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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sense of impending doom, of something ominous about to happen, pervades this survey of Los Angeles–based artist Charles Gaines’s work made since the early 1990s. The mix of anxiousness and dread is best exemplified by one of the first works visitors encounter, Falling Rock (2000–23), one of two major installations by Gaines that has been re-created and updated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (on view through March 17). Upon entering the second-floor gallery, I heard a crash that caused me to jump, and made me wonder if another museumgoer had knocked an artwork over. But I came to find a clock tower inside which hangs a 65-pound piece of granite. Every 10 minutes or so, the rock falls toward a sheet of glass that it may or may not shatter (it smashes randomly). When it does, the shards remain, indicators of a violent previous shock and, when the glass is replaced, predictors of another.

The possibility of a crash in Falling Rock is a powerful opening salvo to this focused survey on one of today’s most important conceptual artists, who has long thought through the sinister ways in which the systems that structure contemporary society are too easily accepted. Moving through the other galleries, the prospect of another crash incites feelings of unease, seemingly intentionally so. Systems that become so ubiquitous and commonplace that they go unquestioned should make us uncomfortable.

On view upstairs is a work that similarly asks viewers to think about how our emotional response to violence and disaster can be manipulated. Equal parts prescient and contemplative, Airplanecrashclock, conceived in 1997 and shown a decade later as part of the main exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, presents an airplane suspended above a cityscape that amalgamates identifiable skyscrapers from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. At intervals, the plane begins its slow descent, whose speed increases as a soundtrack of people screaming (passengers, presumably) begins to play. Then a panel in the “street” flips and the crashing plane is replaced with its wreckage. Though the work could refer to any number of aerial tragedies, that it was devised four years before 9/11, and six before the subsequent US-led invasion of Iraq, makes for a sort of haunting prophecy.

Unlike the crashes (and quiet near-misses) of Falling Rock, the eventuality seemingly foretold in Airplanecrashclock is masked by the aural quality of the third floor, which plays host to several of Gaines’s “Manifestos,” works that translate famed public speeches into musical scores. Connecting the letters A through G to their respective musical notes (with H becoming B-flat and all remaining letters becoming rests and unplayed beats), these works again mask from what they truly derive. A musically beautiful score is actually a rousing political speech Malcolm X delivered in 1965 (an excerpt: “America is a society controlled primarily by racists and segregationists. This is a society whose government doesn’t hesitate to inflict the most brutal form of punishment and oppression upon dark skinned people all over the world”).

Another draws from Taiaiake Alfred’s 1999 book, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (sample: “Indigenous people today are seeking to transcend the history of pain and loss that began with the coming of Europeans into our world. In the past 500 years, our people have suffered murderous onslaughts of greed and disease”). The speeches play on four screens nearby, scrolling over the words like a karaoke monitor. That they play over each other adds to the symphony that oscillates between harmony and dissonance.

Gaines’s exploration of language is drawn out further in works like Sky Box I (2011), a black box installation in which four excerpts from dense academic prose hang on a wall. Over the course of some 10 minutes, the lighting in the room gradually changes, and the texts—writings on colonialism and efforts to create democracies in its wake by the likes of Frantz Fanon and Léopold Sédar Senghor—become unreadable as the room darkens. Once it turns pitch-black, the panels transform into glittering constellations, and as the room brightens, the texts become legible once again. In the related series titled “Submerged Text: Signifiers of Race” (1991–2023), Gaines takes pages from other texts and redacts everything except words that can signify race (both self-identifying terms and harmful stereotypes), pointing out how commonplace and suggestive those words are as a whole.

Gaines (b. 1944) is best known for his use of the grid as an organizing device in numerous series of works he created beginning in the 1970s. Recent uses of the form are on view here, including selections from “Faces 1: Identity Politics” (2018), featuring portraits of major thinkers across history from Aristotle to Karl Marx to bell hooks. With “Identity Politics,” Gaines looks at how the language we use to describe ourselves can ultimately fail us.

“Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1” (2022) employs photographs of pecan trees on the Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina, not far from where Gaines was born. The process in both series is similar: the image is set on a grid of colorful numbered pixels, and Gaines lays images one at a time over one another. The final iteration is so dense with colors and shapes that it becomes indistinct. With the trees, he encloses it in a plexiglass box on whose surface a photographic detail of the last layered tree is printed. In this series, he acknowledges something more menacing: though slavery may have ended more than 150 years ago, the reminders of its legacy are all around.

Gaines doesn’t propose easy answers to the heady questions he’s been asking for more than 50 years. The systems that structure our society aren’t easily deconstructed, for understanding or dismantling. They are—and have always been—purposely illegible. And stopping to consider them fully might reveal more about us than we expect. All we have to do then, Gaines seems to suggest, is gently scratch the surface to learn how much we don’t know. 

In his sculptures, Lonnie Holley utilizes terraneous materials—sand, stone, iron, the detritus buried beneath them—but remains steadily inspired by water. In “I Am a Part of the Wonder,” a song on his recent album Oh Me Oh My, Holley sings about “the wonders of / a drip of water / falling from the sky.” During a conversation before the opening of his Miami survey show “If You Really Knew,” Holley described to me visible dew on flowers, the palpable Florida humidity. “Every one of these plants is breathing,” he said. “Their roots are acquiring the dampness. A drop of water is a living thing.”

It matters that “If You Really Knew” opened in Miami, a city Holley called “one of the most moisty places in America.” One of the artist’s chief concerns—pollution of the planet’s waters—is tangible in the dampness of the place, a point he reiterated in a public conversation with exhibition curator Adeze Wilford: “I’m concerned about the pollution and waste—what’s in the rain once the precipitation draws it up, how that rain mixes with other waters,” Holley said. Where does waste go when the earth can no longer, as Holley describes, “bite and chew it”?

For Holley, the earth is a woman—he calls her Mother Universe—and he has spent the better part of his lifetime collecting and transforming into artworks that which she cannot digest. His sculptures of found materials are the heart of this 70-work exhibition, which traces the trajectory of Holley’s 40-plus-year career and aims to capture the breadth of his boundless multidisciplinary practice. Spray-painted canvases, quilt paintings, steel sculptures, and an ongoing screening of I Snuck Off the Slave Ship (a 2018 musical film codirected with Cyrus Moussavi) together encapsulate at least part of it. The show also includes an extensive selection of pieces by other Black artists from the South that Holley curated himself: Thornton Dial, Mary T. Smith, Hawkins Bolden, Joe Minter, and Miami native Purvis Young—all of whose works, like Holley’s, were part of the collection of William Arnett, the late collector and founder of Souls Grown Deep Foundation who launched Holley’s career in earnest. (The show serendipitously opened on what would have been Arnett’s 84th birthday).

Minter’s Queen (1998), an anthropomorphic figure with chains where her crown would be, takes on new life standing across from Holley’s In the Cocoon (2021), a wire sculpture shaped like a face in profile, a motif repeated throughout his oeuvre. Holley’s figure, like Minter’s, is draped in flotsam—nylon, rope, string, pieces of trees—and the assemblage appears to billow behind them. It might be hair, or a veil to be cast off. Reflecting on the rubble and household objects alchemized in his work and that of the artists shown alongside him, Holley said, “this is material revival: we all revived these materials, as if they were Christ himself. We were the humans who were concerned about them, who took them out of their deathly place.”

The exhibition begins with Holley’s sandstone sculptures, made in the 1980s (with “stone that the builder rejected,” he said, alluding to Psalm 118:22). Holley’s discovery of sandstone marked a turning point in his formative days in Jim Crow–era Birmingham, Alabama. After two of his sister’s children died in a fire, Holley used sandstone—found among the byproducts of a steel foundry he’d explored—to build tombstones for them. These monuments of love were his first artworks, and he made more, experimenting with shapes and materials to establish different kinds of consistency.

Arranged on shelves that allow for a close look, Holley’s early sculptures range in size from around 8 to 24 inches and, with his recurring facial profile motifs or shell-like whorls, resemble the stone sculptures of traditions including Mesoamerican statues, royal Egyptian reliquaries, and Mesopotamian reliefs. One diptych comprises sandstone slabs, displayed together like plaques (Untitled, 1980s). On the right, two figures lovingly embrace and look upon a child, under a bright sun with carved swirls that indicate its shine. On the left, a face emerges from a strata of small rectangles, a topography of Holley’s imagination.

