Ever since, Halaby has continued to push the limits of oil abstraction obsessively to capture and embody various sensory experiences. Early on, she focused on prismatic refractions. One work, Aluminum Steel (1971), showcases her ability to draw inspiration from rather quotidian sources and experiences. A large-scale meditation in oil on the eponymous material’s interactions with light, the painting asserts Halaby’s vision of metal as “the only substance with colored highlights.” She divides lenticular metallic planes into hundreds of thin bands of color, creating a complex geometric field. Nearby, a hand-painted tone study and framed pencil sketch reveal the careful planning that underpins the painting. The work is a monument to dedication and patience—qualities so evident in her art, that must also have served her well in her career. Like so many women artists of her generation, she has waited for decades for a show like this. And like so many women, she enjoyed institutional recognition as an educator before she received her due as an artist: in 1972 she became the first woman to be appointed a full-time associate professor at the Yale School of Art.

Surely such neglect could warrant a little bitterness over the course of a long career, but if resentment exists within Halaby’s private thoughts, there is no evidence of it in her work. Her experiments are brave and far ranging, and her appetite for formal exploration is voracious. All the while, her use of color is joyful and kaleidoscopic: Mother of Pearl II (2018) features every color of the rainbow in an abstract swirl of mosaic-tile-like shapes. In her hands, abstraction is not a tool for turning her subject into a cipher; rather, it allows the work to open toward something universal—perhaps owing to how Arab art resisted representation long before abstraction was welcome in the United States.

Until the mid-1970s, Halaby was largely preoccupied with diagonal line drawings. In 1976 she left her position at Yale and moved to New York City, where she is now based. There, she settled in with new tools, new perspectives, and a whole new arsenal of geometric forms. Pink Walking Green (1983) is a Tetris-like composition with colorful blocky shapes: Halaby described the work to curator Rachel Winter as an effort to capture the experience of watching a woman in pink walking along the green of her verdant street. By the ’80s, Halaby was working not from photo references or models, but largely seeking to re-create sensory experiences of life in her paintings, including attendant sounds, the feeling of the wind, and the visual interactions of shapes and colors.

Indeed, one is able to intuit a lively interaction in Pink Walking Green, just as Angels and Butterflies (2010) successfully imparts the movement of wings with nothing more than rays of color unfolding at sharp angles. Her interest in capturing motion led her to computational experiments in the mid-’80s: she enlisted Amiga, a newly available personal computer, to craft kinetic visual experiments. The resulting “Kinetic Paintings” (1988–ongoing) reveal an eagerness to try any tool that might unlock new possibilities in abstraction. In later compositions, more explicit figuration returns, but her interest in motion persists: Bamboo (2010) is a stunning and synthesized vision of gentle light seen through leaves and moving in every direction.

Not all the movements she captures are as whimsical as breezes and butterflies. The exhibition’s title derives from an inscription on a watercolor work, Occupied Palestine, that Halaby created during a 1995 visit to Jerusalem, her birthplace. It presents an abstract field of pastel brushstrokes and confetti-like sunbursts, overlayed with punctuating brown and black swoops. Though Halaby only rarely adds text to her compositions, this one bears a handwritten caption. “It is as though I am here to witness the last moments in the life of this beautiful and ancient city of Jerusalem,” Halaby penciled into the bottom margin of the image. “My Jerusalem is being murdered. And I make this painting feeling the pain and beauty of Jerusalem.”

Nearly 30 years since this witnessing, and the murder has only multiplied; meanwhile, in the US, Halaby is one of several artists to have faced professional consequences for taking a stance. “Eye Witness” was initially planned as one-half of a joint exhibition between MSU and Indiana University (IU), where she completed her MFA. But in January, IU abruptly canceled her exhibition, citing vague “safety concerns” and dismissing the artist in a two-line email. The cancellation followed Halaby’s post on Instagram decrying Israel’s bombing of Gaza.

The exhibition catalog, Centers of Energy, went to print before the cancellation, and shares a title with the aborted IU exhibition; it begins with a directors’ foreword cowritten by leadership of the two institutions. There is a tragic irony in the contribution of David A. Brenneman, director of the Eskenazi Museum of Art at IU; he asserts that the museum’s 2017 renovation, including the establishment of its first contemporary art department, advances its purpose “to spark reflective dialogue within our university community around artistic issues that include identity, changing cultural landscapes, and social justice.”

One can hardly think of an artist more perfectly poised fulfill this mission than Halaby, whose work so eloquently bears witness both to injustice and to everyday beauty. The IU cancellation is disturbing and disappointing. Yet it would be regrettable to allow this slight to overshadow the triumph of her MSU solo debut; here, the Broad allows Halaby to serve as a witness, and to be witnessed.

