to feel—still part of the news, still part of the public consciousness.”
At a time when reproductive rights and freedom of speech are challenged anew, the Guerrilla Girls and their perennially timely confrontation of authority demonstrate that much can be achieved by a few determined individuals. They remain insistent that more remains to be done. Unsurprisingly, the Guerrilla Girls know best how to describe their ongoing mission. In a 2016 appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, “Kahlo” said, “We say art should look like the rest of our culture. Unless all the voices of our culture are in the history of art, it’s not really a history of art, it’s a history of power.
“Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble” is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. through September 28, 2025; “Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly” is on view at the National Gallery Sofia, Bulgaria, through August 6, 2025; “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” will be on view at the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles, from November 18, 2025 to April 12, 2026
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?”
Political discourse has always flowed freely in Harmony Hammond’s art. Hammond arrived in New York in 1969, months after the Stonewall riots rocked Greenwich Village. Against the backdrop of the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements, she came of age as an artist while attending consciousness-raising meetings and participating in the founding of A.I.R. Gallery, the first women-run nonprofit artist cooperative in the United States. After coming out in 1973, Hammond became an outspoken proponent of lesbian feminism, coediting the 1977 issue of Heresies dedicated to lesbian art, and curating “A Lesbian Show” at the artist-run venue 112 Greene Street in 1978. Decades later, she literally wrote the book on the subject: Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History, published by Rizzoli in 2000.
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Over the last five decades, Hammond has forged a materially conscious and process-oriented vocabulary that mobilizes modernist formalism to political ends. In the ’70s, she incorporated fabric remnants into a radical body of textile-based paintings (like her “Floorpieces” from 1973) and sculptures (such as Hunkertime 1979–80) that drew upon traditions associated with women, the domestic sphere, and non-Western cultures. Encoded in the language of abstraction, sociopolitical concerns continue to figure in Hammond’s recent paintings. Working through emblematic processes—including binding, tearing, piecing, patching, and suturing—on almost monochromatic surfaces, paintings such as Patched (2022) and Double Cross I (2021) caution against patterns of violence, and cipher collectivity for disenfranchised voices.
A defining voice in contemporary feminist and queer abstraction, Hammond has received her due in recent years: In 2019 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum held a 50-year survey of her work and, last year, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. “FRINGE,” a recently opened solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe on view until May 19, focuses on work produced since 2014, including her series of “Bandaged Grids,” “Chenilles,” “Bandaged Quilts,” and “Crosses.” A.i.A. spoke with Hammond about the processes and material metaphors that have characterized her practice from the 1970s to today.
“FRINGE,” the title of your SITE Santa Fe show, can be read a number of different ways. What does it connote to you?
It’s a verb and a noun. The idea of fringe and fringing has to do with edges and marginalized spaces. Going back to the 1970s, the metaphorical associations of edges as meeting points have interested me and been crucial to the formal strategies that I employ. Are people pushed to the fringes, or do they choose to be there? How do things or people meet at those edges? Is there a tension, a friction, a negotiation? The fringe is not just a passive place. In fact, it is very active and charged. It’s the place that I choose to occupy.
Layers and what is hidden underneath are recurrent themes in your work. How are you thinking about visibility and opacity?
I’m trained as a painter. I work via accumulation. From my fabric work of the ’70s to the work I do now, it’s additive. Whether you call it painting or sculpture, that’s what I do. In my early “Bags” and “Presences,” the hanging strips of paint-saturated cloth are three-dimensional brushstrokes. Accumulation over time, over space—that sense of building from the inside out—is very much about agency and occupying space.
The works of the last 15 years exist in a third space between painting and sculpture. They build up paint slowly and intimately in thick, near-monochrome layers. The painting becomes a metaphor for the body. There was a period where the paintings were a dark phthalo blue, at times looking black or iridescent. The color and surface were fugitive, or what we could call queer. Recent paintings are mostly lighter in color, emphasizing surface incident. Lumps, bumps, protrusions, seams, splits, stains, and grommet holes formally open up the pictorial space. At the same time, they suggest body orifices, or wounds, with the paint acting as a healing poultice. When I wrap a painting, the straps often wrap around the edges to the back. You can think of that as bandaging, binding, bondage, but it is also embracing the painting. It’s about strengthening—like an athlete bandaging a knee.
How do surface and texture factor in?
In my recent paintings, light and shadow are crucial. The surfaces are very much in relief—interesting words!—returning to the idea of edges. When I think of edges in painting, I don’t just think of the perimeter; I also think of the painting surface as an edge between art and life, those bumps pushing up from underneath, seams splitting open, or what looks like body fluids oozing out of the holes. I’m thinking conceptually about the underlayers of paint and color. I’m really interested in what’s buried and asserting itself onto or through the top surface. The shadows have to be there, as do the fabric’s seams and loose threads. Seams are connectors. I like the connections to be visible. It’s what I call a “survivor aesthetic,” making a whole out of pieces.
