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.

The heart of Humphrey’s project is the braiding apparatus. She jury-rigged her first such construction in 2006 and has since refined the design using instructions from a nineteenth-century manual. The device is a circular, barrel-like construction with a central hole on top, in which a wooden dowel is placed. To create the braids, Humphrey or her collaborators wrap jewelry wire of various gauges around the pole. The resulting works comprise voluminous masses of woven loops and curls in various states of unraveling, their ends balling into knots or frizzing into tangles. The frenetic whorls also seem to suggest neural networks,
the resemblance perhaps enhanced by research on the amygdala—the region of the brain believed to produce emotional responses—that Humphrey has conducted as artist-in-residence at the LeDoux Lab, the neuroscience center at New York University.

The video piece in the exhibition assembles material Humphrey has gathered over the course of “Circling the Center” to date. It features MRI scans of her brain taken at the LeDoux Lab, as well as footage of her braiding performances, including an event she organized as part of her 2009 residency at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where volunteer weavers meditatively filled a giant, rotating sphere with braid work over the course of two weeks. There are also sequences, shot from above and relatively close up, showing a regular collaborator of Humphrey’s using one of the braiding apparatuses. The soundtrack to the video installation is a haunting audio piece made by Roberto Carlos Lange that incorporates the whispers of weavers reciting their pattern, the mating calls of laboratory rats, and the subtle clicking of wire spools.

Humphrey describes herself as a collage artist, and the show—with its bringing together of sculpture, video, sound, and drawings—did suggest an ambitious interdisciplinary collage. But Humphrey also proves herself to be a capable braider—not only in the literal sense, but also in her successful braiding of grief into a thing of beauty, just as the Victorians wished to do. Collage suggests a layering of distinct elements, whereas braiding is a synthesis, and Humphrey’s work has achieved a sense of that degree of interconnectivity—you cannot pick out just one strand without beginning to unravel the others. Over time and through various iterations, Humphrey has leveraged her loss into the creation of a matrix of meditative moments and compelling objects.

Mousa emigrated with his family from Syria in 1978, when he was a boy, and “American Landscape” represents a continuation of his own struggle with questions about American identity, sexuality, and patriotism. Accessing universal themes through personal stories is a common and powerful artistic device, but it is more challenging to craft personal narratives from universal imagery. The symbols are omnipresent but individual associations with them are subjective. While many people respond with conditioned patriotism to the sight of the American flag, denizens of the art world tend to style themselves as resistant to blind nationalism. Though it is easy to imagine people who struggle with the gender binary to feel alienated by the limited imagination of restroom symbols, it is difficult to imagine anyone strongly identifying with them. But these are the figures that populate Mousa’s landscapes, many of which take altered American flags as background imagery. Neutral icons with only the minimal indication of gender as stand-ins for his particular experience of homosexual relationships, life in the United States, and his connection to Christian values. (Like many Middle Easterners who arrived in the 1970s, Mousa’s family is Christian.)

“Being an American means being part of a big and diversified community,” said Mousa, in a video walk-through of “American Landscape.” Like all the figurative aspects of the “American Landscape” series, this diversity is represented in the bluntest terms: figures rendered in black and white, as with American Landscape #34 (2009), which features four female icons holding hands, atop a mixed-media landscape of rubble. Some of the canvases have fiber elements, including a whole pair of jeans embedded in American Landscape #20 (2009), and an actual American flag chopped into pieces and placed around the surface of American Landscape #19 (2009).  There is a chaos of layers, textures, and colors beneath the placid iconography, perhaps suggesting that these identities struggle to find ground against a prevailing landscape of mass media messages.  Red, white, and blue are complicated by various shades of orange. The stripes of the flags smudge and drip. Several bars in the center of American Landscape #45 (2012) are hashed with tick marks; given the focus on identities at risk, one wonders what tally these marks are keeping.

American Landscape #31 (Unborn Child), 2009, features a host of multimedia elements, both abstract accumulations of detritus and textual elements in the form of newspaper clippings, flyers, and wheat-pasted slogans. end the harm . . . , demands a bumper sticker plastered across the top righthand corner of the canvas, and the statement continues in blocks of text, collaged like a ransom note:…from religion-based bigotry and prejudice. In the foreground, a pregnant mother and child rise in red, flamelike curls. The smaller figure attends to the pregnant belly of the mother, where the fetus is represented as a black circle. They are neither icons nor detailed renderings; rather, they form a potent collision of generic symbols with Mousa’s personal interpretative gestures.

Energy radiates from Mousa’s intense brushwork and smeary washes, barely contained by the visual consistency, strict palette, and limited symbol set. The narrow gallery feels like a chapel, with the small to mid-size canvasses lining the side walls and the expansive American Landscape #1 (2009)—a 12-foot-wide American flag where HRC logos replace the stars and schematic men hold hands along the stripes—as the altarpiece. Only one piece here breaks the stars-and-stripes motif—American Landscape #22 (2009), which harks back to Mousa’s earlier practice of replicating traditional Middle Eastern decorative floral motifs. His older works were executed at a small scale, with a tightly controlled hand. But here Mousa has taken a motif of swirls and flowers, as might be seen in a tile mosaic, blown it up large, and painted it with the loose, frenetic style of the other landscapes. Across the bottom of the canvas extends a row of five male icons holding hands, rendered in rich orange. Just above and beginning to encroach on their heads is an opaque pour of thick brown paint, obscuring all the background motif but a flash of red-orange on the far right of the canvas. As with all of the works in “American Landscapes,” though the figures represent something personal to the artist, the generic blankness of the imagery returns the narrative to the realm of the universal. The figures could be any of us, and the mounting threat to our visibility and solidarity could be anything.