The sandstones’ contours rhyme with those of Holley’s tall steel sculptures (all Untitled, 2019), which are stacked, like totems, with faces again in profile. They are softly curved and seem to breathe, and they appear again in his spray paint works and quilt paintings (made with acrylic, oil, spray paint, and gesso on quilt over wood). In The Communicators (Honoring Joe Minter), from 2021, the visages are rendered in black and gray, and seem to move, as if Holley has animated Minter’s face, abstractly, over time. In Drifting Souls (2021), a diptych of a mirrored image, the faces float obliquely toward a pink-blue cosmos, like butterflies. In Back to the Spirit (2021), they are overlaid upon each other, swirling like clouds.

These faces might be oneiric representations of the soul, visible shadows of the otherwise incorporeal human spirit. Holley speaks often about the violence inflicted upon the planet—specifically, the way it mirrors the racialized terror of hegemonic powers wreaked on vulnerable people, with cruelty born from the same place. But he speaks just as much about his hope for its future. Though titles like Which Tear Drop Will End the Violence? (2022) might serve as warnings, Holley’s images depict states of transcendence and harmony. They look like heaven, but their scenes are set right here, on earth.

Philip Smith has always seemed the oddball of the “Pictures” generation. In theory, he worked with all the right ingredients: a generic sign system of illustrations resembling those of instruction manuals, a way of painting that ironically highlights mark-making and the medium itself, and compositions that mimic diagrams, charts, and other pedagogical tools. And yet, the results always turned out a little too quirky. No matter what he tried—building up surfaces until the pigment felt like silly-putty and then gouging out generic forms, or scratching schematic imagery onto monochrome fields—every gesture toward depersonalization further accentuated an edge of weirdness. He’s like a folksy Matt Mullican, but harder to pin down.

The quirkiness, we finally came to learn, has a specific source. Smith published a memoir in 2008, Walking Through Walls, that tracks his father’s 1960s mutation from a successful interior designer to a psychic healer, astral traveler, ashram visitor, exorcist, and macrobiotic pioneer. Characters in direct contact with the realms of the dead and the extraterrestrial fill the book. As his father masters his powers, young Philip, too, becomes aware of his own, often waking up in the middle of the night hovering above his bed.

In the past couple of years, Smith has opened up his work to these astral and spiritual forces, which freed him from the need to clearly outline and organize his symbols. In his latest exhibition, at Primary in Miami, it’s clear that Smith is still working with a limited set of signs, even if it is increasingly beholden to that of occultist traditions. Untitled (Night Sky No. 2), 2022, features various outlines—spoked and swirly wheels, marked hands, medicinal plants, cellular models, and what could be divination and numerological charts—all held together by the double helix of a DNA molecule that snakes throughout the nearly eight-foot painting. Smith draws these outlines with oil pastel and then vigorously smears them. The process rhymes with his other strategies, such as grattage and inscription, but activates the paintings in a different way. The lines, embracing a vital irregularity, come alive, and the forms start to blend. Colors, spread in a range of densities, become complex structures of varying values. In Untitled (Night Sky No. 2), the blue Smith employs alludes, at once, to cyanotypes, architectural plans, and Delft pottery, while in the equally large and vibrant Untitled (Night Sky No. 1), the black background and smeared white outlines take us back to the constellated firmament suggested in its title. The ground in these new paintings, too, now picking up pigment that comes off the outlines, carries the prickly, all-over energy of static electricity.

Whatever it was that convinced Smith to align his pictorial practice to his everyday one of healing and taking dictation from the spirits, it has yielded interesting results—not because the paintings have gone New Agey, but because they have grown pictorially more complex and dynamic. They demand more of the viewer, in part because they offer so much information to digest and because the information is no longer presented in the schematic arrangements of earlier works, where an interpretation was already implied. The more Smith aligns his canvases to the stars, the more his compositions activate potentials that are anything but otherworldly. The potentials arise, instead, from a more interesting handling of material factors—pigments, surface, scale. Rather than suggesting portals to somewhere else, the paintings emanate an intense and vibrational here-and-nowness.

