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

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

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

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

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

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

A golem is a figure in Jewish folklore usually made of clay, mud, or dust; a vessel for a word or idea, a metaphor come to life. Golems figure throughout “Something Terrible Has Happened (Corpus Fluxus),” a solo exhibition by artist, writer, and activist Avram Finkelstein at Smack Mellon—shockingly, his first in New York City. A founding member of various groups behind iconic AIDS actions and political posters, including ACT UP, Silence=Death, and Gran Fury, Finkelstein turns in this new work to something much more personal.

Large-scale drawings and digital prints hang on the walls, the ceiling, and wheeled metal structures that double as weight-bearing mobility devices for Finkelstein in his studio. The works betray a body in flux, evident in the changing quality of Finkelstein’s mark-making as it corresponds to his loss of mobility. These marks capture the lived experience not of a singular diagnosis, but instead of the intersecting biological, temporal, and social forces through which bodies become disobedient, acting out beyond our control and no longer as wholly our own.

Expressive swirling marks on flag cloth make up Golem (BRAF V600E mutation), 2024, wherein a giant orange and red figure emerges from a black shadowy space. Titled for a genetic mutation in the thyroid cancer that Finkelstein has—a mutation that makes treatment difficult—it is a self-portrait based on cell microscopy imagery. Monumental yet diaphanous, the work towers over the viewer, swaying in response to bodies that displace air as they move about the space. This performative dimension is a deliberate strategy of accessibility: in an essay accompanying the exhibition, Finkelstein describes the gallery space as an “experiential dancehall,” wherein “activation of the space is a more effective way of creating access,” extending beyond visual and cognitive experiences.

This dancehall dimension manifests throughout the show. Works such as Black Golem (after Bergman), 2024, use both optical and psychic reflection. On one face of this double-sided composition, hung on a mobile metal frame, we see a silhouetted figure drawn on insulated brown paper Amazon grocery delivery bags. The image is drawn from memories of watching Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal as a too-young child and becoming fixated on the film’s imagery of Death playing chess. On the other side, the reflective foil acts as a funhouse mirror. Finkelstein describes the work as a “portrait of pain—something about disability we cannot see—and what it means to be in pain all the time.” The work asks: What is required to recognize the pain of others? What kinds of identifications and actions does this recognition prompt?

Questions about the body—and what it is possible to feel between bodies—open poignantly onto relation, as shown in another double-sided composition Golem (Don’s bath), 2024. We see an image based on the first photograph Finkelstein ever took of his lover Don on the recto, with Don’s face, body, and raised hands rendered in fine line and expressive detail. On the verso appears a ghost, an abstracted body created from thick gesso strokes. The work’s complement, Golem (Go away), 2024, draws imagery from one of the last photographs Finkelstein took of Don, the first partner he lost to AIDS in 1984. Here, the figure’s outstretched hand is raised in a gesture of cover or refusal.

Finkelstein’s golems prompt us to see the body as far more than the sum of our parts. We emerge in cosmic, historical, erotic, traumatic, and political relation to one another. Finkelstein learned this early on: when he was 15 years old, he tried to come out, and this led to court-ordered therapy. In sessions, he was shown images and asked to describe them. When asked what he saw in an image of a man and woman peering through a darkened doorway—an image he re-creates from memory in Thematic Apperception Test, (something terrible has happened), 2022—Finkelstein replied, “something terrible has happened.” His brother later scolded him, “you should’ve said, ‘the loving parents are checking in on their children as they sleep.’”

But his description was no misrecognition. He was accurately identifying his inhospitable, pre-Stonewall world—a world that, through decades of activist practice, he undeniably changed. Almost 60 years later, turning this time inward, Finkelstein once again asks us to consider how the body can be a locus to remake the world.

When Patrick Bringley was 25, his older brother, a brilliant doctoral student, died from cancer. Reeling from the loss, Bringley decided to put his burgeoning career at the New Yorker on hold. A visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his mother offered an unexpected reprieve: lingering in front of paintings, he found solace in simply being allowed to “dwell in silence.”

The experience planted a seed. Not long after, he left his job at the august magazine and accepted a position as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he would spend the next ten years in quiet observation and contemplation, immersing himself in the rhythms of the 2.5-million-square-foot temple.

This period of grief and soul-searching is chronicled in Bringley’s 2023 memoir, All the Beauty in the World. Like Jenny Odell’s bestselling How to Do Nothing, Bringley’s book advances a subtle argument for stepping out of the relentless churn of productivity. Odell frames this as a political act—an assertion of presence in a world that demands constant striving—while Bringley treats contemplation as a kind of devotion, an act of quiet reverence before great works of art. The book urges museumgoers to resist the impulse to rush through galleries and instead embrace a slower way of seeing. His story, praised by critics like Mary Jo Murphy of the Washington Post for its “refreshing sincerity and absence of edginess,” has now been brought to life in a one-man stage adaptation of the same name, starring the author.