While the exhibition design eliminates wall texts as a prompt to embrace complexity, most of the works are made in conventional mediums like painting, sculpture, and collage. Doug Ashford’s Next Day (New York Times, pages A1-A28), 2015–16,  redacts the entire first section of the New York Times on the day following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center with an overlay of graphic color fields. There are three winsome selections from Iman Issa’s “Heritage Studies” series (2015–); the minimalist sculptures take inspiration both from objects the artist encountered in museums as well as the museum-style didactics that identify their sources, materials, dates, and provenance, making hers the only works in the show with accompanying wall text, as they are part of her presentation. There are also subtle interventions. Oscar Murillo’s Black Paintings (2017), a grouping of oil-stained canvases, hang in the rafters. Rashid Johnson’s Shea Wall (2017) presents a cinder-block partition, mortared with Shea butter, in a remake of Allan Kaprow’s Sweet Wall (1970), a participatory protest intervention staged close to the Berlin Wall, in which Kaprow and others built a cinder block wall using bread and jam as mortar. Emanuel Tovar’s Cantos Baldíos (2017) was performed at the opening night gala as well as for the public opening day festivities.  Two musicians stood back-to-back, immersed knee-deep in a block of unfired clay, as they played various simple wind instruments that emulate birdsong, in an approximation of dialogue.

During the introductory remarks for a panel on October 7 involving six of the artists in the show (Ashford, Tovar, Murillo, Issa, Tariku Shiferaw, and Mario García Torres), curator Andrea Hickey defined “poetics,” one of the terms in the portmanteau “poethical.” It’s “a literary theory that considers how different parts of a text coalesce to affect a reader,” Hickey explained. “I’ve taken that word and applied it to visual art, to think about form and composition in an artwork.” (In other words, she’s interested in aesthetics.) But she neglected, in either her remarks or her catalog essay, to define the second member of the neologism: “ethical.”

While developing the exhibition, Hickey used Retallack’s quote to spark conversations with the participating artists about whether forms could have an ethical position, and how abstract objects connect to the world around us. But any concrete conclusions drawn from these conversations appeared to be few, or at least were not presented as such at the panel. Certainly the openness of potential interpretation is one of art’s great pleasures and social functions, but I confess to a degree of weariness around the act of raising questions without offering answers. The panel discussion engaged neither theoretical arguments about ethics nor current issues around ethics in art—such as the labor disputes surrounding museum construction on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi; the violation of animal rights in artworks, such as Wim Delvoye’s Art Farm (2004–05), which features tattooed pigs; or the longstanding colonial practice of stripping cultural artifacts from their place of origin for the sake of museum and private collections.

Perhaps raising these points in the panel would have been less crucial, but for the so-called “wager” part of the exhibition—another term that passed without deeper consideration, but one that implies a gamble or risk. The panel focused on the desired effect of the exhibition, which was to exhort the viewer to engage in a process of open-ended looking. By de-emphasizing the didactic components of the exhibition, Hickey aimed to empower visitors by encouraging them to form their own first impressions. During the panel, Hickey suggested that this facilitates a “slow looking,” an antidote to the current paradigm of fast-moving media. The absence of wall texts can perhaps force viewers to make an effort to identify what is on display, rather than taking an institutional explanation at face value. Iman Issa bemoaned the ever-shrinking window for the possibility of reflection, for forms that cannot be “instrumentalized” in the service of pat meaning. She expressed a hope that the viewer would “look, think, then look again.”

“One of the things that intrigued me about this show is that you had an inquiry,” Torres said to Hickey. “Definitely the museum is the space where we hope things are slowed down—the artwork is not something that is imposed, but it’s something that is actually bringing in the question, and it’s just hoping to find who is your audience. At the end of the day, artworks are just spaces for relationships that we don’t find in our daily lives. ”But Oscar Murillo said the show was already over. He sees “Poet*hical Wager” (and indeed any exhibition) as an “excuse” to explore, exchange, and negotiate ideas. He and other artists on the panel acknowledged Hickey’s openness to a long process of developing ideas, suggesting an environment of dialogue, rather than a dictatorial model of curatorship that leverages the power of the institution to legitimize certain works; several new works commissioned for the show were created on site, in the weeks leading up to the exhibition, presumably as outcomes of these conversations.

But none of this constitutes an actual wager. The exhibition may prompt to questions about the structure of the institution, but it does so from a comfortable position within it. As Murillo said during the panel there is a “desire for the work to assist outside the confines of where we expect it.” This echoes Retallack’s desire to see art as “a form of living in the real world.” But many of the works included were so immersed in art world conceits and conversations that have been going on for half a century, it was hard to feel as though the exhibition, on the whole, was disruptive in any way to standard institutional models.

It will no doubt be argued that presenting art of this nature pushes the envelope for a Midwestern audience, as though the Midwest lacks erudition or visual literacy—and if this is the subtext, I question the assumption that such a presentation serves as a necessary supplement to what is already happening in Cleveland. If the goal is to explore art’s significance as a form of living in the real world, would it not be a bigger wager to invite something inside the institution that already exists outside of it—something perhaps already recognizable to the immediate community as a useful tool for navigating their existence? Perhaps something that adapts to our ever-increasing pace of looking and living, rather than attempting to disrupt it? Art like this already exists. But to find it, we may have to leave the museum. In Detroit, art springs up in repurposed houses to offset blight in residential neighborhoods, in artmobiles that tour neighborhoods with wandering exhibitions, and in outsider installations that have gone from local oddities to tourist attractions. In Cleveland, an ecosystem of grassroots residency programs and independent practitioners work to meet the community where it lives, while still managing to put it in conversation with the wider world.  Perhaps institutions, like these artists, could put their resources toward serving Rust Belt cities, rather than instructing them.

