“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.

Weston frequently incorporates imagery and elements from earlier projects into new work, rooting her practice in repetition. For an ongoing series of photographic abstractions, the artist printed installation images on large canvases. Using glass shards repurposed from studio accidents, she roughly etches into the printed surface, redacting imagery and transforming the original photographs into constructivist compositions. By returning to earlier works, Weston hopes to rearticulate questions the initial pieces addressed. She returns again and again to one question in particular, which she posed during our recent conversation: “How do Black people forge, retain, and protect spaces of intimacy and interiority in the context of the environment that we’re living in?”

Weston associates glass with “the atmosphere of risk and violence that Black people face.” Employing various strategies to manipulate the fragile, transparent material into something more opaque and resistant, she evokes a tension between the desire to share a story and to secrete it away from probing eyes. In early works, the artist used readymade glass panes, but in 2018 she began to experiment with the material’s fleeting malleability in its liquid state. To create the draped, bell-like forms in an appeal, but, in particular, very expressly, to (i sink) (2019), Weston slumped molten glass over upturned flowerpots, referencing the planters and washbasins enslaved Black people used to muffle their voices during clandestine meetings. For other sculptures, the artist bends, curls, and crumples heated glass, generating crevices that obscure the imprinted images and writings.

Weston’s current exhibition at the Queens Museum also contends with the symbolic links between glass and anti-Blackness. A new body of sculptures, and the pictures and poems seared into their glass surfaces, allude to “broken windows” policing, surveillance, and the loaded, pervasive media images of shattered and boarded-up shop windows during recent BLM protests. Several works draw on the historical record of an unrealized nonviolent direct action that the Brooklyn chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) proposed for the opening of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Demanding action on job discrimination, housing conditions, school segregation, and police brutality, the organizers called for motorists to stall their vehicles intentionally on the roadways leading to the fairgrounds. In the first of two galleries, Weston adopts a similar tactic of obstruction with her largest sculpture to date, suspending a 15-by-20-foot grid of smoky glass panes over viewers. Ominously hovering and dramatically pitched toward the passageway between galleries, it bars access and forces visitors to detour.

This tension between presentation and refusal is central to Weston’s practice, especially in her use of language. Circling around her most recent concrete- and lead-mounted sculptures—arranged at the Queens Museum on a multilevel plinth that keeps viewers at bay—we are aware of the inscribed texts but unable to fully absorb them. Intimate phrases faintly etched in her cursive stipple appear and recede from view; we catch only elusive fragments, like “a chromium-plated draw-near to neon plastic” or“such a jettison,” and strain to discern more. Weston’s multifaceted sculptures undermine the logic of a material associated with transparency to embrace the poetry of opacity, the power of resistance, and the value of withholding.  

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Curated by John Szarkowski, the original presentation opened at MoMA just 15 months after the artist took her own life in July 1971. While the Zwirner exhibition replicated the original 113-work checklist, the expansive installation, spread across two floors, afforded Arbus’s images more room to breathe. At MoMA, Szarkowski arranged the photographs in tightly clustered groups, creating the impression of structure despite the lack of any organizing principle. Here, the framed prints were even more randomly arranged but hung at even intervals, producing a democracy of space that refused to prioritize any one image. The effect was akin to studying many of these same pictures one at a time in Arbus’s well-known Aperture monograph, which served as the MoMA retrospective’s unofficial catalogue and was for many years the way most people accessed her work.

The real gift of this re-presentation was that it allowed contemporary viewers to get a sense of the impact that Arbus’s oeuvre may have had when first assembled for public consumption. Arbus’s photographs from the 1950s and early 1960s are mostly New York City street scenes in grainy 35mm. A select few, mainly the tender backstage portraits of drag queens, possess the intimacy that would become the hallmark of her later work. When she started using medium-format cameras in 1962, her images gained detail and clarity, and her subjects moved increasingly to the fore. Held low at her chest or waist, the larger cameras enabled Arbus to engage with her subjects face-to-face. The exchange of gazes resulted in some of her best-known images, portraits that demand attention: a tattooed carny, a Mexican dwarf lounging in bed, various triplets and identical twins, a young child manically clenching a toy hand grenade. Widely reproduced in art magazines as well as popular media, these images are practically seared into our minds as “Arbuses.” Yet it is her lesser-known work—including a close-up of a plump sleeping newborn, a transgender man joyously posing with a framed picture of Marilyn Monroe, and two disaffected young women in matching raincoats—that expanded and bolstered the themes of her practice.

Though some critics accused Arbus of exploiting her subjects, others praised her as a compassionate collaborator. She was drawn to marginalized figures but just as frequently photographed so-called normal people going about their lives—on park benches, at parties, in their homes. Through her lens, Arbus captured a variety of lived experiences without imposing a hierarchy. In the press, however, her subjects were derided as “freaks” and “losers.” Even Susan Sontag, in a 1973 essay for the New York Review of Books, reduced the conversation to such base binaries as beauty and ugliness. “All the people are grotesques,” she wrote. “Do they know how grotesque they are? It seems as if they don’t.” Looking at Arbus’s portraits today, it’s hard to imagine why the initial response was so often vitriolic. Was it the outsider status of her subjects that unsettled? Or was it the intimacy of their poses and glances, their confidence and candor, the audacity of the photographer to give center stage to people who were supposed to remain outside the picture frame?