“See Stop Run,” an exhibition in a century-old office tower in New York’s Financial District, primarily surveys Wool’s last decade of work, though his practice dates to the 1980s. The show features the photograph of the unmarred paintings—a chronological outlier but a fitting inclusion given the show’s installation in a gutted and unrenovated office on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street. Ten years after his stenciled words, floral patterns, and spray-painted squiggles filled the Guggenheim Museum’s spiraled ramp, the artist has situated his work in a dramatically less polished setting, one that recalls the degradation of his fire-ravaged studio and rekindles the punk ethos of his earlier days.

In the large, U-shaped venue, coiled cables droop from the ceiling. Uneven, partially demolished floors reveal decorative pink and black tiling, and workers have marked the walls with sooty handprints, spray-painted notes, scribbled math equations, and profane doodles. Abundant windows afford visitors impressive views of lower Manhattan and fill the space with daylight, but continuous wall space is lacking. So as a result, Wool has hung works sporadically on pockmarked columns and between windows on narrow, unpainted and unfinished walls. One framed work on paper, Untitled (2018), hangs atop a smattering of permits and other official documents, presumably left in place as authenticating evidence, if not out of legal requirement.

This property only became available to Wool in a post-COVID market that dampened demand for office rentals. Hardly the typical tenant, the artist still spent considerable capital to rent the space and bring it up to code; he even had to incorporate himself in order to “loan” his own artworks to the show. Historically, emerging artists and burgeoning institutions have capitalized on depressed economies to exhibit in unconventional locations. But financial concerns were not a motivating factor for Wool, an artist of considerable means and privilege, one with dealers likely competing to show (and sell) his work. The goal, according to an accompanying essay by the curator Anne Pontégnie, was to “escape the neutrality of contemporary art spaces.”

This strategy might seem contrived—an artist exploiting the aesthetics of ruin to enhance the grittiness of his own work—if it wasn’t so consistent with his process. Wool has long sought to challenge the integrity of his pictures, whether through degraded reproductions or by subjecting them to constant reprocessing. By presenting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in a setting that refutes clarity and orderliness, he is once again testing his art’s resilience and adaptability.

Since the late 1990s, Wool has used erasure, obfuscation, shifts in scale, distortion, and collage to generate new imagery from preexisting works, circling back while tumbling forward. This is not immediately evident in the exhibition, where related works are not always hung together, though certain forms and patterns do echo throughout. Numerous paintings derive from a pair of folded “Rorschach” blots Wool made with enamel in 1986 (not on view). Between 2020–23, Wool painted atop digitally altered inkjet prints of these silhouette-like splotches. A group of ten hangs in a grid on one of the few walls added by the artist, but one senses that he has generated endless variations from the chance-based images. In turn, one early painting from the series, Untitled (2020), formed the basis for a pair of large silkscreens, both Untitled (2023). Nearly identical, the supersized blobs greet visitors as they exit the elevator, immediately establishing Wool’s aptitude for producing difference through repetition.

A highlight of the show is the series of knotty sculptures Wool has been fashioning over the last decade out of rancher’s wire and fencing salvaged around his home in Marfa, Texas—even though they too often disappear into the chaotic background. The jumbled scrap metal evokes tumbleweeds, but Wool achieves an impressive diversity of forms.His earliest, Untitled (2013), is a surprisingly graceful tangle of rusted barbed wire suspended at eye level like a low-slung chandelier. Untitled (2019) is an unruly, twisted cluster of wire, mesh, and metal slats. Others are more compact like densely woven nests. One of several that Wool enlarged and cast in a rosy, copper-plated bronze, Untitled (2021) perches precariously on a pedestal—a dancer in mid-pirouette. For Bad Rabbit (2022), Wool photocopied images of his wire formations to heighten the contrast and flatten the sculptures, enhancing their relationship to his painted line.

Wool’s painted and sculpted lines converge in a new mosaic, Untitled (2023). Translated from a 2021 oil painting on paper, itself a re-working of an earlier screenprint, the squared-off stones and glass mimic the pixelated distortion of the digitized source. At eleven-feet tall, it spans from floor to ceiling and looks custom-made for the site (it wasn’t). Farther uptown, in another office building—Two Manhattan West—is Wool’s first mosaic. The similar but much larger Crosstown Traffic (2023) towers over visitors in the gleaming new development’s cavernous lobby, demonstrating that the artist can also play nice with the moneyed elite. The version jammed into this exhibition is far humbler: The cloud of black, white, and dirty pink swirls better aligns with the tumult of this transitional space. Matching the hues of the venue’s exposed tiles, the mosaic appears as if it was unearthed during construction.

Wool could have easily mounted this exhibition in one of New York’s ever-expanding blue-chip galleries (two years ago, he showed many of these works in Xavier Hufken’s pristine new gallery in Brussels). But the site’s ready-made rawness befits his work’s willfully gritty energy. Ultimately, the architecture’s exposed innards draw our attention to the many layers of Wool’s recursive process, the deteriorated images buried beneath layers of scribbled paint and digital manipulation—an accumulated history of images.