All these visual strategies have meaning attached to them. I’m using the materials and how they are manipulated to bring social and political content into the work, which is actually quite formal. For example, a piece of fabric that’s cut has a different feeling than one that’s torn and fraying. Materials have histories and memories, whether they’re traditional art materials or what we would call nonart materials.
The metaphorical relationship between material and concept is fundamental in your work. How are you working with language?
Words come and go in my work. I mostly use them to suggest connections or to tell a story that needs to be told. But I also use words in relation to various visual strategies. For example, in my series “Bandaged Grids,” I affix bandages over a grid of holes that suggest wounds. The fabric strips that bandage the painting body are mostly horizontal. When I look at those, I often think of them as sentences—words covering up and over. In the “Double Cross” paintings, doubling is about sameness and difference—and, therefore, queer desire. But “double cross” also suggests betrayal. I am playing with words. I use visual imagery with meaning attached to it in the same way that we attach meaning to text.
In my abstract paintings, voices assert themselves from underneath the surface skin of paint. To me, that’s a political statement. But there are times I do a piece that is more overtly political. There are a few of these works in the SITE exhibition—Bandaged Flag (2021), Patched (2022), or Voices I (2023). Voices I, for example, is composed of pieces of vintage linoleum with fragmented quotes from the French lesbian feminist writer Monique Wittig, one of which asks, “what have you done with our desire?” Both ways of working are about the same thing: voice, censorship, agency.
From the ’70s through the ’90s, you created sculptures informed by an additive sensibility. That dimensionality is still in your current work, but there is also a dialogue with modernist painting. What do you see as the continuities between these bodies of work?
In the early ’70s, content that reflected the lives and experiences of women was not welcome in the painting field. Many feminist artists stopped painting and began to work with materials and techniques that reflected women’s lives and traditions of creativity. That’s when I began to work extensively with fabric, absorbing, embracing, and flaunting traditions of weaving, needlework, and the art of non-Western cultures.
My early fabric works were unstretched—I was painting on blankets, sheets, and curtains hanging push-pinned to the wall, the weight of the acrylic-saturated fabric altering the painting rectangle. Gradually they moved off the wall into space and I realized that I was a painter making what people call sculpture. When I titled the sculptures “Presences,” I was intentionally claiming the notion of presence as essence made visible, in opposition to Michael Fried’s gendered theorization and dismissal of that term. A lot of my work at that time had to do with women taking and occupying space. When I talk about presence, even in the paintings I do today, I’m talking about work that occupies a space larger than its physical space. Going back to the ’70s, that’s paralleled in an early women’s movement phrase: “The personal is political.”
And those processes became the basis for a new modernist framework?
In 1974 I began a series of “Weave Paintings,” that brought gendered traditions of woven cloth back into the painting field on my own terms. The surfaces of these stretched canvases were slowly built up with layers of oil paint mixed with Dorland’s wax medium. I then incised herringbone or braided “weave” patterns into the top layer, cutting into the skin of paint to reveal underlying color. The paint wasn’t completely dry while I worked, causing little points of paint to protrude. These were slightly menacing, but also fragile, and mirrored the painting’s irregular contour. From a distance, the paintings appeared monochrome, but up close, the under colors showed through. The “weave” paintings anticipated many of the concerns in my current work—participating in the modernist narrative of abstraction and, at the same time, challenging or interrupting it with political and social content.
You tumble into Cecchi’s from 13th Street. Before you’re even in the door of the restaurant in New York, you’re peering through gauzy half-curtains, as if backstage, about to face the clientele-cum-audience. Inside, a mural echoes your voyage, depicting the lurch off the subway through sweaty depths, the hasty flight toward conditioned air, the host bending over backward to find you a seat. Vampish oil-painted figures parade from the restaurant’s entryway to its depths through toothsome scenes. In the kitchen, a painted chef offers an oyster to a busty brunette. The dining room features a painted circus of limbs and pointed shoes. In the washroom, a couple does each other’s makeup, pouting at a third face that hovers winkingly in the mirror. Black velvet curtains frame a door at the restaurant’s far end, teasing silhouettes of high-heeled nudes that dance table-height along the walls.