A photograph of lush, dense foliage encroaching on a dilapidated stone archway anchored “DADA Holdings,” Jamilah Sabur’s contemplative second exhibition at Nina Johnson in Miami. Printed on cotton rag paper, the image, titled Cockpit Country (British Army base 1728–1795), 2021, captures a former British military site in Jamaica. The work is presented as a diptych with two prints of the same image in rounded frames; the format recalls the Victorian stereoscope, an optical device that combined nearly identical photographs to render an apparently three-dimensional effect. By invoking the stereoscope, Sabur casts the viewer as an outsider, romantically gazing at or coolly assessing this locale.

“DADA Holdings” was presented in tandem with Bulk Pangaea (2021), Sabur’s video work commissioned for Prospect.5 in New Orleans. That project, which includes images of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country region (the aforementioned photo is a film still), was shot there and in Louisiana, and takes the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility complex as its starting point. Sited on a onetime sugar plantation owned by French slaveholder Antoine Michoud, the building was constructed in the 1940s for the wartime production of ships and then of cargo planes. Curious as to why it was still named for a figure like Michoud, Sabur investigated the current and historic activities at the site, which involved researching the materials used in building aircraft. This sparked the artist’s interest in bauxite, which is globally mined and refined to make aluminum. Sabur’s research prompted her to seek out bauxite sources, leading her to the mines in Jamaica, the country of her birth, from which ships carrying the stone arrive regularly in Louisiana ports. She saw parallels between the British colonization of Jamaica and the mining of bauxite there today; both forces have exploited the Jamaican landscape and employed similar trade routes, and national militaries led the construction of both the ruins in the photograph and the Michoud NASA facility.

Sabur often explores a country’s history by searching for the points where borders become blurry or meaningless. Bauxite mining and exportation have taken place in Jamaica for decades, to devastating effect. The extraction process involves deforestation and biodiversity reduction, as well as air, water, and soil pollution—the dust can settle in the back of the throat. The government’s push to move operations into Cockpit Country—an ecologically fragile region that includes the partially autonomous village of Accompong, a longtime Maroon community—is widely contested, due to the operation’s location in an officially protected area. (The current administration granted Noranda Bauxite Limited the license to mine in the area at the beginning of this year, after much deliberation; they also agreed to slash the total minable land from more than 20,000 acres to roughly 3,000 acres.)

Sabur relates this conflict to a larger history of land exploitation: one of the most striking works that was included in the show, In This Act (2021), features a diptych of the sharp stalagmites of Jamaica’s Windsor Great Cave, positioned on a canvas above a stenciled paragraph from the country’s 1947 Mining Act. Passed when the country was still a colony, the legislation outlines procedures for prospecting and mining in Jamaica, discussing its minerals as mere resources without acknowledging the industry’s ecological and social ramifications. The selection of this excerpt—which defines the term “to mine”—feels rueful, a reminder of how the verbiage of the State (or, in this case, the Crown) enables significant undertakings within its self-claimed borders. The text’s placement below an image of the cave—likely named for Lord Thomas Hickman-Windsor, the country’s second English civil governor—makes the cave seem unexpectedly vulnerable.

“DADA Holdings” also contained three of Sabur’s neon works, part of an ongoing project that pairs images with glowing texts. In the selected pieces, each title refers to a different body of water or the corporation named for it (Ust-Luga, Rio Tinto, Nord Stream, all 2021); the neon spelling out each title shares the frame with a cricket player’s shrouded face. The genderless cricketeer is a recurring figure in Sabur’s work; cricket is the world’s second-most-watched sport, and it’s especially loved in former British colonies, including Jamaica. Sabur often dons the uniform herself—adding a hood—in videos and short films, including Bulk Pangaea (in one scene, the player stands in a gravel landscape that suggests either a moon or a mine, alluding to the aluminum spaceship parts likely made with bauxite from Jamaica). In Ust-Luga, Rio Tinto, and Nord Stream, the cricketeer faces the genteel names belying controversial companies (just this past December, multiple local protests forced Rio Tinto to suspend its plan to mine lithium in Serbia). In other words, the uniformed cricketeer watches the way a powerful force might attempt to conceal its intentions and history with the gentle mask of a name; the player also watches the protracted, often invisible route a material might travel, from soil to building to outer space—as if it were being batted across a field in a game of strategy and points. For how long does a material travel before it becomes a product? At what moment does a product become more valuable than an ecosystem, or a life? To whom is it a game?