It’s tempting to say that photographer George Platt Lynes was ahead of his time. Between the 1930s and his untimely death at age 48, he produced a body of work—elegant fashion photography, sleek images of nude men—that feel fresh today. But Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, a recently released documentary by Sam Shahid, argues that, in fact, Lynes was very much of his time. The ’30s and ’40s in New York saw a bustling scene of gay men who threw fabulous cocktail parties, created art, and, of course, had sex with each other. Hidden Master is quick to remind viewers that plenty of gay men were out in their own way, decades before Stonewall. At the center of this milieu, which is largely understudied, was Lynes. “We see this world that’s gone… through George’s eyes,” says Steven Haas, an art historian and the director of Lynes’s foundation, at the beginning of the documentary.

Toward the end of Hidden Master, Shahid asks several interviewees—including Vince Aletti, Nick Mauss, Mary Panzar, and Bruce Weber—why Lynes isn’t part of the canon. The resounding answer seems to be that they don’t know. It is surprising that Lynes’s images aren’t as prominent as those of his artistic successors like Andy Warhol or Robert Mapplethorpe. But then again, many of Lynes’s best works went unshown during his lifetime: when he was creating his male nudes, it would have been taboo, if not illegal, to exhibit them. What he did show, in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, was his fashion photography: dreamy images of women in the latest couture. His innovations in that genre include an early form of the now-ubiquitous ring light, which are reflected in his models’ eyes.

Though Lynes wasn’t publicly showing his nudes, he wasn’t exactly in the closet either. His nephew, George Platt Lynes II, says he was one of those people who never needed to come out; his minister father and high society mother did not disown him. In the 1920s, he traveled to Paris and befriended Gertrude Stein and her circle; Stein would eventually appoint him as her official photographer. During one steamship voyage across the Atlantic, he met Julien Levy, who exhibited his work. Through Stein, he met Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler; they would essentially form a throuple for three decades. (Their circle included another famous throuple, artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French, who often collaborated as PaJaMa.) The three lived together on the Upper East Side, at times attempting to pass for roommates. At the height of his fame, Lynes would befriend Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet, who also made Lynes the company’s official photographer. Through it all, Lynes made his nudes, gently convincing men—athletes, dancers, sailors, lovers—to disrobe before his camera.

A lover’s death in World War II, the throuple’s dissolution, and another bad breakup led Lynes to move to Hollywood for two years, where he worked for Vogue; there, he lived beyond his means and quickly derailed his career. When he returned to New York in 1948, he had been supplanted in the fashion magazines by Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, who had rented out Lynes’s former studio. (Lynes did not mince words about Penn and Avedon, whose work he called “spinsterish” and “the all-time low in formula-dreariness,” respectively.) He declared bankruptcy at least twice. Much of his equipment was repossessed by the IRS (his brother bought it back then loaned it to him), and he used a Picasso as collateral for another loan.

Lynes destroyed much of his early work and entrusted the rest to sexologist Alfred Kinsey and painter Bernard Perlin. They live on in various archives, and much of it still has not been exhibited. As dealer Peter Hay Halpert points out, they have been regulated back to the closet. Perhaps they will find new life once again.

The show introduces Cassatt to a new generation. The curators, Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber, wanted to get closer to who Cassatt was, to how she wanted to be remembered, and to the legacy of her seemingly serene paintings. They do so by focusing on process. Cassatt, they tell us, was obsessed with work. She constantly worked, toiling to achieve her “casual” auras with light, glimmering colors, modern movement, and, above all, the private pensiveness of her women and her children.

Cassatt’s paintings convey a simplicity—here, now playful greens; here, now a girl in a buggy—but the show reveals that her method is by no means simple. It’s the same arduous careful fight for maximal directness that we see in figures like Marguerite Duras, Yasujiro Ozu, and Clarice Lispector. Cassatt achieved hers by changing mediums; by experimenting with colors; and by being perversely drawn to small-fry subject matter, then mining it from all angles. She mastered the work of printing too: bursting, colorful aquatints and fine drypoint are on display in her glorious “Set of Ten” (1891), 10 Japanese woodblock-inspired prints of Parisian women bathing, sending letters, caretaking.

After being in the presence of so many Cassatts at once—little Françoise reading, ladies at their toilette, boys strangled by loving arms, two girls peering into a map with invisible-to-us borders and oceans—you realize what it is to paint with levity. This does not mean the subject matter, children and opera-boxes and sleepy afternoons, is light.