Where his book allowed Bringley to parcel out his thoughts in long leisurely paragraphs, the 80-minute play, which runs through May 18, condenses key points. After recounting his decision to take the Met job—it created a “loophole by which I could drop out of the forward-marching world”—Bringley assumes the position of a museum guard: hands folded behind his back, feet angled at thirty degrees, ankles crossed. He regales us with the minutiae of his profession: each guard is allotted an $80 annual “hose allowance” for replacement socks; he and his colleagues take cat naps on locker room benches and use ties for eye masks, which he demonstrates. As part of the “third platoon” crew, he works two 12-hour days and two 8-hour days, and quickly learns that wood floors are much gentler on the soles than marble ones. He estimates that sixty percent of his peers are foreign born, and that many have taken similarly circuitous paths to the institution’s halls. “I know guards who have farmed, framed houses, driven cabs, flown airliners, walked a beat as a cop, reported a beat for a newspaper, taught kindergarten, commanded a frigate in the Bay of Bengal,” he tells us.

More than 180 artworks are mentioned in Bringley’s book, but only about a dozen are projected upon the three large frames on the stage of the DR2 Theatre. Among these are Titian’s portrait of a young man, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Adoration of the Magi. Bringley displays an unhurried attention to the splendor of paintings, statues, and ancient artifacts telling us of their provenance and historical significance. Titian’s picture of a male youth is “like a reflection on a sunlit pond.” Bruegel’s famous 1565 painting marked a turning point in Western art as one of the earliest paintings wherein the landscape itself takes center stage. To gaze at these projected paintings is to feel time gather rather than pass—to sense not a linear progression but a charged, expansive present.

Soon after taking up his post, as Bringley put it in his memoir, he “surrendered to the turtleish movement of a watchman’s time. I can’t fill it, or kill it, or fritter it into smaller bits. What might be excruciating if suffered for an hour or two is oddly easy to bear in large doses.” As the images wink in and out of the frames, a dong sounds, like something you might hear in a sound bath class, summoning you into a ring of meditation.

The sparse the set (designed by Dominic Dromgoole) befits the show’s intimate form but occasionally acquires the slickness of a TED Talk. Bringley’s background in event planning at The New Yorker is evident throughout in his polished delivery: his measured cadence, his direct engagement with the audience, and his rote gesturing lend the production a well-rehearsed, if seminar-like quality (an earlier version of the play was presented at the Charleston Literary Festival last year).

When he asks the audience for volunteers who might play a few of the commonly identified “species” of museum visitors (sightseer, dinosaur hunter, art lover), the subsequent script leans more stale than spontaneous. The chosen playgoers are handed slips of papers and asked to read aloud inane questions like “Where’s the bathroom?” or “Does the Met have the Mona Lisa?,” disrupting the flow of the monologue and contributing little to the proceedings. Why not risk a moment or two of real spontaneity, even if it’s only to invite the spectators to scribble down questions for Bringley as they enter the theatre?

Bringley has dedicated the show to his mother, a former Chicago theatre actress. Unfortunately, he did not inherit the charisma of a natural thespian that Gavin Creel did. Creel successfully powered a Met-inspired solo piece the same year Bringley’s memoir was published. A magnetic Broadway actor who passed away last year, Creel was commissioned by the Met to create a performance responding to some works in the museum’s vast holdings. The result was a buoyant song cycle titled Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice (you can watch an early iteration online) that makes for a stark contrast with All the Beauty in the World: Creel is a bounding ball of energy while Bringley plays things close to the vest.

Yet both take an unfussy delight in art. Creel’s advice to harried art appreciators—“Look. And breathe. And wait.”—echoes the museum guard’s counsel to take things slowly. If Bringley’s show doesn’t ultimately evoke the kinds of epiphanies that are a hallmark of the most cherished works of art he lauds, it nonetheless offers quieter pleasures. I mean it as a compliment to its star when I urge you to walk, not run, to see it.

To paint a glamorous woman, naked but for a loosely hung fur coat and a long drape of pearls, and have her not be the focal point of an image is just one of the striking aspects of Walton Ford’s new series of paintings, on view at Gagosian in New York through April 19. Based on the artist’s research into the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the paintings are far more interested in the experience of her feline companions: two dazzling cheetahs she reportedly paraded along the canals of Venice. One of the cats fiercely occupies the center of La levata del sole (2025), backlit by the rising sun. The other is poised in the midground, a pigeon snapped in its maw. Standing off to the side with a defiant pose and provocative gaze, Casati is alluring but hardly the painting’s most compelling feature.

Ford is well-known for his work appropriating—and subverting—the conventions of natural history illustrations. He has perfected an aesthetic of animal liveliness, one that trades in the genteel authority of 18th- and 19th-century science but smuggles in some contemporary humor and critique. Prints done in the style of famed ornithologist John James Audubon, for example, appear to replicate Audubon’s life-sized depictions of American birds. But Ford’s versions are often riven with barely suppressed psychological tension, channeling the violence behind Audubon’s representations. Audubon both loved his birds, rendering them with ardent vivacity, and ultimately killed them in pursuit of his image.

Ford has found in the animal world a rich source of narrative ironies, with animals both mirroring human dramas and revealing the animality of human society. In these new works, he brings a human actor into the scene in more explicit ways. Casati was a Milanese heiress living large in early 20th-century Venice; she became involved with the Futurists and sought to make her life a work of art. In addition to the cheetahs, she allegedly wore snakes as necklaces and cultivated a menagerie of lion cubs, panthers, monkeys, peacocks, and other exotic species. Her wild parties and exuberant lifestyle, combined with the eternal beauty of Venice, provide captivating content for Ford’s images.