Peggy Levison Nolan’s first solo museum exhibition alludes to years’ worth of the artist’s drives with her youngest daughter, Stella. All of Nolan’s seven children populate her oeuvre, especially in this showcase at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, but Stella appears twice in the passenger seat of her mother’s car—once in an enlarged print where she holds up a tiny camera, and more tenderly in Untitled (Stella with Rose), c. 1990. Here, Stella is baby faced, irked, and evidently exhausted, lolling in her seat, one leg capriciously hanging out of the window—limbs get heavier in the Florida heat. Her brow is almost furrowed. Her T-shirt is stained. The window crank, blurred by the shallow depth of field, gleams in the sunlight. Meanwhile, the rose she’s holding is unwilted and fresh; we can almost imagine its sweet scent.

Nolan’s father gifted her a Nikon when Stella was three; she was immediately “hooked,” she’s said, and began making images of her growing family, the intricacies and intimacies of their lives in South Florida’s working-class neighborhoods. Her camera was always present; this show, “Blueprint for a Good Life,” spans her early work in black-and-white: her kids and their friends dance, make birthday cakes, and fall into each other’s arms, first mud-streaked, then restless, then body-pierced. With equal love for her medium and her children, Nolan reinforces their growth; before her lens, they blossom into young adults.

Speaking of blooms: In Stella with Rose, the preteen seems resigned to the ongoing presence of the camera. Visibly irritated, she remains participatory, even confrontational, staring directly at her mother. The space between Nolan’s documentary impulse and maternal care is singularly slippery here, and so most striking: how clearly the photographer in her saw the just-right light, the unexpected prop, and the brevity of the moment, while, as a mother, she might simply have said, wait, let’s take a photo with the flower.

In the 1970s, Carlos Alfonzo belonged to an underground community of young artists in Havana who pushed back against the Sovietization of Cuban culture by embracing new forms of expression that drew on Afro-Cuban religious imagery, premodern sign systems, and vernacular craft. This group—which included Juan Francisco Elso, José Bedia, and Ricardo Brey—gained recognition in exhibitions like the landmark “Volumen Uno” (1981) and the Havana Biennial (founded in 1984). By then, however, Alfonzo had departed from their ranks: he left the island in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, settling in Miami Beach and becoming an artist of exile rather than a member of the “1980s generation,” as the group was later known. In the United States, he developed a distinctive pictorial language and complex style.

“Carlos Alfonzo: Witnessing Perpetuity,” at LnS Gallery in Miami, gathered major works from every phase of the artist’s career, which was cut short by his death from AIDS-related complications in 1991, at age forty-one. The impressive exhibition began with rarely seen late-1970s works characterized by a schematic, quasi-primitivist figuration. Three ink drawings titled “Tribal Series” (1979) display abstract petroglyphic forms floating in vertical columns on white grounds. Another drawing from this period, Yo nunca te tuve bajo un árbol (I Never Had You Under a Tree, 1976), features simplified graphics of palm trees, moons, fish, and human figures packed tightly together to form a dense allover pattern.

Soon after immigrating to the US, Alfonzo began pursuing a more expressionistic approach and took up motifs that would recur throughout his mature work—such as tongues pierced with nails, eyes and smiling mouths elongated to look like tropical fruits, and spirals suggesting coiled phalluses. It took time, however, for him to find the optimal way to bring them together compositionally. Characterized by slashing, frenzied brushstrokes, his paintings from the early ’80s possess a new high-voltage energy, but the results are often muddy and confused. In Petty Joy (1984), repeating motifs are piled incoherently atop one another across an unstretched canvas tarp, the composition flattened by an excessive use of white.

In the second half of the 1980s, things appear to have clicked for Alfonzo. The large vertical painting Shift (1987) feels at once brooding and full of energy, with areas of dark earth tones and blacks punctuated by furiously applied pink, yellow, white, and green passages. The composition is organized around a large spiral surrounded by motifs including knife-like shapes, eyes, and teardrops. Employing imagery linked to Afro-Caribbean religious practices, the painting suggests an abstracted altar erected deep in the woods, covered in offerings.