Commissioned by maître d’hôtel and Off-Broadway actor turned restaurateur Michael Cecchi-Azzalino for his new haunt on the site of the defunct literary hub Café Loup, artist Jean-Pierre Villafañe’s (b. 1992, Puerto Rico) trio of allegorical murals Into the Night (2023) depicts the seven deadly sins in portraits of cosmopolitan vice. Playing seamlessly into the art deco fixtures that theatrically light the restaurant’s interior, Villafañe’s figures are caryatid statuesque, with sharply sculpted geometries evoking a Bauhaus grotesquery. New York as urban jungle or late-night denizen is Villafañe’s subject, and he renders it as a study in restraint and Dionysian release.
In Villafañe’s universe, as in our own, buildings dictate the flux and flow of life. Place becomes a character in tableaux that borrow perspectival tricks as easily from city streets as from Fra Angelico. This emphasis on architecture is honed by years of study, first at the Savannah College of Art and Design and then at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Growing up in Puerto Rico, his painterly work intersected with the built environment in graffiti throw-ups both condoned and covert, covering apartments, plazas, and abandoned warehouses. In a studio visit, the artist told me he sees traces of his improvisatory street art in the sketches that are the basis for his paintings. His sinuous limbs and rectilinear tendencies threaten to blur bodies with the architectural features that surround them. Tits and ass become spherical studies. Fishnets echo masonry. Contoured cheekbones and arched brows take on the sinewy, structural quality of a buttress.
Figures push at and collapse the spaces that contain them in Villafañe’s hedonic portraits of city life. Recently, the artist has taken to observing the city with a god’s-eye view, with a studio on the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center, where he is an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects. In paintings black, white, and burnt sienna all over, Villafañe’s characters rebel against Puritanical efficiency and its “compartmentalized timetables of desire,” to borrow his words. They play hooky on the rooftop (Offsite, 2024). They quiet quit, slinking off to orgiastic liaisons behind closed office doors (Playtime, 2024).
In the artist’s summer 2024 exhibition “Playtime” at Charles Moffett, New York, the striped pajama-pant aesthetic of post-pandemic office wear is willfully confused with the striation of cell bars, figures doubly entrapped in “coffin cubicles.” The artist is sympathetic to the Severance-style repression implicit in the day-to-night of the bureaucratic worker and desiring self, stashing joys for the afterhours when, in Villafañe’s words, “you’re released into the wilderness again to become a rascal.” In his riotously duplicitous paintings, cabaret chorus lines converge with phalanxes of commuting automatons, masses of bodies that become sites of both work and play.
THE LAST TEN YEARS have seen a return to the written word across visual, sculptural, and time-based media. In particular, Black artists and poets have investigated the unruliness of language, its slip-ups, evolutions, and equivocations. Though many Black conceptual artists, such as Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems, turned to language during the 1970s through 1990s, those picking up the thread today are particularly attuned to vernacular or fractured forms. Dave McKenzie’s 2012 performative video work Wilfred and Me shows the artist in profile repeating the sentence “Magic Johnson has AIDS.” As the rhythmic pulse of the recited phrase wears on, the words register more as sounds and the artist’s richly textured voice grows increasingly hoarse and dry, eventually being reduced to an arid rasp. A. H. Jerriod Avant’s 2017 poem “Felonious States of Adjectival Excess Featuring Comparative and Superlative Forms” is an ode to Black idioms, which have historically been categorized as grammatically incorrect (“my mo’ favoriter and mo’ better is my most favoritest”). Steffani Jemison’s gestural ciphers—in drawings, paintings, and more recent sculptures involving physical erosion—lean away from signification entirely, in favor of opacity and friction.
Steffani Jemison, ABOVE OR BENEATH, 2020, acrylic and dye sublimation print on synthetic velvet, 244 by 43 inches.
During the 1960s, Conceptualism introduced text as an alternative medium to painting, sculpture, and photography, one tied equally to narrative, sound, image, and—per the name of the movement—idea. For some, the expanded role of the concept in art allowed for a new objectivity: art could be disentangled from emotional expression or the artist’s hand, and text offered an ideal container for these theoretical proposals. However, situating text at a remove from subjectivity ran the risk of further dampening the voices of people with marginalized identities, who were only just starting to claim social and political leverage. Some artists, including Piper and Lorraine O’Grady, emphasized that the “dematerialization” of art did not necessitate the erasure of the body, nor of the indexical trace. It could be an invitation to action or gesture that required rather than removed the artist’s body.
Returning to that tension between dematerialization and depersonalization, and effacing language’s veneer of universality, many contemporary practitioners use marginalized or “broken” types of speech. In recent years, exhibitions and books such as “Speech/Acts” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Adam Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader (both 2017) have explored these reconsiderations of and disengagements from the written word. Many of these endeavors extend the critical, philosophical, or poetic writings of thinkers including Édouard Glissant, bell hooks, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers. A central concern for these artists, writers, and curators is the representation of Blackness, which sometimes entails eluding textual capture.