The paintings are themselves exquisite objects. Ford’s dexterity with watercolor balances trompe-l’oeil illusionism, particularly in the cheetah’s mesmerizing coats, with painterly abandon, as in the pooling reflections on the surface of the Grand Canal. Ford, the gallery reports, initially intended to make just one painting on the subject: the golden, glowing, La levata del sole (2025). But he was so taken with the result that he carried on, and one of the most rewarding parts of the show is seeing the characters develop across the series. Each work takes an Italian title, often referring to literature published by Casati’s lover, the military officer and decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Decadence, a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the 19th century and was popular in Casati’s time, dwelled in hedonism as an antidote to bourgeois mores, and the decadence here is truly ravishing. The cheetahs’ jeweled collars sparkle, the Marchesa’s lithe body shimmers in the moonlight. And then, like any good thing, there starts to be too much of it. The golden glow of La levata del sole becomes the sickly-sweet, bubble-gum pink of La Marchesa (2024). The latter work depicts the aftermath of a fête. Revelers in the background drape themselves among ruins, their bodies seemingly turned to stone. There may be some vanitas in this image, with scattered carnival masks and overturned wine jugs nodding at symbolic resonance. But the cheetahs, licking the leavings clean, seem unbothered by any metaphoric significance.

Across the paintings, it’s the animals who take the cake. In one of the most enigmatic works in the series, Casati—wrapped in a magnificent python—stands in the arched opening to a derelict alleyway while her companions scrounge discarded kitchen scraps. By the 1930s, Casati had lost her fortune, but Ford imagines a world in which she kept the cheetahs. Both have jewel-studded collars and diamond-encrusted leashes, though no one deigns to hold them. Titled Desiderio infinito (2025), the work throbs with desire: Casati’s, the cheetahs’, and our own, for these delicious paintings.

Every party should have Warhol films projected. That’s my conclusion after revisiting some of them for hours at the tiny but warm New York Museum of Sex show “Looking at Andy Looking.” Everyone should fall asleep to Sleep (1964). Every film frame can, if hung over a bed, lull you. The filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami once said that he preferred movies that make you sleep—that are “kind enough to allow you a nice nap”—especially against those loud, violence-stuffed movies that take you “hostage.” Well, Warhol’s films are just as kind. In response to the endless, frightening sixties business of assassination, imperial war, and the money drive, Warhol films offered up nice naps.

Now, if you’re having sex, it probably wouldn’t be so nice to nap. There’s a time and place for everything, including sleep. Sleeping during sex, though! During such an act of busy thinking and unthinking, lost and gained positions? Enter Warhol. He saw, cagily and presciently, the flattening of bodies onto screens. Andy turned the camera on a sleeping lover—John Giorno—let him sleep, walked out of the room, walked back in, panned across the body, and filed it away among a proliferating archive. All this sleeping-fucking-eating: this is how someone exists in the raw at this time. Tender and melancholic. Giorno sleeps, but what is he dreaming? Warhol’s art stops at the flesh, just as we cannot penetrate the unconscious of our lovers.

Blow Job (1963), described by the wall text as “arguably Andy Warhol’s most perfect film,” is here, too: 45 minutes of a man making faces of pleasure as something is happening down there. It may or may not depict the titular act—and this inexplicitness was the cause of an infamous near-riot at Columbia University in 1964, when Warhol screened the film there to irony-deficient, horny young rabble. Sleep, too, is here: five hours of Warhol’s Giorno sleeping, with chest, ass, pubes, and unconscious head all neatly cataloged. Blow Job, Sleep, Empire: with help from the Jonas Mekas propaganda wheel, these shifted the definition of beauty in the popular US lexicon: a filmed beauty, a gay beauty, a beauty of an intimate boredom.

Yet the real revelation of the Museum of Sex show is Three (1964), a raucous, gentle silent film that would make Jim Jarmusch weep in ecstasy. The plot is simple: on a work break from, presumably, building Andy’s Brillo Boxes, Gerard Malanga heads to the Factory toilet, where he goes down on Ondine’s heroically flaccid cock, as a third, Walter Dainwood (Ondine’s friend who looks a lot like Andy), makes contorted Jim-from-The-Office faces to the camera, chews an apple, and reads William Carlos Williams’s Paterson. It’s a smegma-caked, magnificently alive slice of 1960s life. Art, industry, sex, money, bound together with more casual lyrical grace than anything we saw in the overhyped Anora of last year. Three was not publicly disseminated during Warhol’s lifetime, shown only among his tight circle of friends: the equivalent of nudes among the homies.

Is it worth the $36 ticket? Maybe, if you also want to pay a visit to the carnival siren whose wheel-shaped clitoris you have to swirl to get a love potion elsewhere in the Museum of Sex. Maybe, too, if you love carnivals and aren’t claustrophobic, and want to ride down the tight asshole and come out the vagina of a fat-bottomed girl-qua-slide. Against this not-uncharming kitsch, Warhol exists in glassy-eyed chic opposition.