Throughout the years, Cassatt has borne many labels, which are seldom useful when grappling with the material depth of one of her canvases. “Impressionist.” “Woman painter.” “American.” “Upper-middle-class white.” “Sentimentalist.” “Suffragette.” All these she certainly was. Yet what grabs us is how fierce her battle is for the shade of a dress: raspberry pink. It takes a lot of observation and patience on our part for the mourning-black of a stoic to emerge in Portrait of Madame J (1883)—blurry, as the stoic’s face is, behind a veil, concealing her grief behind still, bleary eyes.

But Cassatt’s interest in work—which means physical labor, yes, and also the hard work of noticing the scrunch of an ignored child’s face as she expresses desire for she-knows-not-what—is not the writhing, heavy work of Paul Cézanne, who was bitterly unsatisfied with his blocky, huffing-puffing apples and his apple-y Madame Cézannes until the end. Nor is it work in the Socialist/Realist sense of Gustave Courbet’s tillers and Jean-François Millet’s gleaners. Cassatt is mesmerized by an everyday labor hidden among the chaise longues, the work it takes to make sure a baby doesn’t die before its time. In other words: the work of attention and love. Perhaps this sort of love is overbearing. Good.

Deborah Solomon claims in her New York Times review of this show that Cassatt “belongs to the second tier of Impressionists” and that she “cannot be said to inhabit the same exalted plane as Degas or Manet.” This ranking business! It’s loathsome, tiresome. Arrêt!

This hierarchy is as boring as the insistence that Cassatt’s subject is as simple as mothers and children, that she knew what it was to be a mother and to draw it (she never had kids), or that “nothing,” outside the moneyed sphere, happens in her work. It is too easy to chide Cassatt for dabbing her birchwood brushes in one hand while stirring her silver teaspoons in the other. Yes, she was of the upper-middle-class American aristocracy, a stockbroker’s daughter. “Ordinary” bourgeois scenes: these were her specialty, that was the weird milieu she knew well. And she keeps it weird, perverting the ordinary. What she does with the subject, like her fellow Americans Henry James and Edith Wharton, is to take a limited perspective on the world and elevate the touched objects and buried feelings piling up around her as the source for unexpectedly subtle rhapsodies of a hierophantic order. Cassatt’s order transcends the mere social mores that serve as the downfall of a Countess Olenska or a Daisy Miller, but not of little Françoise, her child neighbor, reading.

Cassatt moves through her paintings without the touching neuroses of a James, without his curling smoke trails of clauses or qualifying commas. James is nervous he will never perfectly unravel the figure in the carpet, doomed completist that he is; Cassatt is assured, even comfortable, in the incomplete, the unknown of her thinking women. If we want to invest our own thoughts in the trauma of the everyday, if we want to meditate on our own money-love woes, our muttered complaints about cramped arms, we can go to Cassatt’s mother-like nursemaids bearing their baby-like crosses. These aren’t mothers or babies we see. They are the politics of care. Result: we don’t sweat words. We lose ourselves in pigments and blank space.

I keep returning to two paintings. The first is of her child neighbor, Françoise in a Round-Backed Chair, Reading (1909). It is an epitome of meditation. It’s not as radical, formally, as the other Cassatts, which typically render a face or hand in full, sumptuous detail, while leaving the rest of the body and background in a modernist, sketch-like state of incompletion. Nevertheless, Cassatt’s sublime incompletion rears its head when we realize that the book jacket on Françoise’s book is lost, so we can’t tell what she’s reading. Nor can we be sure that she’s even reading it: her eyes look off into an unseen corner of the frame, perhaps into our space. What does she see, if anything? Françoise wanders away from us, from the room, into her own thoughts, solemn yet full of gaiety.

The second is The Map (1890), a black-and-gray drypoint print in which two girls examine a map. Cassatt renders the map as a single line, so that the girls look down on what seems like not a map at all, but a blank piece of paper, even a table. The girls decode the map through a joint effort. And they do it in Cassatt’s unfolding calm.

Cassatt was prolific, creating many mini-worlds, each granularly distinct; within her houses, I want to sit in a chair and daydream. She realizes the advice Henry James theorized in his own preface to Portrait of a Lady—namely, to “place the center of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” in order to “get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish.” Cassatt, too, captures the unceasing mystery of a face that knows it can’t be known. You feel like you finally, paradoxically, know what it is to be with someone. To lie on the divan as you read and watch them read, or weave and watch them weave, or vibe and watch them be blank-minded, doing “nothing” (quite a whole lot, in fact), meditating. And feeling satisfied with this fragment.

It had been a while since I last felt attacked in an exhibition, but the serpent made a move and the situation could’ve ended up a lot messier than it did.

It helped that the serpent was animatronic and super stylized—but it took a moment to remember this while my body recoiled. The exhibition was Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s at Canal Projects in New York, which features a cast of robotic contraptions on view through July 27. A lone corn stalk greets visitors at the entryway, its weathered husks suggesting this corn, like other stalks throughout the show, have seen some things. Walk up a few stairs and you stare down at a large pile of dirt on the floor, above which hovers a snake with mechanized wings that flap on occasion. This is the Cincoatl snake, and it’s the star of the show.  