View of “Speech/Acts,” 2017, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, showing Kameelah Janan Rasheed, A Supple Perimeter (activation ii), 2017.
While many of these dissections of language have been realized in visual formats—focusing on the formal appearance of letters or words—more artists are turning to aural experiments, indicating how speech tends to be more legibly tied to class and race than writing. Characterizing language in the Caribbean in “Cross-Cultural Poetics,” Glissant wrote: “the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse.” More specifically, by reading text within the context of performance and sound art, artists reinsert the body into communication, showing how the specificity of a speaking body changes our understanding of meaning. Some of the many artists working with language in time-based media include Tony Cokes, James Allister Sprang, and Pamela Z. Of particular interest are those who translate from speech to text and back again. JJJJJerome Ellis and Will Rawls do so while also playing with silence and abstraction to contest the disembodiment of text and, at times, trouble legibility.
THE SONG OPENS with the pulse of piano notes: ascending triplets that create a sense of stasis, like an ellipsis, awaiting resolution. Ellis’s even voice enters this soundscape—titled “Dysfluent Waters,” from his 2021 album The Clearing—by prompting his listener with a question, even as the triplets fracture and are superseded by a meandering melodic line: “How can thinking about water help us think about … dysfluencies, blacknesses, and musics … together?” While delivering this query, Ellis pauses twice, as an orator might do for effect. These interludes extend longer than expected, Ellis’s thought put on hold for a moment before picking up expressively where it left off. The entire composition is punctuated by such gaps, breaks caused by Ellis’s stutter, a disability that has become central to his poetic and performative practice. While most people think of a stutter as streams of repeated sound, disfluency can also manifest as elongations or blocks, and Ellis’s own speech is interspersed with poignant silences.
Spread from JJJJJerome Ellis’s publication The Clearing, 2021, published by Wendy’s Subway.
Ellis’s album takes its organization from his existing writing. The tracks on The Clearing originated as an essay titled “The clearing: Music, disfluency, Blackness, and time” that Ellis wrote for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies in 2020. Discussing records of slave owners’ brutal enforcement of working hours through bells, horns, and—if neither were obeyed—whips, Ellis’s essay maps out historical relationships among Blackness, music, disfluency, and temporal regulation, and envisions practices that could “open time,” or interrupt the rhythm of clock time. Abridged and read aloud, the text defines the temporal and rhythmic parameters of the music that embellishes Ellis’s narratives. The recording was released as both a book (published by Wendy’s Subway) and a double set of LPs (co-produced by the Poetry Project and Northern Spy/NNA Tapes). The publication transforms Ellis’s silent blocks into fragments of language that shower the page, disrupting its usual linear order like concrete poetry, and drawing attention to the ways in which Ellis’s voice alters the temporality of recording and text alike.
JJJJJerome Ellis, The Clearing, 2021, at Issue Project Room and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, New York.
In the audio recording, Ellis’s stops enter the flow of his speech as an alternate and unpredictable rhythm of lone phonemes, stray letters or sounds, that bubble into enunciation. Almost inaudible, these “clearings,” as Ellis terms them, insist on our patience and invite a deeper form of listening. In her 2017 book Listening to Images, cultural theorist Tina Campt writes about forms of nonverbal articulation, such as humming, describing a “sublimely expressive unsayability that exceeds both words, as well as what we associate with sound and utterance.” We can locate some of that expressivity within the nonverbal in several renditions of Ellis’s piece—the publication or the performance video released by NNA Tapes—that reveal his vocal pauses to be not silent at all, but teeming with activity, the same letters or phonemes studiously repeated as Ellis moves through his block: “dddddddddddddddddddddd” or “glglglglglglglglglgl.” Reflecting on his stutter in “Dysfluent Waters,” Ellis tells the listener that his blocks are like vibrating moments of expectation, trembles before the completion of the thought: “I saw the word’s journey, its not having arrived.” Likewise, the listener experiences these interludes not as absence but as anticipation. We shift temporalities from the dynamic pace set by Ellis’s speaking voice to the suspended imminence of his block. In another song, “Loops of Retreat,” Ellis draws a parallel between the repeated syllables of his own verbal breaks and the iterative loops of Black music, a sound of “endless restlessness.” Ellis characterizes his stutter as a “temporal escape,” an expansive insertion that, as his essay indicates, fractures the orderliness and linearity of clock time, text, and music alike. Ellis’s speech refuses efficiency, rebuts definition, and even resists his own control.