But that could mean risking the institution entirely. That’s not a smart wager for those housed within it. Though it may, in the end, be considered both more poetic and more ethical.

The observation that music produced for a wide audience can be exceedingly personal underscores a challenge undertaken by “Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance,“ which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit this month, and runs through January 7, 2018. The show provides ample social context in the form of posters, photos, documentation, musical instruments, and videos. There is footage from the 1967 Detroit Uprising showing tanks dispatched on the city streets and snipers firing from buildings. However, MOCAD juxtaposes this historical information with presentations that emphasize the privacy of interpretation. Cauleen Smith’s Black Utopia (2012), a double LP featuring music, lectures, interviews, and other material drawn from Sun Ra’s archives in Chicago, is configured for “Sonic Rebellion” as a listening station, where a visitor can sit in a rattan chair among scattered records and a potted plant.

In “Sonic Rebellion,” artworks are presented with little distinction alongside archival material, and there are plenty of items that fit both categories. The keyboard on which techno pioneer Derrick May composed “Strings of Life” (1987) functions as a historic marker rather than an art object. A set of amplifiers belonging to guitarist Jack White, customized in 2003 at the behest of the musician by influential Detroit artist Gordon Newton, serves as both an artwork and relic. The reference materials were drawn from local networks, grounding the exhibition in Detroit’s history of musical innovation, which encompasses Motown Records, techno culture, and the EDM scene, as well as genre-busting works by musicians schooled in indie rock and second-generation hip-hop.

MOCAD regularly relies on the creative efforts of its installers and preparators, who, for example, helped determine the visual presentation of Smith’s Black Utopia. But staff members become lenders as well in this show, with pictures, flyers, and other ephemera sourced directly from employees. There are also handbills from the collection of Miz Korona, a Detroit emcee who appeared in the film 8 Mile (2002) as an auto plant employee freestyle rapping by the lunch truck.

In conversation with this homegrown ephemera are artworks that touch on various niches within the theme—sometimes by artists from other cities. Harlem-based Bayeté Ross Smith created a Detroit iteration of an ongoing sound series. Titled Got the Power: Detroit (2017), it consists of a stack of crowdsourced boom boxes emitting a collection of stories, songs, and ambient audio. It perfectly embodies the concept of the collective merging of many individual voices into a song of place. Mickalene Thomas’s dual-screen video work Do I Look Like a Lady? (Comedians and Singers), 2016, presents syncopated smash cuts of black female entertainers, from Nina Simone to Whoopi Goldberg to a lineup of ’80s-era Apollo comediennes. The exhibition regularly recognizes the radical entertainers that soundtracked many an act of rebellion. For instance, there are posters representing the hugely influential proto-punk band MC5, which was affiliated with the far-left White Panther movement.

Punk receives a whimsical treatment with Brooklyn-based artist Nathan Carter’s elaborate “Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet the DRAMASTICS” (2016), an installation encompassing the handmade characters and paper stage sets that went into the making of the puppet-mockumentary The DRAMASTICS Are Loud  (2017), which is also on view. The film chronicles the adventures of an imaginary all-female punk band, The DRAMASTICS, as they confront failure, fame, and fortune, and eventually exit the scene. The bright and lively diorama is funny and irreverent, creates an appealing visual break from other, equipment-heavy work, and cheekily captures the DIY ethos at the heart of the punk movement, if not its more abrasive aesthetics. Carter, who has taken on musical subjects before, as in the mixed-medium installation Slayer Metallica (2012), has said that for many years he wanted to be an angry punk rocker and sees himself in each of the four band members.

A concurrent exhibition, titled “Punk House,” conveniently sited in the museum’s adjacent Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead, offered artifacts and artworks by some of the flesh-and-blood participants in Detroit’s punk scene. Curated by Kelley’s Destroy All Monsters bandmate, Carey Loren, “Punk House”provides a colorful wonderland of paraphernalia from Loren’s personal collection of ephemera and those of others within his network. It also features a commissioned interior mural by London-based artist Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) and a new site-specific Wild West–themed installation by Detroit-based artist Jimbo Easter (James J. Millross). On opening night, there was a series of live performances by local and national musicians, including experimental noise duo Kuperus/Miller, performing on the Homestead lawn.

“Sonic Rebellion” presents a multifaceted look at some of Detroit’s musical history, and the way that Detroiters have parlayed personal points of inspiration into groundbreaking music with social pushback. It also places this history in a global art context. However, even though the artworks are dynamic, they are all decidedly more restrained than the raucous performers at the opening. But perhaps, to return to James Greer, it is worthwhile to remember that, like music, art does not offer definitive answers, only the opportunity to create our own experience, and the exhibition facilitated a space for this process.

The Big B Liquor Party Store, which holds down the northeast  corner of the intersection of Trumbull Ave and the I-94 freeway in Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood, has taken on a different character of late. The third-story windows on the eastern facade, once boarded up, now display a series of recognizable figures. It’s a collection of Detroit-born poets and publishers, the second cohort of figures in artist Nicole Macdonald’s “Detroit Portrait Series”–an ongoing public art project.

Macdonald’s intention is “to tell the history of Detroit from the ground up, honoring leaders and everyday heroes from the city’s past and present through large-scale portraiture,” and using completed panels to board up windows in abandoned buildings throughout the city. The series at the Big B features activist writers and minority publishers from Detroit: Robert Hayden, the first African-American to be named poet laureate of the United States; Sixto Rodriguez, musician and subject of the 2012 breakout hit documentary, Searching for Sugar Man; Terry Blackhawk, poet and founder of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project; and others. This series was first installed in the main shed of the Detroit Eastern Market last summer, accompanied by a series of readings and workshops, and its permanent installation at the Big B coincides with an exhibition featuring Macdonald’s latest series, which features cultural activists and entertainment legends of Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhood.