During the final years of his life, while his health was deteriorating, Alfonzo produced the best works of his career: the stately, melancholic “Black Paintings” (1989–1991), two of which were included in the show. The paintings unveil themselves slowly: at first, the ten-foot-tall Home (1990) seems to depict only the white outline of an abstracted figure on a black ground that nearly overwhelms it. But the painting is brimming with partially hidden details, such as symbols roughly painted in subtly modulated shades of black. The work has a quasi-religious feel: its pictorial space is as tightly compressed as that of a medieval icon painting or an early illuminated manuscript, while its formal severity and architectural scale place it in the realm of altar backdrops or mausoleum doors. Made during the height of the AIDS crisis, the “Black Paintings” are not contemplative or peaceful. Instead, they express both an intense rage and a hope that flints in the dark, each element feeding on the other.

The centerpiece of Sanford Biggers’s 2015 solo show at David Castillo, timed to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, was the sculpture Laocoön (2015), a balloon figure of Bill Cosby’s comedic cartoon character Fat Albert lying facedown on the ground, attached to an air pump that caused it to expand and contract. The work incited heated debate among critics, some of whom saw it as a crass commentary on the killing of black men like Michael Brown and Eric Garner by police. “Quadri ed Angeli,” his most recent show at the gallery, was as formalist and quiet as the last one was politically topical and sensational, comprising seven new abstract works (all 2019) employing antique quilts.   

Two “paintings”—large quilts from which sections have been excised—hung on either side of the gallery. In Somethin’ Close to Nothin’, Biggers has removed two slender curving shapes from a quilt with a red, yellow, and blue lattice pattern, the forms matched by hazy ones painted in black on the quilt’s surface that suggest shadows. Twintriloquism, whose front is patterned with diamond-shaped forms in muted shades of green, yellow, and brown, has a pair of tall rectangular flaps cut from its center. The flaps spill onto the floor, opening windows onto the white wall on which the work hangs and revealing the bright red plaid pattern on the quilt’s reverse side.

The other works on view were sculptural. Biggers glued pieces of antique patchwork quilts onto birch plywood with gilded edges, producing geometric compositions that variously recall origami, Rubik’s Cubes, and fractals. Most of these works hung on the wall, projecting out into space. One of them, Polyglot, is composed of a series of five cubic forms that rhyme with the bright, multicolored tumbling block patterning of the quilt segments adorning it. The transformation of the patterning into three dimensions produces an enigmatic structure that evokes something otherworldly, like an alien starship. Similarly, Semaphore, the only freestanding work in the exhibition, looks like a shuttle ready to lift off into space. More than five feet tall, the vertical structure comprises primarily triangular forms that jut from the work like fins.

As Biggers has described, his quilt works, which he began making in 2012, allude to the—probably apocryphal—practice of using quilts to mark safe spaces along the Underground Railroad. Indeed, many of the works’ titles refer to forms of coded communication: semaphore is a system of visual signaling using flags, while ventriloquism is the act of disguising one’s voice by projecting it so it appears to come from a different source. Taking up the traditions of coding and patterning, Biggers functions as an interlocutor between past and present. Throughout the show, particularly in the sculptures, the artist demonstrated his interest in Afrofuturism, an aesthetic that imagines the future of Africa and the African diaspora by reassessing the past through science-fiction tropes. In the exhibition materials, he characterized Harriet Tubman as an “astronaut” who led slaves to freedom by “navigating the stars.” In contrast to the explicit symbolism that had yoked Laocoön to current events, the abstraction in the new works allows them to gesture to speculative futures.

This article appears under the title “Sanford Biggers” in the February 2020 issue, pp. 90–91.

WHY AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) now, fifty years after its founding on Chicago’s South Side? Three reasons, at least. One, in the past few years, political activism has intensified, and a new generation of scholars and curators is clamoring for a corrective retelling of historical narratives that would reveal the proper dimension and coherence of the cultural artifacts that accompanied liberation struggles. Two, it is important to show that the work of AfriCOBRA members didn’t finish with the dissolution of the Black Arts Movement in the mid-1970s or, more broadly, with the culmination of Black Power politics: the group’s insights into the use of art in popular struggles opened pathways that extended beyond the immediate context in which those insights arose. To this end, “AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People” stretches all the way to the present, including not only historical works but also more recent efforts by the group’s members. The third reason it is important to revisit AfriCOBRA today is that some people feel the movement never sufficiently responded to its feminist critics, a problem that certain turns in contemporary public discourse imbue with new urgency.