The lapsed modernists who burn sage to Annunciation and Abstraction crow incessantly about Andy ending art. I don’t think he did. He just coolly encapsulated an epoch where capitalism, falsely, was perceived as the One True God, the End of It All, the comfortable last grave. He saw the camera as a machine, saw that it does not care about you, saw that pictures signify little. Warhol, that soup-inhaling enthusiast of Marilyn and Mao, reveals those rules. A blow job is not what you immediately pictured, so on-the-nose; instead, it is a face in bored mock-ecstasy, an apple-eating joker. In other words, levity.

A confession: before Christine Sun Kim’s survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I had her work all wrong. In my head, her oeuvre could be neatly divided into two camps, with the early work being more formally innovative, the later stuff more politically important. Those early pieces emphasized Kim’s nuanced understanding of sound, owing to the careful auditory attention that her Deafness demands. After that, there were the drawings, which confronted ableism assertively—and humorously—often using text to communicate directly. 

Her Whitney show offers a perfect mix of the two sensibilities. It was the drawings that made her famous, which was proof, in my mind, of the ways disabled people are continually burdened with explaining themselves. In black charcoal on white paper, Kim translated various ASL signs into graphics that emphasized the language’s complexity. Too Much Future (2017), a drawing that also appeared as a billboard outside the Whitney, diagrammed the sign for “future,” typically illustrated with a thin line charting a hand’s arced movements. By thickening the line until it filled most of the image, she evoked a grammar unfamiliar to most English speakers, one equipped to convey the sense of looming doom felt during Trump’s first term. Here, ASL is both medium and message.

After the ASL notations, she began making pie charts and degree diagrams explaining the barriers and joys of Deaf life with considerable sass: a slice of the Why My Hearing Partner Signs (2019) pie, for example, is labeled with a Spice Girls lyric: “if you wanna be my lover…”. At the Whitney opening, visitors next to me oohed and aahed in front of these pie charts, remarking that they’d never thought about the experiences described before. The drawings offer moments of recognition for those who can relate, too.

At first, I liked Kim’s sound-related pieces more as artworks. The Grid of Prefixed Acousmatics(2017) manages to cement complicated ideas from sound studies into ceramic sculptures, and Close Readings (2015) is a four-channel video captioned by Deaf friends, who notate scenes from famed films about the voice, like The Little Mermaid. Drawn from memory, lip reading, or context clues, the results range from hilarious to scathing. 

Yet it was the drawings that had the biggest impact; the earliest here is from 2012. Shortly after her big billboards for the High Line and For Freedoms went up, and once her chart drawings debuted in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, more people than ever, it seemed, became alert to disabled experiences and access needs—even if the ooh and aah-type comments that followed this awareness still sometimes came off as patronizing. Proof that Kim herself deserves some credit for this major cultural tide shift can be seen in her 2020 invitation from the Super Bowl to sign the National Anthem. (The resulting affair was two steps forward, one step back: the camera chopped her contribution, making the song impossible to follow for Deaf viewers.) The shift is evident, too, for those who caught Lauren Ridloff in an early Kim performance shown here, Face Opera II (2013), and recognized that the Deaf actress has now infiltrated the mainstream, making appearances in acclaimed TV shows and movies ranging from The Walking Dead to Sound of Metal. 

I wrongly thought that Kim’s drawings might be better as politics than art—which has always been fine for me. It seemed worth sacrificing rarified references in order to actually change the world.

But seeing her Whitney show, I realized how much it matters that the drawings are art, actually. The black and white graphics could have been made on a computer, printed on T-shirts, and wheatpasted in cities all over the globe, à la Gran Fury’s Silence=Death campaign. But instead, Kim’s drawings are handmade. The charcoal is smudged, some mistakes are crossed out, and the text is obviously handwritten. Her daughter even scribbled an occasional contribution.

Kim consistently borrows techniques from the twentieth century avant-garde: Fluxus-style scores, Happening-style performances. These works involved direct communication, even one-liners, too; they just felt more poetic before the age of online content.

More than these traces of the human hand and references to art history, there is her poignant mode of address. Kim deftly implicates her audience without alienating them (more of that in the world, please). But above all, it matters that these drawings are art because she’s showing that Deafness engenders so much more than different ways to communicate. Deafness is a culture unto itself, hence the capital “D.”

As evidence, the gallery on the lobby level, my favorite section of this show, includes drawings diagramming ASL phrases, explaining that “sorry not sorry” is expressed as “sorry zero,” and that “very interesting” is signed “258”—reminders that grammar can be structured by traditions and even inside jokes. There’s also the kinetic sculpture ATTENTION (2022), a collaboration between Kim and her husband, Thomas Mader, which features a pair of inflatable arms that offer a burst of red in a show that’s almost entirely black-and-white. The limbs resemble those of the inflatable tube men seen outside car washes. They rub a large rock as they sign, the rock’s eroded surface resembling those butt prints left in monasteries where Buddhist monks meditated for thousands of years. 

Another confession: Kim is my friend, and I usually don’t review friends’ shows. But I was growing tired of the ways disabled artists get written about so delicately, as if it’s amazing they’ve made anything museum-worthy at all. It feels like we might be on the cusp of being able to have conversations that go beyond the basic explaining of our lives. Kim’s Whitney survey is the first major museum show to allow an artist confronting disability to be as expansive as she is, and I didn’t want anyone to miss that. The stakes are too high.