WHEN ELLIS’S ALBUM was released in November 2021, it brought to mind choreographer Will Rawls’s “Cursor” project, developed during his 2018 residency at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn. For the first of three showings, Rawls performed from a console located behind the audience, writing in a sparsely populated text document that was projected at the front of the space for viewers to see. Words, typos, a garbled vocabulary, and free-floating syllables filled the page as the sound of typing echoed through ISSUE’s performance hall. The clatter of fingers on the keyboard was paralleled by Rawls’s amplified articulation of the fragmented expressions.
Will Rawls, Cursor 1: Word Lists, 2018, at ISSUE Project Room, New York.
This document—in some sections vacant and awaiting activation, in others already populated with phrases to be edited or rearranged—operated simultaneously as a score and a landscape. From his position at the back of the room, Rawls navigated the document with his cursor, which moved through the text as a black figure set against a white ground. In his introduction in the program notes, the artist introduced his audience to the cursor as a blinking silhouette that could stand in for the experience of Black embodiment. “[Cursors] are bodies motivated by language, by users, by others. They move through space. They blink in tempo and race the hours. They speak in many tongues. They pause and backtrack. They search and destroy. They are black. They are fugitive. They dance.”
Though the cursor was the only figure that moved through space during Rawls’s performance, the choreographer asserted his presence in the act of translation from visualized text to vocalized sound. Reading these jumbled phrases and characters aloud, Rawls repeated lines, sounding out different pronunciations and emphases, transforming an apparent collage of sounds into humorous and even earnest expressions: “UYHRIERJE RSSDDDSP PO” becomes “WHO ERASED THE POPE.” Excavating language from abstract accumulations of noise through the process of articulation, Rawls’s performance emphasized that the body, as much as the mind, is the lens that encounters, constructs, and interprets meaning. Conversely, Rawls also evacuated meaning from words already inscribed on the digital page, turning the familiar absurd with alternative pronunciations, repeating “I don’t bother with” until it blurred into a rhythmic beat. Writing about the piece in the October 2018 issue of Artforum, Rawls commented, “My body is both leader and follower,” and reflected on how his physical presence shaped sound—through articulation and the typed words—and, conversely, on the feelings that those sounds produced in him as he gave them voice.
Will Rawls, Cursor 1: Word Lists, 2018, at ISSUE Project Room, New York.
In his progressions from noise to words and vice versa, Rawls’s fragmentation and reconstruction of written and spoken language highlighted the tension between representation and abstraction. Enunciating jumbles of letters that would sooner be interpreted as reflecting a mood than a sound—picture the frustrated slam of fingers against a keyboard in “FPISANF A[FPN”—Rawls exaggerated the communicative ability of the alphabet while de-emphasizing the meaningfulness of words. But his experiments also drew attention to the formal qualities of letters, to their shapes and arbitrary relationships to phonetic sound.
These flights into abstraction also stemmed from Rawls’s scrutiny of representation, especially its failures and its tendency to perpetuate historical forms of violence. Cursor recalls another work by Rawls, Uncle Rebus (2018), in which performers constructed sentences from Brer Rabbit folktales, trickster narratives that enslaved peoples brought from Africa to the Americas as oral stories. He supplied performers with two sets of the standard English alphabet, in addition to symbols such as an asterisk and an exclamation mark. As the performers attempted to spell out words with these inadequate means, they resorted to symbols to function as letters, and began willfully to choose unconventional orthography: “WE R*ORGAN!SE.” In his Artforum piece, Rawls described the performers in Uncle Rebus as “spelling out something that has been historically categorized as a dialectical, minor English. The public also sees three black people laboring in the sun. To try to control that perspective, you have to race against a long history of the risks of representation.” In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant describes Haitian Creole as an intentional mockery of the simplified and command-based language imposed by colonizers upon indigenous or diasporic populations. By choosing to use such fractured forms of language, Rawls and his performers engage with this longer history of linguistic rebellion. However, Rawls is also wary of turning away entirely from representation. As he noted in the same interview, “The risk of a staging without words is that if the cursor functions as an incarnation of blackness, and if narrative falls away entirely, then the fully abstracted body could feel ahistorical.” In Cursor, Rawls expressed this ambivalence about language—with its seemingly antithetical capacities for capture and political manifestation—by moving back and forth between representational and nonrepresentational modes.
In 1971, poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “this is the oppressor’s language / yet I need it to talk to you.” Later, theorist bell hooks, in her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress, recalled her initial rejection of Rich’s characterization of the English language, holding on to this mode of expression for “those of us… who are just learning to claim language as a place where we make ourselves subject.” Simultaneously, hooks understood that English “is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues.”