Emerging out of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC)—a Chicago collective of writers, artists, activists, and others that is best known for the seminal mural its members created, Wall of Respect (1967)—AfriCOBRA was founded in 1968 by Jeff Donaldson, Jae Jarell, Wadsworth Jarell, Barbara Jones-Hogu, and Gerald Williams. The group tasked itself with generating positive and consciousness-raising images that specifically addressed the concerns of black people and that responded to what the members saw as an insufficient representation of black life. The artists worked primarily in two-dimensional formats, employing bright hues (“coolade colors,” they called them) and bringing together human figures, patterns, and text in allover compositions that tended to undulate, mimicking musical waves. In fact, music and the celebration of musicians were quite central to AfriCOBRA work. Filling canvases and sheets of paper from edge to edge suggested the way music can fill a room. The paintings and prints were meant to feel continuous with the cultural expression that permeates everyday life, so that artworks wouldn’t be relegated to a rarefied realm barred to common folks.

Famously, feminists proposed that the positive images of the Black Arts Movement, in carrying out the tasks of consciousness-raising and black pride–building, obscured problematic gender relations within the black community. Organized by Jeffreen M. Hayes, the current show—which features the same lineup of artists as “Ten in Search of a Nation” (1970), an early exhibition of AfriCOBRA work at the Studio Museum in Harlem—attempts to address this criticism in myriad ways. It includes, for instance, many pieces that depict female figures, arguing that black women were indeed celebrated and valued all along. Angela Davis serves as a recurring motif. She can be seen in Wadsworth Jarrell’s now-iconic screen print Revolutionary (1972), as well as in Gerald Williams’s painting Angela Davis (1971). Napoleon Jones-Henderson’s tapestry Decade of the Woman (1989) holds the center of a wall. Alongside images of female figures, there are a number of works that focus on the family, including Wadsworth Jarrell’s painting Black Family (1968), which submerges a portrayal of a nuclear family in a complex weave of figure and ground, a tapestry of curving lines, chemical colors, and floating letters. The more one looks at the works that focus on the family, however, the more one questions the heteronormativity that clearly slipped into the progressive politics. The original criticism addressing the lack of representation of women might have been more broadly and pointedly about the way in which patriarchal relations were reproduced within liberation struggles, as perhaps seen in Carolyn Lawrence’s earnest silkscreen Uphold Your Men, Unify Your Families (1971).

The exhibition generously showcases Lawrence’s body of work and those of Barbara Jones-Hogu and Jae Jarrell—another means by which it addresses the criticism concerning the under-representation of women. Hayes made a particularly wise choice in her selection of Jarrell’s works. She showcases not only the fashion designs for which Jarrell is best known—innovative clothes that celebrate African-derived aesthetics and motifs—but also her painterly and sculptural efforts, revealing a figure who has explored historical and personal themes in compelling ways using a range of materials, particularly as she moved toward assemblage. 