Founded in the early twentieth century, Black Bottom and the adjoining entertainment district of Paradise Valley (known as “the Harlem of Detroit”) were wellsprings for African-American self-sufficiency and cultural innovation until they were razed in 1950s. This not-so-coincidentally dovetailed with the construction of the I-75 and I-375 freeways, which cut directly through the neighborhood’s main corridors, especially Hastings Street, the site of many of the 350 black-owned businesses that operated in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley during the neighborhood’s peak.

Some of this history is well-known, but much of it has been obscured, both as a passive consequence of the physical violence done to the neighborhood in the course of its transformation, as well as in a concerted effort to suppress narratives that might challenge the idea of Black Bottom as a slum that needed to be destroyed for the public good. This elided history includes the pre-Motown impact of Detroit’s musicians on American music, the influence of Detroit’s political organizers on American resistance movements prior to the Black Panthers, and the emergence of a strong black middle class for the first time in the northern United States. Key figures who contributed to the character of our nation have attained new visibility through Macdonald’s large-scale portraits.  Works from her new series are featured in an exhibition in the lobby of the Boll Family YMCA, in downtown Detroit, where they greet members and visitors as they enter. (The show is on view through February 28; a reception was held on February 1, the anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.) Subjects include big names and lesser-knowns from Black Bottom’s heyday: Billie Holiday, John Lee Hooker, and Aretha Franklin, pioneering black record producer and shop owner Joe Von Battle, longtime civil rights organizer Ron Scott, and many others

The smell of chlorine from the downstairs lap pool permeates the air in the YMCA’s lobby, where five of Macdonald’s huge paintings on plywood are propped up on easel backs made of two-by-fours. The exhibition also includes small-scale, printed versions of the other ten portraits the series; the originals are installed above another liquor store on Gratiot Avenue, the historic boundary of Black Bottom. Her work is rarely displayed at eye level, so this show is an opportunity to see the craftsmanship that Macdonald invests in each piece before leaving them to weather the elements. The figures, which sit comfortably in upper-story windows, loom much larger when one stands directly before them, and Macdonald’s impressionistic method becomes clear as the viewer draws close enough to their surface to see the subjects as abstract mélanges of brushstrokes. Macdonald has numerous bodies of work that create taxonomies of Detroit natives in public spaces–such as “Birds of Detroit,” a series of stencils portraying avian species that have proliferated in Detroit– and her comfort with street art and ongoing practice as a mural painter have well-equipped her to work comfortably at a large scale, creating visuals that are as satisfying from thirty feet away as they are at thirty inches.

When I met Macdonald in the Boll Family YMCA lobby to discuss her work, she immediately rattled off a list of changes that she noticed on her walk through downtown Detroit from the coffee shop. Macdonald has a lively curiosity about the city where she was born and raised. Her efforts to uncover and showcase hidden histories hardly preclude her keen observation of the present-day narratives unfolding to create another layer in the strata of urban development. The appearance of her work in locations that are free and accessible is a key component of her process; it is Macdonald’s wish to return these narratives to the people who lived them.

Macdonald is asceticism personified: quiet, extremely focused, breakably slender. Her work ethic and her desire to constantly shift attention from herself to the subjects of her portraits reflect the heart of Midwestern humility that beats within the old guard of the Detroit art scene. After our meandering conversation, she calls me to make the sobering addendum that she views the 1954 razing of Black Bottom as “a crime against humanity.” The so-called “slum clearance,” supported by eminent-domain land grabs for public-works projects like the interstate highway system, displaced and dismantled some of the most thriving African-American communities in Detroit, as elsewhere. Those who point to the Detroit Race Riot of 1967 (more commonly known as “The Uprising,” among communities within the city limits) as the major psychic wound of the city are missing the seeds that were planted and driven into the earth by the bulldozers that tore apart Black Bottom thirteen years earlier.

But sometimes seeds planted with pain and sown in sprawling decay yield beautiful flowers. Macdonald’s portraits are the colors of Detroit: chicory blue, verdant green, rusty reds, grays, browns, and of course, black. As we go about our daily life as Detroiters–corner store, gym, bus ride–it is energizing to be reminded that we walk in the footsteps of titans, that our histories and theirs are still alive and being written, and that someone is paying close attention.

In Detroit, just north of where the I-94 freeway cuts across Van Dyke Street, neatly separating several up-and-coming eastside neighborhoods from a stretch of no-man’s-land that remains determinedly godforsaken, a message is scrawled across the side of a dilapidated garage: “they tried to bury us but they didn’t know we’re seeds.” The message and the setting are emblematic of a particular strain of resistance to Detroit’s recent comeback narrative. Out here, it is still a struggle to rend survival from the chaos. As powers that be move to reorganize Detroit, what becomes of the communities who have held it together through a time of abandonment? What becomes of the individuals who cannot conform to the new order? What place, what tools, what vestige of old Detroit, a suffering but sovereign city, remain for them?

The answer comes in the form of a story. Set in a dystopian twenty-fourth century town-a future, as with most science fiction, just far enough away to comfortably critique the present-Beware of the Dandelions tells a tale of corporate hegemony and grassroots resistance. Presenting a story arc that plays like the plot-building sequences in a video game, the animation by graphic designer Wesley Taylor recounts the Dandelion Revolution-a populist uprising that seizes control of a factory-farm village where most able-bodied citizens are locked in a cycle of indentured servitude to the “planetation’s” production of genetically modified apples. We see the townspeople, largely of color, debating whether to take radical action or try to change the system from within. We see the brutal maintenance of the orchards, where regulations reject all but the most perfect specimens, wasting the rest. A woman working the line collapses from hunger.