The snake, it turns out, is the corn’s protector. In Mesoamerican traditions, the Cincoatl snake (which is often translated as “snake-friend of maize corn,” per the wall text) defends the crop from forces that might keep it from growing. Surrounding the snake are four Chinantles, barriers made of corn stalks that are said to be an avatar of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, a feathered-serpent deity “related to wind, Venus, the Sun, arts, knowledge, and learning.” With fangs and disquieting marble eyes, the serpents jut and lurch around the exhibition in the four cardinal directions, marking a sacred space. (One of those was the artwork that tried to attack me, but I had come in peace and survived the ordeal. The corn stayed safe, too.)

This installation—commissioned by Canal Projects, a nonprofit space in Lower Manhattan since 2022—tells of corn’s origins while meditating on Indigenous technologies. The wall text refers to the work of Chilean sociologist Luis Razeto Migliaro, who defines Indigenous technologies as tools with the capacity to cultivate life. Indeed, Rodríguez’s sculptures all come to life: Vasijas de barro con cucharas (Clay Pots with Spoon), from 2024, is an arrangement of motorized wooden utensils that clack together, like castanets. Tezcatlipoca (2017) is a tower rising above a cardboard coyote skull and topped with an old CD/cassette/MP3 boombox; from time to time, it swivels on a wheel that rolls below. Cincoatl snake (2024), the centerpiece, goes up and down, seeming to fly, albeit in a very rudimentary fashion.

Using decidedly DIY aesthetics—lots of unkempt nests of wires and circuit boards—Rodríguez makes a show of his contraptions’ elementary qualities in a way that seems to be part of the premise. In a time when technology has started to feel like an inescapable force hell-bent on destroying life, his creations serve as a reminder that it can be a tool for both destruction and creation. The hand-wrought nature of Rodríguez’s intervention offers signs of hope: the made-ness of his robotic forms suggest that some things can be taken apart—and perhaps reassembled anew.

In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point.

Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good Luck’s titular well wishes. But to many other viewers, the symbol will likely read as a swastika. There are differences between the two symbols: a whirling log’s four angles form a square, whereas a swastika is rotated 45 degrees, creating a diamond. But those differences are subtle and easy to miss. That’s why it’s worth spending time with Cody’s whirling logs, which figure in two current New York solo shows, at MoMA PS1 and Garth Greenan Gallery.

At PS1, Navajo Transcendent (2014) shows a lone whirling log popping against a teal background. Cody rendered the ancient symbol in a pulsating pattern derived from traditional Navajo weaving that’s known as an eye dazzler: here and elsewhere, she is emphasizing the symbol’s cultural origins. In Navajo Transcendent, she has caused the sign to appear three-dimensional, rendering it with depth, as if to suggest that there are multiple vantages from which to view this symbol, both formally and culturally. Certainly, with its dazzling colors and dizzying patterns, this work contains none of the austerity or threat associated with Nazi regalia.

I’ll admit that, as a Jew, I don’t always find Cody’s works featuring this easy to take, and it seems I’m not alone in feeling that way. When I visited PS1, I overheard two visitors debating Navajo Transcendent, noting that the work is presented without a trigger warning. The institution seemed uncomfortable in its handling of the work as well. It showed the piece alongside a wall text that does not include words like “swastika” or “Nazis,” words that feel like elephants in the room. In that wall text, viewers are directed to a label for a different piece, Navajo Whirling Log, should they seek “additional context.” The text for Navajo Whirling Log notes that “misassociations with the Nazi swastika” may occur, and reminds viewers that Navajo culture “predates Nazi atrocities by millennia.” This is a fact—but so is the continued prevalence of swastikas wielded in hateful ways. It is hard not to see a Nazi symbol here.

That’s partly why, in 1940, Navajo, Papago, Apache, and Hopi leaders signed the Whirling Log Proclamation, formally agreeing to stop using the symbol. They noted that the motif had been “desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.” That excerpt appears in an explanatory text posted at Garth Greenan Gallery’s front desk, but this necessary context is mysteriously absent within PS1’s galleries. That text also states that the leaders signed the proclamation under pressure from the US government, and points out that anyway, Navajo religious practices were banned in the US until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978. In the intervening decades, Cody and other contemporary Navajo artists have endeavored to revive the whirling log, asking why one connotation should supplant another. Several have been met with protests, such as when, in 2017, a Washington art space removed works by Steven Leyba that featured whirling logs after backlash.