Ellis’s and Rawls’s uses of language suggest a twinned desire to escape from and into words. Rawls’s willful typos and variable pronunciations mine meaning from abstract text. Ellis’s work inscribes his disfluency into the conventions of textual and aural space, while prompting us to listen for the potency of the pause. What appear to be glitches in Ellis’s and Rawls’s mode of interacting with text in fact expose the body’s enunciations as sites of linguistic evolution: Ellis asks how text can make room for the particularities of his voice, and Rawls tests how his voice can create or destroy meaning. In the fracture between written and spoken language, the body enters and finds novel ways of expressing itself, whether in grammatical subversions or the evasion of language altogether.
Alive with personified creatures and borrowed symbols, Astrid Terrazas’s canvases function like tarot cards, hazy assemblages of meanings that orbit an iconic core. She crowds her canvases with depictions of windows, tile work, stained glass, and even other paintings, fracturing the picture plane with overlapping visual fields. Perspective is inconstant; some monochrome backgrounds verge on the non-space of a diagram or book, while others capture the landscape in cross-section or recede through interconnected portals.
This visual fluidity carries into her paintings’ narratives. Though the works contain biographical and historical allusions, they are open to interpretation and point to diverse mythologies, drawing iconography from Aztec codices, zodiac signs, and Mexican folkloric traditions. Terrazas often uses animals to connote particular emotions, and botanical drawings to evoke growths both cancerous and benign. The bull, for example, is a recurring symbol for rage and anxiety. But Terrazas’s characterization remains sympathetic, framing the bull’s aggression as part of a cycle of antagonism and injury.
In auxin levels/tejiendo ojos (2020), Terrazas uses self-portraiture to reflect on her experience taking anxiety medication, depicting herself as both a seated girl and a fuming bull. Here, the muscular creature’s aggression is portrayed as an outward expression of inner turmoil. The artist extends this compassion to people as well, who sometimes appear with both a devil’s horns and an angel’s wings.
Astrid Terrazas, auxin levels/tejiendo ojos, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 64 by 58 inches.
Slipping into these fantastical worlds, a viewer might miss the social and political concerns that pervade Terrazas’s visions. The artist obliquely references her work with the Ridgewood Tenants’ Union in la casa del Diablo, SE RENTA (2021), which appeared in the group exhibition “Recovery” at P·P·O·W Gallery in New York this past fall. In the painting, a twisted pomegranate tree seems to siphon blood from a landscape of houses and fields through a single red vein. Lower in the composition, a devil marches along a spiral path toward a seed that threatens to turn into another parasitic growth. In the distance, ropy rivulets of blood flow to or from a graying stump, either feeding it or connecting it to something beyond the frame.
Cantando himnos en el jardín atrás de Walgreens (Singing Hymns in the Garden behind Walgreens, 2020)—the centerpiece of last summer’s six-person show “La Luz Proviene de Ahí” at Campeche in Mexico City—turns to self-affirmation and care as modes of resisting hate. In the right half of the canvas, sweating, grapelike faces dangle lugubriously on twined branches that sprout from a plot of soil labeled ire. To the left, a woman stands at the center of twelve cell-like shapes, each carrying its own icon: braided strands of hair, a flagellate, an IUD, or acupuncture needles. Impervious to the jealous green faces, the woman focuses on her own body’s needs and cycles.
Astrid Terrazas, A fruitful being, tú rana, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 44 by 69 inches.
Born in Juárez, where she lived until the age of seven, Terrazas also uses her paintings to record her family’s history—not only memories, traditions, and shared dreams, but also familial divides caused by hostile border policies between the United States and Mexico. Retrato familiar (2020) looks out from behind an iron window grille at a church in Guanajuato, suggesting the inaccessibility of her childhood sites. A fruitful being, tú rana (2020) captures the psychological tenor of Terrazas’s separation from her mother. The latter is depicted as a colossal cow, udders drooping from her belly, who unwittingly bears a child-size human figure (Terrazas herself) on her back. On the right-hand side of the canvas is a luminescent window whose blue tinge echoes the colors of the nearby Mexican Lotería tarot card for La Rana (“the frog”), alluding to the artist’s childhood nickname. The cow turns her gaze toward that azure portal, the world she imagines Terrazas occupies, without recognizing how close her child’s spirit remains.
Terrazas’s latest project—to be featured in her upcoming solo exhibition at P·P·O·W Gallery in September—casts geographic divisions in linguistic terms. The paintings operate like monumental games of telephone where proverbs, which are often culturally specific and nearly impossible to translate, acquire new meaning. The hens have come home to roost (2022) presents a pallid female figure being attacked by blue chickens in a more literal interpretation of the titular expression. But behind the violent scene hover anatomical diagrams of the muscular and vascular systems, skeleton, and brain, joined to other parts of the composition with painted braids of hair. The image transcends the recrimination latent in the original saying and suggests a phoenixlike link between life and death, as though the birds and woman mutually power, or are powered by, the fragmented body’s vital ebbs and flows.