The story unfolds inside a 400-square-foot performance “pod”-a modified polyhedral dome, equipped with three large projection screens in the round, a surveillance camera, and an LED lighting grid. A virtuosic, hip-hop inflected spoken-word performance resonates from the speakers. “Hey,” sings Invincible “ill” Weaver, the artist who delivers the sung/spoken word aspect of the narrative, “Have you seen the apple orchards/ Where the trees are trapped and tortured/ But the captives all look gorgeous?” Each performance is interactive, calling on the audience to stand and participate, to execute physical tasks as a collective in order to advance the narrative-thus encouraging the participants to physically embody community values.

Beware of the Dandelions is the work of the Detroit-based experimental media collective Complex Movements, comprised of Weaver, Taylor, multimedia artist L05 (Carlos Garcia), and Wajeed, a music producer, sound designer, and filmmaker. Last month’s show in Detroit, which followed pilot performances in Seattle and Dallas, represented a powerful homecoming of sorts, as the group returns to present their ongoing work of linking community organizing with the performing arts and social-justice action at Talking Dolls, an experimental design studio on the east side-coincidentally (or perhaps not) in rough proximity to the garage bearing the message of the seeds.

As a project, Beware of the Dandelions exceeds the scope of the performances. The collective started developing the project in 2013. That’s because Complex Movements has put together not just a performance piece, but a mobile platform for organizing social-justice movements. While the Beware of the Dandelions live performance is a kind of fictionalized synthesis of social-justice work, there are two other forms of activity that accompany the shows-“community mode” and “installation mode.” In the former, Complex Movement’s members run workshops that they develop in partnership with artists and activists in the host city in an effort to identify, uplift, and acknowledge the work that is already happening and understand the needs of the people who live there. In installation mode, they present the stories they have gathered in the process of interacting with locals, documenting and sharing social-justice work that goes largely ignored by mainstream media. Complex Movements uses that experience to tailor performances of Beware of the Dandelions to their audience, centering story progression around the different “emblems” that appear in the work. “We come with this framework, and different emblems get highlighted based upon what the community feels like they are gravitating towards,” said Sage Crump, the show’s producer. All the emblems are based on natural phenomena, and are represented by black-and-white graphic seals. They comprise the core movement-organizing structures that Complex Movement is attempting to model. One emblem is Mycelium, the underground root structure of fungus that functions as a single, huge, highly communicative organism. For Complex Movements, mycelium symbolizes interconnectedness and detoxification. When the graphic seal stylizing mycelium’s feathered network of roots appears onscreen during the performance,  the audience members are instructed to secretly choose two other people, and physically locate themselves between their targets, until the whole room resettles into a new pattern. The challenge of executing any given task with the group leads to variations in performance time.

Other emblems are drawn from light, plants, and animals. Wavicle finds in light’s wave-particle duality inspiration for moving beyond binaries and valuing uncertainty and doubt. Starling Murmuration, after the synchronized patterns created by flocks of birds in the sky, prompts reflection on collective decision-making and collective leadership. Fern takes the plant as a model of the fractal, evocative of the application of core values at every scale of the work. Ant Colony operates as a metaphor for thinking about cooperative work, economics, and shared resources. Finally, Dandelion is a multi-layered emblem, looking at both the decentralized spread of the weed’s seeds as well as the deeply connected taproots that make it hard to displace.

“These emblems are fundamental to how we organize ourselves as an art collective,” Weaver said in a phone interview. “They’re fundamental to the story world of Beware of the Dandelions, and they’re fundamental to the installation and the workshop mode.”

Afrofuturism is popular in Detroit, where artists use its visionary combination of science fiction and Afrocentricity to address crumbling infrastructure, government control, and population displacement in this longtime majority-black city. But attention to the aesthetics of futuristic narratives sometimes means complex issues can get simplified. In its ongoing process, Complex Movements has decisively achieved something often attempted and rarely accomplished-they have created a work of social practice that simultaneously functions as an artwork, lifts up its own community, embodies its own values, and triggers actions to promote those values. Following the performance’s conclusion, audience members enter a social-justice space, where they can make buttons, connect with fellow audience members, and receive information about ongoing work happening in Detroit that correlates with their areas of interest. Nobody will exit a Beware of the Dandelions performance without access to the resources they need to connect with on-the-ground social-justice movements, where they can perhaps test out the collaborative and communication skills they’ve been taught by the module. Complex Movements has attained a tricky balance between art and activism, not with heavy-handed, didactic content, but with technological innovation, healing lyricism, and playful participation that encourages connections among the audience. In spreading their message, the members of Complex Movements are seeding a visionary future for the confluence of art and social practice. The outcome feels as effortless as dandelion seeds on the wind.

For legendary mail and collage artist Ray Johnson (1927–1995), any ephemera of everyday material culture he encountered could potentially be art—including the bottle caps, abandoned toys, tennis balls, fragments of fractured ceramics, stickers, gloves, shells, and lost bathing suits found on his many beach walks. He made fishermen’s trolling lures, a box of neckties, and mannequin feet designed for sock displays into sources of meaning by approaching them as facts of the environment. Why did these things come into the world? Do they represent evidence of something? Can the ostensibly random encounters of life be assembled into order?

“Ray Johnson: The Bob Boxes,” on view at the College for Creative Studies’ Valade Family Gallery in Detroit through October 8, displays the contents of thirteen collections of such ephemera, assembled by Johnson and bestowed upon one of his most intensive correspondents, Robert Warner. The contents of these boxes largely consist of washed-up objects found by Johnson during his “prison walks”—his term for the daily afternoon strolls on the Long Island beach where he took breaks from the captivity of his job—mingled with overflow correspondence addressed to Johnson’s New York Correspondence School (some of which remains unopened), original artworks, and a multitude of additional objects sent to him by correspondents or sourced from unknown locations. The boxes hang on the wall, while the contents of each one are loosely arranged on plinths. Taken collectively, the boxes constitute a longstanding and intimate conversation between friends, one that reveals a fascination, even an obsession, with the accidents of objects’ travels, and the artist’s struggle to find meaning in the world.