Cody’s whirling logs do make me uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean her works that feature them should be taken down. Her tapestry Navajo Whirling Log (2019), at PS1, features four such logs that touch their tips, forming a cross at the work’s center. The cross is a symbol for the Spider Woman who, according to Navajo tradition, wove the universe into being. Anyone who views this piece as representing four swastikas, then stops there, is likely to miss out on that rich story. Art often shows us how many signs have more than one meaning, and if we keep an open mind—and, maybe, get uncomfortable—we might learn to see things anew. 

This is the subject of a new book by art historian Claire Bishop, titled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of “prosthesis for viewing” art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this new normal.

Today, we often treat slow contemplation of a painting as a respite from the onslaught of everyday life, the museum as a rare site of reverent attention. But in her introduction, explaining her interest in attention, Bishop shows this wasn’t always so. Citing critic and historian Jonathan Crary, she writes that the very concept of “attention” emerged in the 19th century as a means of optimizing laborers at the onset of industrial capitalism. Soon, the world witnessed new methods for displaying art meant to focus that attention. By the 1870s, single rows of paintings punctuated by blank wall space replaced crowded salon-style hangs. That same decade, theatergoers began to find their seats facing the stage head-on—no longer arranged in a horseshoe shape offering views of audience and performers alike. And whereas, historically, theatergoing had been a decidedly social experience, talking to seatmates became rude. In theater as in visual art, viewing became a disciplined cognitive experience rather than a sensorial and social one.

As Bishop makes clear in her introduction, there was a classist element to all this. Gabbing peasants, unaware of the new etiquette, were snubbed. “Distraction,” Bishop writes, became “a moral judgment.” Taking this critique into the present, she takes issue with moralizing dismissals of artworks that encourage you to whip out your phone and take a picture, or look something up. It’s elitist, she says, to classify phones and TV as objects of distraction, and set aside art and opera as worthy of reverence.

The four chapters that follow were not originally intended as a book, but are rather four essays written over the course of 10 years; only later did Bishop realize they share the theme of attention. The first chapter, on research-based art‚ is the book’s most significant contribution to the field, and I say this leaving aside my feelings about her claim therein that “the genre has never been clearly defined—or, for that matter, critiqued.” (This magazine dedicated a whole issue to the subject last year, about which Bishop and I exchanged several emails.) Bishop argues that the genre is structured around ways that digital technology organizes information, and even thought: we might not remember the name of something, but we know where to look it up. She defines research-based works as relying “on text—printed or spoken—to support an abundance of materials, distributed spatially.” Typically, such works present viewers with more information than they can meaningfully consume.

For Bishop, Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93) is a formative example: with archival material on shelves and at viewing stations, visitors could research African diasporic culture, especially the reception of hip-hop in Germany. Green deliberately offered a huge quantity of information: she didn’t want her viewers to walk away feeling they had “mastered” the topic. In 1995, though, she created a CD-ROM edition, because viewers never seemed to have enough time in the museum.

Green’s decidedly post-structuralist proposition, Bishop argues, was a necessary move away from master narratives—and one that evinces digital technology’s impact on attention. But the writer is less convinced by later works of research-based art. She notes that Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center (2005–) similarly arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme. By the 2000s, she says, as internet use expanded, people began to feel overwhelmed by information all the time, and stopped needing artworks to reproduce that experience.

The trend of information overload took off, and viewers grew fatigued. The 2002 edition of Documenta featured more than 600 hours of video. Technically, it was possible to watch it all, if you devoted 6 hours per day to the task for all 100 days the show ran. Viewing art came to feel onerous. (If the research-based art trend was the shot, it’s not hard to see why today’s colorful painting became the chaser.) In lieu of information overload, Bishop finds herself “yearning for selection and synthesis,” and
here considers Walid Raad exemplary. Raad offers viewers compelling narrative threads in works that often concern Lebanese history, but he always makes clear his stories are one of several perspectives. There are multiple, but not infinite truths.

IT’S NOT JUST RESEARCH ART OR VIDEO ART presenting viewers with more than we can comfortably consume. Several recent major works of performance art have also done away with the idea of comprehensive viewing, and this is the subject of chapter 2. They might offer no seating, inhumane duration, and/or a looping structure so that viewers can come and go. Two examples Bishop cites are recent Golden Lion winners at the Venice Biennale: Germany’s Faust (2017), by Anne Imhof; and Lithuania’s Sun & Sea (Marina), 2019, by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė.

Sun & Sea (Marina) was a looping nonlinear opera about climate change; viewers could come and go, or simply stay and tune in and out, much as people both attend to and ignore the anthropogenic apocalypse every day. Faust, meanwhile, was a durational performance wherein hot “health goths” strike poses on a plexiglass platform that doubles as a framing device. If you weren’t in Venice that year, you probably saw it on Instagram. Here, Bishop rebuts simplistic critiques of that work as being “too Instagrammable,” effectively calling such dismissals snobby. She says the work instead reflects “a new form of hybrid spectatorship” that smart phones have produced.