Terrazas associates her new series with the incantations and spiritual remedies practiced by her curandero forebears. If she does not actually ascribe medicinal properties to the magic of acrylic on canvas, she sees painting as something that can model and manifest new social realities.
This article appears in the May 2022 issue, pp. 46–47.
The chain of command, rife with antipathies and alliances, was apparent in the staging alone. Three interrogators outfitted in suits, sunglasses, and badges were seated at three blue-lit tables aligned along a single axis, one placed higher on the raised backstage. Meanwhile, informally dressed and somehow unassuming, the Agent (played by mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher) sat alone at a table placed at a perpendicular angle. The opera, featuring these four voices and a recorded electronic orchestra, was set in motion by Butcher’s mellifluous delivery of a list of adjectives: “Warm, affectionate, intellectual . . .” Only when she uttered “nonsmoking S.W.M.” did it become clear that the sung lines modeled the format of a personal ad. She was soon interrupted by the First Interrogator, performed by musician Brian McCorkle, who ominously instructed the Agent to describe an unspecified event in her own words. “Use simple statements. . . . We may begin the observations at any time.”
So began Roulette’s recent production of Robert Ashley’s 1987 opera eL/Aficionado, in which three interrogators, presumably the Agent’s colleagues in “the service,” question her about her training in intelligence work and her early assignments. (The run of performances in late October coincided with the release of a CD imprint, recorded with the Roulette cast at Ashley’s studio in July.) Ashley, who died in 2014, was an unconventional composer whose works are animated by the belief that unedited speech is itself a form of music. The influence of that conviction was evident throughout this performance, where conversation was rendered as an antiphonal exchange, and Butcher’s vibrato emphasized the cautious tone of her descriptions.
Though Ashley composed the opera as a stand-alone, he later folded it into a series of works, the “Now Eleanor’s Idea” tetralogy (1985–94), each of which addresses a belief system at the root of American consciousness—in the case of eL/Aficionado, that of “corporate mysticism.” eL/Aficionado captures the fearful likeness of espionage and capitalist enterprise, not only through the business-casual attire and overstated hierarchies but also with hints at Cold War politics, specifically the United States’ business-motivated interventions in Latin America. Continuing this emphasis on commerce, the Agent’s sung report is interspersed with the language of print advertising, from personal ads to real estate listings, which, we are led to believe, constitute a code describing the people and places that the Agent observes. However, in keeping with mystical arcana, this code remains opaque to the audience—and, it turns out, to the characters as well.
View of “eL/Aficionado” at Roulette, 2021, picturing Kayleigh Butcher.
The opera’s narrative is Kafkaesque—labyrinthine and structured around ambiguously purposeful assignments undertaken “to satisfy a mysterious auditor.” Only ever given a partial portrait of the task at hand, the Agent’s perspective—like that of the capitalist subject—is fragmentary and alienated. Delivering ornamented lines that exhibit her vocal range, Butcher nonetheless performed with a sense of realism and sincerity that emerged in nervous adjustments of hair, pursing of lips, and shuffling of papers—the tics and twitches that one might expect of someone in a job interview or on trial. By contrast, her interrogators’ actions were stylized, their more recitative lines drawled with an ironic twang; at several junctures, the two interrogators seated on the same level (soprano Bonnie Lander and vocalist Paul Pinto) looked at each other, hands over microphones, and nodded simultaneously in a caricature of sinister resolve. At other moments, they performed almost like automatons—Lander’s voice in the penultimate scene fell into a monotone that alternated between drone and staccato.
Recurrent in the Agent’s statements about past events was the subject of memory. The Agent was persistently challenged to recall experiences, to take a second look. (“You teach yourself to do that. It is a form of cleaning up your memory. That last look. In case anyone should ask,” she explains.) The opera also looks back in another sense, containing references to earlier Ashley works such as the 1975 installation and performance Over the Telephone (explicitly described in eL/Aficionado’s sixth scene) and the 1968 opera The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity, which deal with remote surveillance and cross-examination, respectively. In this tracing and retracing of events, Ashley’s Agent (perhaps like Ashley himself) expresses a desire to perceive meaning in her experiences, though their significance repeatedly evades her. The surreal and inconclusive narrative of eL/Aficionado mirrors the unresolved nature of real life. As philosopher Lydia Goehr has observed, the true violence of crime shows lies not in gruesome images or suspense but in the pretense of resolution—that the crime is always solved, that justice prevails. This is perhaps the intent behind the opera’s rueful last line: “I learned long ago that there is never any news.”