Did you know that Kafka wrote kind letters to a girl who lost her doll in the park—as the doll? And that this was meant to help her slowly get over the loss of said doll?

I, for one, did not. It’s a story mentioned briefly on a wall text at the Morgan Library’s new exhibition in lovely tribute to Franz Kafka, on view through April 13. And reader, it knocked me out. Internet sleuths, of course, don’t believe it actually happened. Dora Diamant, Kafka’s partner for the last year of his baroquely sad life, claimed it did, and said she saw the strange, pathetic comedy unfold before her own eyes.

One day, in Berlin, the lovers came upon a despondent girl from their neighborhood (Steiglitz), weeping in a park. When pressed, the girl said that she had lost her doll. Diamant and Kafka combed the park for it to no avail. Then, that very night, Kafka apparently set to work on a special project: a brief literary correspondence to the girl, in which he took on the guise of the doll, writing from afar and explaining that it, the doll, had many special adventures it had to attend to. As Diamant recalled in the early 1950s to Marthe Robert, a French translator of Kafka, Kafka feverishly wrote a veritable novella to the girl over the span of about three weeks, narrating the doll’s life from the first person: it grew up, it went to school, it met people.

Knowing the game had to end, however, drove Kafka miserable (sounds like our Franz); therefore, in perhaps the only stark happy ending in the Kafka oeuvre, he married the doll off, with pomp and dress and cakes galore, concluding with the doll’s gentle plea to the girl: “You yourself will understand, we must give up seeing each other.”

Although the show spans Kafka’s career, the doll letters do not appear anywhere among the papers on display at the Morgan. They are not among the opening pages of the manuscript for his most famous tale, The Metamorphosis (1915)—that biography of the vermin formerly known as Gregor Samsa, also composed at a feverish clip. They’re not next to the final page of The Castle (1926), which infamously breaks off mid-sentence. Nor are they next to the curators’ displays explaining Kafka’s tortured relationship to many fathers: the father of Judaism; the father of good health; and the literal big father, Mr. Hermann Kafka, who made so much noise in the family apartment that it drove Franz into fits of rage—which only fueled the desperation we see on display so gloriously in Franz’s diaries, his letters to absent lovers and booming fathers, and his drawings of spindly emaciated sons being berated by paternal figures.

Who knows if the doll letters still exist? Who cares? I love that the Morgan exhibition, chronologically arranged, ends on the idea of the doll letters. What we do see, in a section on Kafka’s “afterlife,” or the works that he inspired, are proofs of a lovely-seeming children’s book inspired by the doll letters, Kafka and the Doll (2021), written by Larissa Theule and illustrated by Rebecca Green. Fictional or not, the Kafka-doll story busts open the Kafka cliché. (If I hear that stupid, say-nothing adjective “Kafkaesque” one more time…) Yeah, sure, his life was sad: sanatoriums, paranoia, unfinished novels, early death. But it takes someone intimate with tragedy to write good comedy: the apprenticeship of graveness can produce brief pockets of levity.

I, for one, believe those doll letters exist. I will choose to believe a man like Kafka could and would go out of his way to write something as moving as those letters, to a girl who was about to face a loss, the first of many losses. And our Franz knew loss all too deeply. I believe he knew, like Old Man Freud, the power of transference. You don’t need physical proof to register the weight of care; in fact, you might go mad in search of it. You need only a casual faith in something beyond the self.

In the pantheon of the early 20th-century avant-garde, Orphism—the subject of a sweeping but diffuse survey at the Guggenheim Museum—is rare among isms in that it remains relatively understudied and misapprehended, at least in comparison to modernist cognates like Futurism, Vorticism, and Cubism. The Cubists’ kaleidoscopic unmooring of geometry from perspectival propriety inspired Orphism’s drive toward “pure painting”—pictorial form and color liberated from figurative duties—but, confusingly enough, the movement’s name is bound up with literary allusion. Coined in 1912 by French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, it evokes Orpheus, the mythical Greek prophet and musician. For Apollinaire, music suggested a new model for modern painting distilled to its purest potential state, unbeholden to narrative exposition.

Though developed almost exclusively in Paris, Orphism involved artists of wide-ranging extraction and nationality, and the Orphic painters’ concern for “pure” form and color resonated with other developments in nonobjective painting from Germany to Italy to the United States. “Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” goes a long way in contextualizing some of those parallels and intersections. Enlivened by an impressive array of loans, the exhibition sets into relief Orphism’s specific aesthetic achievements as well as its amorphous taxonomy.

As the wall text notes, the painters most closely affiliated with Orphism—Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Francis Picabia, and František Kupka—never adapted Apollinaire’s term of designation as their own. They produced no manifesto or writing in its name, and the Delaunays, for their part, used the term “simultanism” to describe their work. But formal ambitions and optical effects undeniably united a few artists of disparate origins and diverging aesthetic trajectories, even if briefly.