Johnson was a notoriously enigmatic art-world character. He called himself “the most famous unknown artist,” and twenty years after his death, he remains a figure of considerable opacity, to even his closest interlocutors. Warner seems to have drawn particular inspiration and direction from Johnson. After the artist’s death, Warner left his career as an optician and sought a more meaningful path, eventually landing at the South Street Seaport Museum, New York, where he works in the letterpress print shop. During the 1980s, Warner and Johnson maintained an intensive and varied exchange in the framework of Johnson’s New York Correspondence School, a network of people who sent each other mail art in which Johnson acted as the central operator. Selections from their letters to each other make a neat line along one wall of the Valade, displaying the interpersonal lexicon that the men developed over years of conversation, with its art-world jokes and cultural references.

The complete reach of participation in the Correspondence School—which later adjusted its name, with an intentional misspelling, to the “New York Correspondance School” to underscore the back-and-forth dance of mail art communications—was perhaps only known entirely to Johnson, though among the contents of the Bob Boxes on view are dozens of contributions from NYCS members. One plinth displays a mysterious archive of envelopes that were kept in a suitcase full of Johnson’s papers that came into Warner’s possession separately from the Bob Boxes, after the artist’s death. Some of the envelopes bear full mailing addresses, while others are ambiguously labeled with major art world names, including Joseph Cornell, John Baldessari, and Now [sic] June Paik. In an interview, Warner said he thought that the envelopes were a sort of filing system that Johnson used to keep track of participants in the Correspondence School, but it is clear that he considered himself, at times, to be “in conversation” with artists regardless of whether or not they had direct communication.

Warner said that he became an enthusiastic player in the NYCS after seeing one of Johnson’s collages in 1988. Warner sent him a collage of his own—it was common practice among members of the NYCS to exchange small, spontaneous works of art—and their correspondence by mail and phone grew from there. His optometry office was at Sixty-second Street and Madison Avenue, near a number of Upper East Side galleries, and Johnson frequently dispatched him as a kind of spy, asking him to look at shows on his lunch breaks and report back. Other missions included making deliveries of NYCS packages, gathering information about celebrities like Andy Warhol, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Mia Farrow, and tracking down obscure items made by Johnson or catalogues of shows that included his work (it seems that Johnson’s passion for amassing material culture did not always extend to maintaining his own archive). Decades after the fact, Warner breathlessly shared anecdotes with me about being sent on a trip to an obscure art bookstore in the midst of a blizzard, to make a seven-dollar investment in a 1973 publication called “Famous People’s Mother’s Potato Mashers,” a collage-art publication of Johnson’s work produced by London’s Flowers Gallery. Warner told me about an encounter with Tom Wolfe on the stairs, all dressed in white: “I held the door for him, as he was going out, and Tom Wolfe said, ‘Don’t let your face freeze.’ It was those synchronistic encounters that were the most amazing for me.”

Synchronicity is a watchword for artists like Johnson, whose accumulation of cultural materials generates patterns, themes, and coincidences. The Bob Boxes were given directly to Warner, not sent through the mail, but some of the flags, toys, notes, refuse, printed matter, and odd objects included among them were addressed and posted to Johnson without an envelope. There is real artistry on the part of Valade curator Jonathan Rajewski, also an artist, in the careful—which is not to say rigidly formal—arrangements that make these clusters of objects comprehensible. Rajewski’s attention brings out the appeal that these objects once held for Johnson, giving the viewer a sense of what inspired him to include them in his archives. Supplemental objects, such as Johnson’s Cass Tech High School yearbook, are also on display, as a reminder of the small caches of memorabilia left in the artist’s hometown of Detroit. Additionally, “The Ray Johnson Videos”—some seven hours of documentary footage that filmmaker Nick Maravell took while following Johnson in 1987 and 1988—play in a screening room adjacent to the large main gallery where the rest of the work is displayed. Maravell let the artist represent himself in his own words, and this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to watch the videos in their entirety.

Though born and raised in Detroit, Johnson is not often considered a Detroit artist. Yet the Bob Boxes capture the process of material salvage and repurposing that lies at the heart of Detroit’s mentality, a once-treasured city that was discarded by the rest of the country, leaving a dedicated minority to pick up the pieces. Not every artist from Detroit is a “Detroit artist” (nor is every artist currently living and practicing in Detroit), but this, the largest-ever exhibition of Johnson’s work in his hometown, reveals the importance of his roots here. “Ray Johnson: The Bob Boxes” captures a sense of fractured optimism and a frustrated desire to salvage meaning from chaos through connection and communication.

There’s change in the air at the Cranbrook Art Museum, where Andrew Blauvelt, a 1988 MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art’s design department, begins his new job as director this month. He succeeds Gregory Wittkopp, who has held the dual role of director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research since 2011. Wittkopp steps down from his position at the museum in order to focus his efforts full time on the center.

A practicing graphic designer for more than 20 years, Blauvelt comes to Cranbrook from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., where he was senior curator of design, research and publishing since 2013. Prior to that, he served as the Walker’s chief of communications and audience engagement, and as the institution’s design director and curator from 1998-2010. Blauvelt will be joined by his husband Scott Winter, who has been named Cranbrook’s new director of development for the Academy of Art and Art Museum.

Blauvelt took a moment out of a busy transition between organizations and cities to speak with A.i.A. about his move.

SARAH ROSE SHARP  You’re a Cranbrook grad, so this is a kind of homecoming for you. Is the school as you remember it? Any surprising changes?