But this begs a follow-up question: does Imhof tell us anything new or interesting about this spectatorship? Does merely indexing a condition make good art? One of Bishop’s more salacious arguments is one she makes matter-of-factly, and offhand: “In the twenty-first century,” she says, “works of art tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune telling.” Due to income inequality, she quickly argues, artists are no longer canaries in the coal mine. Even if I thought that characterization of recent art were true, I’d push (beg!) artists to do more than accept and reflect status quo.

Chapter 3 focuses on performance works that Bishop calls “interventions.” These works swap duration for disruption. Here, she makes a useful distinction between guerrilla interventions and institutional ones, Fred Wilsons’s Mining the Museum being the canonical example of the latter. In 1992 Wilson rehung rooms of the Maryland Historical Society with objects from the institution’s collection in a manner that lay bare the state’s history of slavery. It was a provocative piece—but rather than change the museum’s practices, the gesture, Bishop writes, “gave rise to a glut of compensatory invitations,” with institutions delegating critical gestures to artists rather than rethinking their own practices.

Bishop contrasts these interventions with guerrilla-style ones by the likes of Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei, who seized public space and attention without permission. While such works offer important political warnings, they are also symptomatic of a changing mediascape: going viral and making headlines is an important part of the strategy for works looking to generate “provocation, disruption, attention, debate.” In 2004 a member of the Yes Men went on BBC posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman to apologize for a deadly disaster the company had caused—then watched Dow’s share price plummet. What’s key here is not site specificity, as is often true for institutional gestures, but what Cuban artist Tania Bruguera calls “political-timing-specificity.”

Interventions, according to Bishop, “tend to foreground a model of authorship that heroicizes the artist … as a daring rebellious outsider.” There’s a reason, she adds, why many of the artists she cites are men: “this kind of intrepid assertion of the self in public space … privileges those who feel secure enough to penetrate that zone and claim it.” Continuing in this vein, she rebuts critics of Bruguera’s #YoTambienExijo project. Her 2014 performance involved asking Cuba to open up not only to free markets, but to free press and free speech. Because the project involved social media, it necessarily linked to an individual’s profile, even though it was a collective endeavor. Yet some complained that the project centered the artist rather than the cause. Bishop writes that such criticism is “much less frequently levelled at [Bruguera’s] male contemporaries like Ai Weiwei, who are more likely to be heroicized as dissidents,” rather than seen as attention whores.

The final chapter takes an unexpected pivot to the many artists today making work about Modernist architecture, a trend that Bishop argues is the product of the internet placing history at one’s fingertips. Such artworks are a useful case study for laying bare the many problems that artistic research can engender. In researching—or simply searching—online, it’s all too easy to strip objects from their context, and to depoliticize or romanticize them in the process. These works “produce historicity in a register of simultaneity,” Bishop writes, and produce the feeling of “everything everywhere all at once.”

Certain motifs can come to take on myriad meanings, with the “universalism” of the so-called International Style lending extra malleability. So much so that in 2009, curator Adriano Pedrosa organized a whole show of non-Brazilian artists engaging with Brazilian modernism; meanwhile, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) has been refigured by the likes of Ai Weiwei, Michael Rakowitz, and the collective Chto Delat. Stopping just short of calling Modernist invocations cheap tricks, Bishop jabs that “mid-century modern became synonymous with grown-up good taste,” and adds that countless artists venerate modernism in “an appeal to ancestral spirits”—that its invocation automatically “lend[s] significance to the contemporary object.” Modernism already holds space in our collective attention, and artists reroute those symbols to new ends.

Somewhat unexpectedly, digital art is wholly absent from Bishop’s book: she argues that “the effects of digital technology upon spectatorship are best seen in art that, at first glance, seems to reject digital technology most forcefully.” For this reason, hers is a much more interesting and less obvious argument about the internet’s effect on art than many made by the preponderance of shows and articles in the 2010s. But the wholesale sidestepping of digital and post-internet art, as well as all the scholarship around it, still seems strange. I found myself eagerly awaiting her take on phenomena like immersive experiences—the apotheosis of blending digital viewership with traditional artworks—but it never came. Her brief mention of works by so-called post-internet artists feels cherrypicked in its focus on artists who reproduce the experience of information overload: she omits the many who warned (21st-century artists do warn!) of what was coming, for our attention span, for AI, and so on.

I suspect this omission is for one of two reasons: either Bishop didn’t consider digital art a subject worthy of attention—(would that not also be elitist, I genuinely wonder?)—or because the patched-together essays that constitute her chapters were, as Bishop acknowledges, never meant to form a master argument. Either way, ironically, I have to hand it to her: the elision proves her point.  