A gallery tucked within the first curl of the Guggenheim’s ramp sets four core artists’ interrelated efforts into incandescent relief via one large-scale canvas each, produced in their most respectively “orphic” guise. Though the residues of representation persist in some of the paintings—the pulsing heavenly bodies of Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (1913), for example, or the currents rippling from the center of Kupka’s Localization of Graphic Motifs (1912–13)—their imagery is chiefly concerned with rhythm and texture. Empirical reality does not dictate the hallucinatory swirl of color or gyration of form in works that appear derived instead from celestial inspiration or interior visions.

Just around the corner, Wassily Kandinsky’s Improvisation 28 (1912) reminds viewers of the extent to which musical composition informed certain pictorial experiments during these years (while also registering the explicit embrace of Robert Delaunay’s work by the Munich-based Blaue Reiter group formed around Kandinsky). Simultaneity in music substitutes a polyphony of chords instead of a linear succession—the kind of effect pursued in many of the works on display. As art historian Nell Andrew writes in the exhibition catalog, the indissoluble coupling of music and dance proved influential in Orphism’s pictorial tendencies (much in the way that figure and ground often prove indistinguishable in Orphic imagery).

The principal ambitions of these painters were optical rather than intellectual. The Delaunays paid close attention to post-Impressionist innovations by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, as well as the scientific color theories of French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. But the “contrasts” out of which they constructed their images were not merely ocular or chromatic. Orphic imagery responded affectively to the conditions of modern life in the metropolis and its increasingly cinematic, commercial, and mechanized sights and sounds.

Sonia Delaunay’s Electric Prisms (1913), with its titular nod to advances in electricity still relatively new at the time, underscores the decidedly urban tenor of Orphic painting in this regard. Poets like Apollinaire and the Futurists incorporated similar phenomena into their writing, both thematically and typographically, and Sonia collaborated in the same vein with Blaise Cendrars, another modernist poet resident in Paris at the time. Punctuated by a stylized Eiffel Tower, her luminous watercolor abstractions unfurl alongside (and bleed into) verse by Cendrars, whose “Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France”—hanging in a vertical display in one of the Guggenheim’s small bays—explores transcontinental train travel during the first Russian Revolution, in 1905.

The Eiffel Tower recurs as a sign of urban life in various paintings by Robert Delaunay, where it becomes increasingly dematerialized. Even at its most abstract, his imagery refuses to give up the ghost of figuration. And the exhibition highlights with great flair his work’s contiguity to that of other contemporaries. The corpulent clouds in Delaunay’s Tour Rouge (1911–12), for instance, bear no closer equivalents than those painted by Fernand Léger during the same years, visible across the Guggenheim’s atrium in a rendering of Parisian rooftops. The outsize prismatic clock that frames the figures in Marc Chagall’s Homage to Apollinaire (1911–12) likewise rhymes unmistakably with the Delaunays’ disks from the same period, just as Chagall’s depictions of the Eiffel Tower and Parisian windows resonate with Robert Delaunay’s series on the same motifs.

The show’s attention to personal and professional collaborations is enlightening. The Delaunays’ influence on the painters Eduardo Viana and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso—and the echo of Portuguese “local color” on their own canvases in turn—stands out in this regard. But as the exhibition progresses, some juxtapositions lose their punch, as well as the larger argument about Orphism’s precise significance and resonance. Poignant clusters of works become diluted by a series of rather oblique inclusions. The presence of early Cubist works by Marcel Duchamp make sense, given his affiliation with Picabia. By contrast, paintings by Jean Metzinger, Marsden Hartley, David Bomberg, Natalia Goncharova, and the sculpture of Alexander Archipenko prove confusing in their inclusion, and the same can be said of the Futurist works by Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. Vorticist, Rayonist, Cubist, and Futurist painting all evince some shared elements with Orphic abstraction, but the inclusion of works from various movements might leave the uninitiated visitor in doubt as to Orphism’s precise content, contours, or consequence.

About the work of Archipenko, Apollinaire proclaimed that the artist sought “above all the purity of forms,” attaining not simply a melody but “a harmony.” The same might be said of all the artists in this show. Yet in placing so many tendencies under the aegis of Orphism, the exhibition erases its actual edges, such as they were, as it attempts to define them. This may aim to reflect the malleability of the designation itself, but it also risks rendering Orphism a bit of everything—and, hence, nothing in particular.

The show’s extending the Orphic enterprise into the 1930s results in a similar slackness. Aside from a few sparse reprisals by Delaunay and Kupka between the two world wars in Europe, Orphism essentially petered out by 1914, even as its innovations resonated in other experiments. Paintings by the American Synchromist painters Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell made between 1913 and 1917 receive their due, and Thomas Hart Benton’s Bubbles (1914–17) reveals the temptations of nonobjective painting even for the most unlikely artists by the mid-1910s. The arresting, electric blue of a work by Mainie Jellett (1938) certainly corresponds with the nearby Painting for Contemplation by the Cubist Albert Gleizes (1942). But focusing on purely formal (and belated) resonances hardly helps elucidate an already loose and fugitive movement. In spite of such shortcomings, the show assembles an impressive spectrum of works, and sets into entrancing relief the confluence of nonobjective artists in Paris on the eve of the First World War. Even when its juxtapositions appear strained, various individual paintings gain new light—and hue—in this exhibition’s vibrant polyphony.