ANDREW BLAUVELT  Funny, everything seems “crisper”—it’s like looking at the place on a Retina display. With the recent renovation and expansion, the museum looks so beautiful. Some of the departments have moved around-my old studio space is now a digital printing lab for photography. Since I’ve managed to make my way back to Cranbrook over the years, it’s more familiar than it would have been had I not seen it in 27 years.

SHARP  With the current Nick Cave exhibition, Cranbrook forged a much closer relationship with Detroit. Do you have plans to continue that effort? What are good ways of supporting inclusivity between communities that may be racially or culturally divergent?

BLAUVELT  Absolutely. Yes, the Nick Cave project is a great opportunity to bring the worlds of Detroit and Cranbrook together, and I’m very interested and eager to do things together. I want to learn more about the Detroit scene—I think partnerships and collaborations will be important opportunities to do this. I would like to open the world of Cranbrook to Detroit, to make it more inviting to visit and explore, make it less cloistered and mysterious.

SHARP  It’s obviously too early for you to have a complete vision for your role at Cranbrook, but can you share any topline priorities, an exhibition wish list, themes, or issues you hope to explore?

BLAUVELT Before I can answer that question, I really want and need to learn more about the museum and its potential relationships. The museum is connected not only to the Art Academy, the schools and science institute on the Cranbrook campus, but also, as you note, to Detroit. Quite simply, I want to take the museum to the next stage in its life. It has great potential to be a national player in the contemporary arts scene.

SHARP  What’s your process for stepping into a new curatorial or directorial role? Do you set up your office? Peruse the collection? Schedule an all-staff picnic? How do you get a feel for an institution?

BLAUVELT  All those things and more. I need to set up my office. I need to better understand the collection. I need to meet all the staff and hear their ambitions for the museum. I also need to hear the same thing from the trustees and from my campus colleagues. From that a clear vision can be formed and informed.

SHARP  Are there any specific challenges and/or opportunities that you anticipate with this move? What about Cranbrook really excites you?

BLAUVELT  I suppose the challenge will be to work at a smaller museum, but I’m actually looking forward to it. The Walker was a fantastic place with great resources and staff—but it was also large and complicated and ultimately less nimble. Because of its scale and its position within a contemporary art school, I think Cranbrook Art Museum should embrace the same experimental mindset that motivates the Academy’s students and artists-in-residence, which means it can act more as a laboratory to test new ideas, programs, and projects—to rethink what a museum should be rather than chase after what other museums already do.

SHARP  Your partner, Scott Winter, is also taking on a role at Cranbrook, as Director of Development. Have you two worked together before? What are your hopes for this professional partnership?

BLAUVELT  Yes, we worked together at the Walker for 14 years. He’s very creative in thinking about how to engage people in a more social experience of art without sacrificing the mission or dumbing down the art. We’re more down-to-earth in our approach to the arts—we both grew up in the Midwest and share a great sense of humor, which helps [our working relationship], I think. We tend to feed off each other when thinking of new ideas or solving problems. We’re excited to be working together again. And, no, we don’t report to each other-so that will help our personal relationship!

SHARP  Tell us a little more about your final show at the Walker Art Center, “Hippie Modernism.”

BLAUVELT  The show has been my labor of love for seven years now. It took a while to come to fruition, but at long last it will open on Oct. 24 at the Walker. It will also travel to Cranbrook, which was planned long before I took the job. The show is about the art, architecture, and design of the counterculture. The term hippie modernism was actually coined by Lorraine Wild, a Cranbrook alum, about 25 years ago in an essay she wrote about the design program at Cranbrook in the early 1970s. The term stuck with me ever since and I wanted to unpack it. The words are dissonant—as if they don’t belong together. In a nutshell, it asks what influence the ideals and ethos of the counterculture had on modernism in the period from roughly 1964 to 1974. In a way, you can think of this period as proto-postmodernism—when artists, designers and architects mounted a radical critique of high modernism and mainstream life and normative values. Many art movements were birthed in the 1960s and 1970s—from Pop to Conceptualism. “Hippie Modernism” considers the art and artifacts that were not part of this canon and were excised from art and architecture histories because, in part, the revolution supposedly “failed”—if not politically and socially, then certainly aesthetically. The exhibition sees it not as failure but rather as prophecy. The exhibition contains several immersive installations, examples of experimental furniture and graphics, and a wide variety of media. It’s a bold and colorful trip back to a future that wasn’t, or one that is yet to be.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) is buzzing with activity in preparation for the opening of “United States of Latin America” (Sept. 18, 2015-Jan. 3, 2016). Organized by MOCAD senior curator at large Jens Hoffmann (also deputy director of the Jewish Museum in New York) and Pablo León de la Barra (UBS MAP Latin American curator at the Guggenheim), the group exhibition stems from a decades-long conversation between the two curators about the identity and diversity of Latin American artists. It will feature 34 artists hailing from all over Latin America, including Minerva Cuevas, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Amalia Pica and Pedro Reyes.

Hoffmann and León de la Barra took a moment away from overseeing the busy installation to speak with A.i.A. about the conceptual foundation for the show, their hopes for a greater dialogue around Latin American identity, and the energy of emerging art scenes.

SARAH ROSE SHARP  Can you give me a little taste of the conceptual basis for the show?

PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRA  We first met in 2001, but the dialogue started before then—I remember when I read your interview with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in ’99 [in an exhibition catalogue]. He [Jens] had a column for Purple magazine called “Avenidas,” which means “roads.” He would write about each trip that he took through Latin America.

JENS HOFFMANN  We were both emerging curators in the early 2000s. We both have roots in Latin America—Pablo was born in Mexico, I was born in Costa Rica. We were both looking at a lot of similar artists that are from our generation—which is also the basis of this show. These are all artists born after 1970.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  I think the oldest was born in ’72, the same year as me.