“It was the nullification of expression,” Accardi later said of her works from that period. Her almost calligraphic scribbles—whether arranged in neat lines or garbled into a blob—look like language. And indeed, words were on her mind. Rivolta Femminile was founded on the principle that reading and writing were valuable tools for achieving self-awareness—and in turn, for helping women disentangle their own desires from internalized expectations.

When Accardi left Rivolta Femminile in 1973, she wrote a letter to a cofounder justifying her departure—a letter she never sent. Now, an excerpt appears in the catalog for her retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, on view through June 9. In that letter, Accardi explained why she needed to leave and devote herself more fully to making art again: “The most remarkable thing I found in feminism,” she wrote, “was the discovery that I am a human being, and as such, I have no desire to deprive myself of … imaginative, utopian passions.”

The early ’70s was not the first time Accardi interrogated the relationship between aesthetics and politics so intensely that she had to press pause. A vitrine in her retrospective displays a manifesto that the Italian-born artist signed in 1947, when she was in her 20s and had just joined both the Communist Youth Federation and Forma. The latter was an artist group aligning formalism and Marxism. They believed in making art as a way to improve one’s life in a material sense, through labor, and insisted that such a vital and deeply human act shouldn’t remain the purview of the bourgeoisie. Forma’s ideas galvanized the work she produced until around 1953, when she experienced a “deep crisis.” After a yearlong hiatus, she temporarily eliminated color from her work, as she would again decades later. In so doing, she hoped to avoid becoming “distracted towards pleasantness” and “to give her painting a moral certainty,” as an exhibition pamphlet from the time reads.

The best colorful paintings in the show in Rome are from the 1960s. Accardi, who died in 2014 and liked to call her practice “anti-painting,” explained her attraction to contrasting colors: “Only through the notion of night do I know the day.” With abstraction, she wanted to dispense with the patriarchal baggage that haunted representational imagery, and to capture life’s complexities. “I simply paint a symbolic portrait of life as I see it,” she said, “with its struggles, its joys, its miseries and its defeats.” So in the ’60s, as advertisements and packaging were newly altering the visual landscape, Accardi ingested it all and responded with paintings of squiggles in dizzying hues. In Violarosso (1963), she scribbled in bright orange all over a magenta surface, nearly dissolving all distinction between foreground and background.

By 1965, Accardi was on to something totally new. She swapped canvas for Sicofoil—a clear plastic—in an effort, as she said, to “reveal the mysteries behind the art.” That material, designed for packaging, is inclined to curl, so she would sometimes let it roll into cylinders or cones, or else stretch it like a canvas on wooden bars. A room in the retrospective is dedicated to immersive pavilions she built with plexiglass and then painted on. On these clear plastics—newly introduced material at the time—bold, opaque brushstrokes appear to hover in space. There is a quiet revolution in the way Accardi’s paintings foreground the background: whether a clear substrate disappears entirely or a vibrating magenta surface refuses to recede, this supporting role is really also the protagonist. I imagine most women can relate.

Accardi cared deeply about political thought and action, but she didn’t want to fall into the trap of, well, black-and-white thinking that might cleave aesthetics from politics too neatly. For her, life encompasses both in a complex, contradictory swirl. She insisted that a rich range of experiences was her right, and in fact part of the reason she cared about Marxism and feminism in the first place: that richness made life worth living and defending.

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

But visibility has its downsides. Gomez confronts them in Every day I walk outside is a leap of Faith (Walking with Alok), which shows the artist in a black bra, staring in the mirror as she shaves her upper lip. Behind her, a canary flies out of a gold cage, and in one corner Gomez has kissed the canvas with a pair of a bright-red lips. In the foreground is Alok, a gender non-conforming poet and comedian who has been a mentor to Gomez during her transition. The two are surrounded by leering construction workers and signs reading ROAD CLOSED and DETOUR. There’s tension in this scene: like the overlooked laborers in their high visibility orange, Gomez and Alok appear both hyper-visible, and yet invisible, too.

That painting is untethered to any real space: instead, the figures float in a purple void. Gomez uses purples often, perhaps referencing the swirling together of the colors of the trans flag (pink, cyan, and white), or even the spectrum of hues in a bruise: a bruise at the site of hormone injection; a bruise from hemophilia, a condition Gomez has; a bruise that refers to the violence that trans women of color often face, whether from lovers, from johns, or even from catcalling construction workers.

At the back of the exhibition, there is a sculptural intervention. There, Gomez has installed a chain-link fence covered by a green tarp, with diagrams of her facial feminization and breast augmentation surgeries painted onto the surface. Surrounding these diagrams are outlines of butterflies: the ultimate symbol of transformation. A sign on the floor warns: “WERK ZONE.” Nearby, Gomez has dedicated a poem to her friend Winter Camilla Rose—also depicted in a leisurely odalisque portrait—about “a journey with no guide / with no end.”