Student activists coined the term “Asian American” in 1968 to unite students of Asian descent, alongside Black and Latinx students, in pushing for the creation of an ethnic studies department at the University of California, Berkeley. So it’s fitting that “Legacies: Asian American Art Movements in New York City (1969–2001),” the first survey exhibition to focus on Asian American artists in New York across multiple generations in the latter half of the 20th century, is set in a college gallery. The elegantly curated 90-artist show installed in New York University’s 80WSE traces the formation and diffusion of a sense of identity that doubled as a political statement and transformed over time as artists explored new media and modes of expression.

In lieu of the floor-to-ceiling didactics one might expect to see in such an ambitious historical survey, cues announcing shifts in time and names are subtle. The exhibition abstains from making a spectacle of its plenitude, inviting viewers to observe stylistic and technological developments unfolding freely and associatively. It lets, for example, Arlan Huang and Karl Matsuda’s figurative and demotic cover art for A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America (1973), regarded as the first record of Asian American music, on display in a vitrine, be washed over by the looping, lilting soundtrack of Mariko Mori’s Miko no Inori (1996), a digital video starring a cyborg priestess, leaking in from another gallery. The show also allows chromatically muted works on paper that luxuriate in negative space—Shusaku Arakawa’s semi-schematic Sketches for an Anatomy of the Signified or If: Part I, Drawings (1972–75); Colin Lee’s smudged and thumb-printed Kem’s Story (1979); and Tam Van Tran’s hole-punched and stapled Vacuum (n.d.)—to converse quietly across its rooms, between cameo appearances from canonized figures like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Patty Chang.

The most compelling works in “Legacies” deal with diaspora obliquely, inducing sensations and associations that lead to self-interrogation. This effect is achieved in a pair of archival pigment prints titled origins (1997/2024), by Kerri Sakamoto and Lynne Yamamoto. In the ’90s, the two artists collaborated on an installation in which a thick skein of synthetic black hair connected their grade school class portraits, taken in Toronto and Honolulu. In the first image of origins, a speck of paper that reads “bi bi” sits inside a navel. The phrase calls to mind the word “baby” and, even more explicitly, “bye bye.” The second photograph contains a wet, bulbous, red lump held between two fingers and pierced by a needle guiding a black thread, possibly in reference to the stitching of the perineal tear after childbirth. A third hand thrusts a strip of paper into the fray. It reads “… as quiet as spiders. Slowly I open my mouth,” as though likening the thread to spider’s silk and inviting the lump, like sustenance, into the speaker’s body. Here, the postnatal imagery does not conjure notions of bloodlines or nationhood often associated with ethnic and political identity; instead, by employing ambiguity and lyricism, the artists evoke quasi-familial kinships, surrogacy, and the fantasy of a shared past and home.

Like origins, other works in “Legacies” play with text and image, as well as the uncanny threshold between the organic and synthetic. Yong Soon Min’s four-dye sublimation prints, Kindred Distance 1–4 (1995), layer the words “why” and “where” and the phrase “our home,” over images of clothing displayed in stores. In one, a group of shoppers—a woman with wide eyes, a man with a hand in his pocket—confront a confederacy of garishly made-up mannequins. The mannequins are ostensibly representations of people, yet they look nothing like the ones in front of them. In a sense, Min’s series narrates an encounter between subjects of the Asian diaspora reunited at “home” after a transformative period of separation.

The three works on paper by Arakawa, Lee, and Tran also incorporate text. Arakawa’s pencil and watercolor piece features rows of cryptic, blocky majuscules that declare TO THAT SLICE OF PARADOX WHICH MAY BECOME APPARENT WHEN THE UNRECOGNIZABLE TEMPERATURE CLEAVES THAT WHICH CLEAVES TO IT. Under that is a line of cursive reading WITHIN BUT BETWEEN THE NUMBERS BEING COUNTED. The notions of cleaving and of existing “within but between” can be read as descriptions of a diasporic condition.

The text in Lee and Tran’s works is difficult to spot at first, especially in the latter, with inked letters so small that only those who get within breathing distance of the collage can make out the artist’s esoteric plea: MAY I TRULY PRACTICE THE SUBLIME TEACHINGS. The surface of the long table in Lee’s intaglio etching bears the phrase “paper son,” referring to how prospective immigrants purchased documentation to fabricate a blood relationship with a United States citizen or permanent resident, and the words 爸爸[DAD] SAID IT TOOK HIM 3 HEARINGS TO GET OFF THE ISLAND. Floating in the upper-left corner of Lee’s print are three parallel line segments of varying lengths, made up of multiple crisscrossing marks; they read as “三,” or “three.”

Throughout “Legacies,” simple markings function as codes legible to those with certain literacies and curiosities. The presence of this multivalence attests to the thoughtfulness with which the show frames its artworks, drawing out their nuances rather than subsuming them under pronouncements of identity. Presented two decades after its titular end-date, at a time when discussions of identity have, on many fronts, turned stagnant and defensive, the exhibition prompts viewers to wonder about emergent Asian American arts scenes in New York. Having seen their foundation, one comes away from this survey better equipped to imagine what subsequent generations will build.