HOFFMANN  That generational bracket is also how the show came together, bringing together someone like Pedro Reyes, who is a little bit more prominent, with people who have never really shown in the U.S.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  We wanted to move toward the next generation and put many of these artists in dialogue for the first time.

HOFFMANN  And not focus on the usual countries. We have Mexican artists, we have artists from Brazil, but also artists from many other countries that are not usually in Latin American shows.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  We’re interested in this idea of dialogue beyond regions, not only between us but between these artists, and what connection they could have with Detroit, and with the art world in general.

HOFFMANN  Latin America is not as networked as North America, where artists freely move around.

SHARP  Is there a redeeming element to that regional isolation, because you get results that are a more pure reflection of a place?

HOFFMANN  Sometimes I think there is a benefit to it, because you have time to ferment something—

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  Mature it, to create a humus, or fertile soil.

HOFFMANN  But there’s a conflict, for me, around whether the work has to be somehow related to the realities in Latin America. We’re trying to negotiate those questions with this exhibition.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  I don’t think the exhibition pits the United States against Latin America, but even the exhibition’s title plays a little bit with the idea that the United States has almost taken the name of America—which is a continent—for itself. You have Europe trying to create a whole European community, so what would happen if Latin America started to work in a more unified way?

HOFFMANN  Naming is really at the core of how you define an identity of a place. Every name you give that region is somewhat inauthentic, you know? Even if you call it Latin America, you’re referring to a language from somewhere else, a culture from somewhere else. But there have been many Latin American movements about a unified vision for the continent. The whole show is based on the impossibility of defining that region.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  What you find is that there’s a diversity of voices, that there’s not one single Latin American style. We’re trying to show this complexity of practices.

SHARP  From where I’m sitting, I see two pieces that mix U.S. culture with Latin American culture.

HOFFMANN  That central mural is called America.

SHARP  Yes, I recognize Scrooge McDuck, of course, swimming in his vault of money.

HOFFMANN  And he’s superimposed on a colonial painting of an indigenous person.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  It’s by Minerva Cuevas, a Mexican artist who has been very politically active throughout [her career]. We thought it was interesting to present the work in Detroit, because of the Diego Rivera murals just next door [the Detroit Industry Murals, 1932-33, at the Detroit Institute of Arts], which people identify with Mexican art. We saw Diego Rivera murals together about eight years ago in San Francisco.

HOFFMANN  The Pan American Unity Mural [at the City College of San Francisco, 1940].

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  We thought it was interesting to present work by someone who was rethinking what a political mural could be. When you see the show, it seems very vibrant, lots of color. That could correspond to a certain idea that people have of art in the region—but if you look further into the works, upon closer examination, you start to see these other layers of content.

SHARP  Can you talk about a few pieces that capture some of the relationships or themes you are trying to cultivate?

HOFFMANN  Nicolás Consuegra’s works relate to Detroit and the post-industrial condition. There are 10 photographs taken in Bogotá, in places that removed the letters [from mounted signs on the facade] of businesses. There is this ghostlike presence that is left behind. So the work talks about urban and economical conditions, but at the same time, how much is left of a prior purpose once we take its signifiers away.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  One piece that comes to mind is the work of Ximena Garrido-Lecca, who is installing right here.

SHARP  This collection of earthenware vessels of different sizes? Is she connecting them with lengths of copper piping?

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  They’re ceramic pots from the north of Peru, which were once seen as useful but have now become decorative. She makes the sculpture become a kind of machine, related not only to the past use of the ceramics to contain water, but to the oil exploitation happening in the region today. So what happens with those truths left in the past?

SHARP  That’s a great question.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  The geometric work is by Amalia Pica, who is an artist from Argentina now living in London. It comes from a performance where plexiglass shapes are mounted on a wall, and the performers select them and bring them together into physical compositions just shy of intersecting, or sometimes overlapping. So this piece is a memory of this moment but it also comes from growing up in Argentina in the ’70s, at a time when the military dictatorship prohibited assembly by more than three people in the street. So she’s taking realities from the past, but is also moving to the future, envisioning the possibility of people to assemble together in the streets again. I think it’s these intersections and unions that we’re trying to create-how to shake up what is normally understood as art from Latin America.

SHARP  There’s obviously a Latino community within Detroit, and I think there is a desire among that community to identify with something besides Midwestern United States culture. The piece that Garrido-Lecca is working on here, for instance, incorporates copper pipes. In Detroit, these pipes get stripped out of houses a lot. They have a specific meaning in this city. So, coming into a place with your own set of signifiers, that then creates a whole different layer of meaning.

LEÓN DE LA BARRA  As an outsider, I’m interested in people’s perspectives of Detroit. Even Ximena, arriving yesterday for the first time, said, “Oh, I’m going to find a city that’s in ruins.” And the truth is that once you start looking inside it, you find that there are a lot of people doing things, running spaces—there is an energy. One of the things you can learn from Latin America is the artistic activity of emerging places. There’s a tradition of artist-run spaces, artist-run schools, which is discussed in a conversations in the catalogue. It’s not only about mounting an exhibition about art from elsewhere, but about how you can connect different cities. One of the strengths here, and in Latin America, is that a lot of these artistic scenes have responded to continuous economic, social and political crisis, and have used art to imagine a world in which to live. Art is a tool that goes beyond the market or museum exhibitions, and is significant in its own locality.

HOFFMANN  For me, exhibitions are very much linked to education and pedagogy—even the exhibition as a metaphoric journey to places previously unknown. Whether those are intellectual places or geographic places doesn’t really matter so much, because they both come together. So [the show] invites you to take a step somewhere else, which seems geographically so close, but intellectually, politically, socially or economically really far away.