Since AfriCOBRA’s halcyon days, the artists have transposed the use of intense colors, shallow pictorial spaces, and vibrant surfaces to new types of work. The historical pieces in the show can look a little dated when seen alongside the more recent ones, though there are of course some exceptions. In the collage Soweto/So We Too (1979), the late Jeff Donaldson invented an aesthetic out of patterning and pasting that still feels fresh today, while also reminding us of just how complex the use of text was in AfriCOBRA work overall and how internationalist the politics that informed the group’s project was. (Nelson Stevens’s screen print Uhuru, 1971, for instance, refers to the socialist pan-African Uhuru Movement.) But in general, the historical AfriCOBRA works feel moored to a particular era. By exploring these artists’ evolution beyond AfriCOBRA’s heyday, however, the show allows for a better understanding of the effects and potential of the movement’s innovations. The shieldlike painting-sculptures from Wadsworth Jarrell’s series “Yeah But, Can You Fight?” (1995) build on the painterly style that he began developing in the 1960s and connect it to the long tradition of black assemblage. Jones-Henderson’s sculpture Word Warrior-ess, June Jordan (2003), which memorializes African American poet June Jordan, also taps into this tradition, particularly the tendency to engage material elements bound to African spirituality, including symbolic fabrics, cowrie shells, and altar structures. Along similar lines, Jae Jarrell’s Victorian Beads and Glass Work Enscreened (2017) dangles a series of ropes, beaded necklaces, and glass pieces from what appears to be the skeleton of a room divider folded into a triangular shape. Here, again, rather than speak to consumerism’s decimation of collective experience or signal some clever but vacuous conceptual maneuver, found objects are used to build a symbolic and spiritual universe that can move parallel to the history of harrowing and triumphal episodes comprising the experience of African peoples in the Americas.

“AfriCOBRA: Messages to the People” revisits the large and rich, if neglected by the mainstream, world of 1960s black aesthetics and its legacy. It also appears at a time when the inability of contemporary cultural institutions to respond to the demands of a new activism and scholarship—as gaffe after gaffe evinces—has strengthened a desire to explore politicized cultural movements that rose from the ground up in the past. In this way, while looking back, the exhibition serves the needs of our turbulent moment.

Emphatically carnal and post-Surrealist, the semi-figurative paintings of Los Angeles–based artist Christina Quarles speak to intersectional desires and anxieties. Quarles, a queer-identifying African American artist with fair skin, channels her lived experiences, including those of mistaken racial identity, into dualities and displacements in erotically charged pictures in which fantasy reigns. In the thirteen works on view in “Baby, I Want Yew to Know All tha Folks I Am” (all 2017), bodies (usually female-of-center duos) were unrestrained by the laws of physics or the conventions of erotic coupledom. Rubbery limbs wound around each other and through physical barriers, suggesting the power of sensuality.

Quarles wields acrylic with a sense of performativity. She variously thins the paint out like watercolor, lays it down in thick impasto, or draws with it, notably in her figures’ precisely rendered fingers. Parts of her canvases remain bare, while other sections are heavily built up. Her impressive technique invites comparisons to modern masters. One critic recently likened her abstractions to those of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, though an alternative legacy can be traced through female painters’ inventions. Quarles dabbles in methods evoking those that radicalized the very notion of painting, like Helen Frankenthaler’s pouring technique and Lynda Benglis’s usage of acrylic paint as a sculptural medium. She also conjures the sci-fi tropes of proto-feminist Pop art. In bringing together these various innovations, Quarles imbues the couples she depicts with a sense of otherworldly possibility.

Previously, Quarles toyed with incorporating text into her paintings, but in the new works the imagery does the conceptual lifting on its own. In Yer tha Sun in My Mourning Babe, a woman whose facial expression mimics that of the figure in Munch’s Scream lounges on a green field, with a gray-tinged ghoul wrapped around her back. The figures are bisected by a stylized, speckled plane that suggests a form of visual static that neither seems to notice. In Flopped Over n’ Bent into Two, a hovering floral-patterned plank (perhaps a table or ironing board) slices through a pastel-colored figure with impossibly wavy limbs.

While Quarles’s figures are often engaged in erotic acts, the pleasure in which they luxuriate is tinged with the possibility of pain. In A Shadow of Whut I Once Was, two female subjects embrace on a checkerboard floor that swallows the lower one whole. Doubled Down illustrates a similar entanglement. Here, a standing, naked woman appears to be pulled down to the depths of hell by a lover who is submerged in a razor-thin, liquidlike plane composed of oil-slick black, purple, and green smears. In the even more macabre Pull on Thru tha Night, two subjects are framed by a starry sky. One of them, bent at the waist, appears to be carrying a lumpy, hastily articulated body on its back while itself being supported by the other figure, who sits cross-legged, her breast leaking a droplet of blood.

Just a year out of graduate school, Quarles has attracted attention for her fresh take on historical painterly traditions. But it is her unflinching depictions of intertwined queer sensuality and female abjection that distinguish her as a painter of our moment, in which a gulf still separates female reality from feminist ideals.