Elizabeth Catlett’s retrospective “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” at the Brooklyn Museum, testifies to how Catlett’s creative ethos saw visual art and social justice as deeply intertwined. In addition to displaying her oeuvre, the museum has rounded up her various cultural and stylistic influences from Black Power Movement ephemera to pre-Hispanic sculptural references, pinpointing how Catlett’s intersectional politics were syncretic with her formal techniques. What results is a Catlett exhibition that’s long overdue and right on time.

Born in 1915 in Washington, D.C., Catlett, two generations shy of experiencing enslavement, nestled stories of her grandmother’s cruel reality into her psyche. These narratives were later reconfigured in Catlett’s artworks as positive and more complex depictions of Black women throughout history. In the first gallery, home to a mixture of her prints, ephemera, sculptures, and paintings, Catlett’s “Black Woman Series” (1946–47) features active or earnest scenes of Black women in positions of stride, seclusion, or service. The linocut I am the Negro Woman (1947) captures the emotional tenor of an individual. Her face, cropped to fit a restrictive four-by-four-inch frame, emerges from the shadows with a compelling gaze. The woman’s coffee skin features white and black striations: while the white lines communicate where light touches her, the latter lines hollow out her under-eyes and cheeks to register a fatigue that evinces perseverance.

The striation marks are thin in this print; Catlett deploys thicker lines in works like In Harriet Tubman, I Helped Hundreds to Freedom (1946)—a scene of Tubman leading enslaved people through the Underground Railroad. Tubman’s body is scaled twice as large as the rows of people to her left; her dress holds long stiff creases that outline her elongated legs in contrapposto, while her equally exaggerated arms point toward freedom. With Sharecropper (1952), Catlett’s solemn oil painting of a Black woman with a towering torso, the artist revives Cubist elements derived from African masks to emanate spiritual characteristics woven into the woman’s body. Angular folds surround her lengthy, terra-cotta arms, while a regal neck and smooth geometric shapes contour her face. Catlett’s images of Black women, imbued with reverence and command, fulfilled her desire to reconfigure their identity throughout Modernist culture and to fashion an aesthetic that prioritizes their interior world, social condition, and African lineage.

Motherhood is a key motif in Catlett’s oeuvre. Responding to a glossary of Christian European maternal iconography, Catlett replicated the Mother and Child archetype, initially premiered as a limestone carving for her master’s thesis in 1940, later as lithographs and sculptures in terra-cotta, wood, and black marble. Her reincarnations of Madonna and Child portray Black mothers’ experiences of bodily autonomy and safety, which are often denied under a white supremacist regime. And as the motif evolves over time through material and form, it becomes more curvaceous without ever fully departing from its geometric original.

On view in the museum’s feminist wing, the exhibition surrounds Judy Chicago’s infamous Dinner Party (1974–79), which is on permanent display. The installation barely considered Black women—including only one, Sojourner Truth, representing her, unlike the others, with a face instead of a vulva. It might be tempting to think of Catlett’s work as a rebuttal to Chicago’s breed of white feminism, but in fact, her work predates it. The juxtaposition links to contemporary Black women’s retorts to a mainstream feminism, forming a lineage with Hortense Spillers’s book Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987) and Lorraine O’Grady’s essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992). Spillers recounts how the plantation system reorients a family structure so that Black women sit at the helm, while O’Grady reflects on a legacy of conflicting images of Black women in dominant visual culture: as an overt fetish symbol or as an invisible, mundane laborer. With this nuance, Catlett’s work both precedes and complements the work of these feminist theorists, rectifying a history of negative imagery against Black women.

Catlett’s lived experience in cities like New York, Chicago, and Mexico City profoundly shaped her political consciousness and artistic sensibilities. Studying under the Russian-French sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York inspired her to embrace internationalism and abstraction. In the US, Catlett was heavily involved in Black leftist and communist groups, her commitments later enhanced by her trip to Mexico in 1946. There, she became a member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an artist collective that believed art should serve the political concerns of Mexican people, and that drew on their indigenous roots. Here, Catlett found solidarity, an echo of her interest in imbuing an indigenous African identity in her artworks. In 1947, she studied with Francisco Zúñiga and José L. Ruiz. Zúñiga introduced her to pre-Columbian ceramic techniques and woodcarving.

As her work began to center a global solidarity among oppressed people through the lens of communism, she became susceptible to the red scare of the McCarthy era. As a result, she was exiled from the United States in 1952, and soon became a Mexican citizen. This background makes works like Political Prisoner (1971), inspired by Angela Davis’s detainment, all the more potent. The 6-foot cedar sculpture shows a female figure with her head facing the sky and her wrists cuffed behind her. Her flayed torso reveals the colors of the Pan-African flag.

What makes these ruminations between art and politics, representation and interiority, nationalism and humanism succeed is Catlett’s ability to shapeshift across mediums as she shuttles between ideas. A common thread throughout the exhibition is the way she married these apexes to form a multilingual visual vocabulary. Shifting between printmaking, painting, and sculpture, Catlett condensed the visual spectrum of two and three-dimensional surfaces, sampling African and Mesoamerican aesthetics, such as stylized forms and simple geometric shapes, to surpass the thresholds of modernism. Catlett embodied self-determination and universality, which led her to craft artworks that function ahead of and outside time.