Describing her durational choreography in a 2017 interview for the Walker Art Center, Maria Hassabi observes, “I often talk about the paradox of stillness in my performances, because stillness can’t really exist—we are breathing, and even if it’s imperceptible, it’s still a movement.” Hassabi’s words provided the title for the museum’s current exhibition on the performative turn in the visual arts and the representational turn in performance—two overlapping trends that suggest a blurring of the animate and inanimate. Encompassing performance, painting, sculpture, photography, and video, “The Paradox of Stillness” examines how the defining characteristics of performance—time, space, embodied presence, and audience—have influenced the traditional visual arts. Inversely, the exhibition also proposes that performance draws strategies from painting and sculpture, including stillness, compositional framing, and representational tropes. The cross-media slippage is clearest in the galleries dedicated to still lifes and tableaux vivants. One gallery collects memento mori by Paul Kos, Pope.L, and David Hammons that sweat, rot, and melt. Elsewhere, documented choreography by Robert Morris and a tapestry that doubles as the backdrop for a performance by Goshka Macuga make explicit reference to the paintings of Édouard Manet—the latter critically represents the female nude, extracting images of women from the photographs of Miroslav Tichý and placing them in a feminist confrontation with the grave of Karl Marx.
Haegue Yang, Sonic Intermediates – Triad Walker Trinity (Sonic Intermediate – Tripodal Venting Walker, Sonic Intermediate – Spinning Mask on Parasol Walker, Sonic Intermediate – Botanical Bi-Headed Creeping Walker), 2020, powder-coated steel frame, powder- coated mesh, powder-coated handles, ball bearing, casters, brass-plated bells, nickel-plated bells, black brass-plated bells, metal rings, plastic twine, turbine vents, artificial plants, multilayer foam, installed dimensions variable.
“The Paradox of Stillness” is accompanied by a shifting schedule of performances that take place throughout the exhibition galleries and museum grounds. While bound to encounter one or two of the fourteen performances during any given visit, a viewer will also find many works inactive—Anthea Hamilton’s tiled platform reduced to architecture, Haegue Yang’s scintillating sound sculptures rendered silent. A strange kinship arises between these vacant stages and other works that invite the audience in, such as Piero Manzoni’s Base magica–Scultura vivente (Magic Base–Living Sculpture), 1961, which cues the viewer to stand on a wooden pedestal and become a work of art. In fact, the exhibition does little to distinguish between performance, documentation, stage, and indexical mark, each suggesting a different measure of liveness. Film documentation of Robert Morris’s Site (1964) is not the same beast as Marina Abramović’s performance for video Luminosity (1997)—the former was intended to be secondary to a work, the latter an experience itself. And Michelangelo Pistoletto’s sculpturally framed table and chairs Quadro da pranzo (Oggetti in meno) (Lunch Painting [Minus Objects]), 1965, suggests an opening for activation more like that of Yves Klein’s or David Hammons’s body prints than Cindy Sherman’s self-portrait in profile to which it has been spatially and conceptually linked. But clarity of terms is not a priority for this exhibition, which desires to further muddy the boundaries between disciplines, charting cycles of influence that have moved from the visual arts to performance and back.
We can also understand this show as an exploration of how to integrate performance into the traditional thematic group exhibition. As noted in curator Vincenzo de Bellis’s catalogue essay, new institutional platforms for the commission and display of performance have proliferated during the past ten years. But how do you insert the frequently narrative and durational aspects of performance into the space of the museum? Performance in a theater setting almost contractually demands the respectful attention and time of a viewer; the museum gallery model is almost exactly the opposite, giving over autonomy to the visitor’s itinerant gaze. De Bellis’s approach takes after that of Tate Modern curator Catherine Wood, who has remarked that, since the museum has traditionally been a space of representation, one answer to the quandary of exhibiting performance is to fit it into that language—and to put it in direct spatial dialogue with existing collections dominated by painting and sculpture. Indeed, it has been argued that the origins of performance art trace more directly to these media than to theater or dance, due in part to the modernist antipathy to theatricality voiced most infamously in Michael Fried’s 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.” “The Paradox of Stillness” is pointed in its presentation of time-based performative works that deliberately respond to the visual arts. Ambitious as the show is, it also prompts us to consider modes of performance that do not fit comfortably into the white cube. I am reminded of choreographer Tere O’Connor’s comment about the Museum of Modern Art’s 2011 rendition of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982), for which the performance floor was coated in sand to leave an imprint of the dance: “That made me suicidal because how does dance depict? . . . Is it trying to make a symbol?” Not all performance is.