As the executor of Diane Arbus’s estate, Doon Arbus has at times wielded suffocating power over the presentation and analysis of her mother’s work. On the occasion of another major retrospective in 2003, she wrote: “The photographs needed me . . . to safeguard them—however unsuccessfully—from an onslaught of theory and interpretation.” The estate has infamously required publishers to submit articles for editorial review before providing image rights, prompting two publications, Artforum and October, to publish essays without images in protest of these attempts at censorship. Given the Arbus estate’s framing of the public reception as a battle over the images themselves, this show could be read as a corrective or a peace offering, suggesting its belated acceptance of the critical discourse as evidence of the work’s importance.

Mayer’s writing—as a critic, essayist, and translator—was often entwined with her art, so it is fitting for this show to begin with a series of text-based conceptual experiments from 1968–69 that register fleeting phenomena like firecrackers heard and cigarettes smoked. These matter-of-fact documents are displayed in a vitrine alongside a number of contemporaneous drapery studies. Seemingly incongruous, these works anchor Mayer’s parallel interests in language and temporality as well as textiles and drapery, concerns that would eventually overlap in her practice.

After making a series of paintings on unstretched canvas and other fabrics—an example on satin is included here—Mayer jettisoned her paints in 1971 and began working primarily with textiles. Initially, her fabric sculptures offered a lyrical take on postminimalism, as Mayer encouraged the pliable materials to express themselves. In the wall-bound Balancing (1972), two lengths of silky rayon and dyed cheesecloth drape from bowed rods and anchors set into the wall, evoking the sails of a ship. But the artist quickly began constructing more elaborate scaffolds for her readymade and hand-dyed textiles, resulting in volumetric works like Galla Placidia (1973), produced for her debut exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, of which she was a founding member, and shown only once since. For this commanding sculpture, Mayer layered translucent gauzes and iridescent satins in lavender, coral, and chartreuse, wrapping them around a suspended ring to create a billowing form that gathers at its center and cascades to the floor.

Only a few examples of these fragile sculptures have survived, but Mayer kept detailed photographic and hand-drawn records. Her whimsical yet exacting drawings, of both finished and unrealized sculptures, form the heart of the exhibition. The sketchy Abracadabra Sailboat (1972) resembles an early formulation of Balancing, while the more detailed De Medici (1972) documents the complex star-shaped structure of a finished but no longer extant sculpture. The knotted, sewn, and draped arrangements conjured in a quartet of colored pencil and marker drawings from 1971 demonstrate the variety and indeterminacy of forms the artist was exploring—rarely did two ideas look alike. Mayer described these drawings as plans for “impossible pieces”—an acknowledgment of opportunities falling short of her aspirations—and many never escaped the two-dimensional realm.

View of “Ways of Attaching,” 2021–22, at Swiss Institute, showing documentation of Snow People, 1979.

While Mayer continued making sculptures for gallery displays—works that are missing from this presentation—she began, in 1977, to publicly stage what she called “temporary monuments” employing ephemeral materials. Well-documented in the second-floor gallery, these ceremonial events celebrated seasonal cycles and honored lost friends, family members, and even those unknown to her. For Snow People (1979), installed in a library garden in Lenox, Massachusetts, where her sister, poet Bernadette Mayer, lived at the time, Mayer carved fifteen figures in snow and paired each with a placard that paid tribute to all the Adelines, Fannys, Carolines, and other commonly-named women of the town’s past. Naming played a central role in Mayer’s practice: she frequently titled sculptures after historical women, but she was just as concerned with memorializing those of her own time. The balloons she lofted into the air from a barren field in Upstate New York for Some Days in April (1978) bore the names of her parents, who died when she was a teenager, and Ree Morton, an artist friend then recently deceased, whose public projects inspired Mayer to pursue similar pageantry.

Mayer’s highly personal, evanescent tributes contrast sharply with the brashly monumental, industrially fabricated sculptures that her male peers installed in corporate plazas during the same period, as well as the countless historical statues that dot New York. The related ephemera displayed here, which include photographs, hand-drawn posters, and two evocative drawings of the “mooring knots” Mayer used to tether the balloons, record and preserve these fleeting events, which often had little or no audience. As a gathering of these surviving traces, the show presents an illuminating and overdue tribute to an artist who spent her time memorializing others.

For this iteration, the artist chose the sturdier but equally utilitarian particle board. As with all of Simpson’s sculptures, the work is meticulously crafted but also casually homespun: here, in addition to leaving process markings visible, she added subtle tints of color and vertical bands of graphite and colored pencil. That Enclosure was designed for cardboard is evident in its interlocking panels, seemingly collapsible or easily disassembled: two parallel sloping and peaked forms, which resemble a stairwell or a gable roof, are bisected by perpendicular segments to form a trough-like container that hovers above the ground. Poised on two pointed front legs, the sculpture appears powerful from certain angles, and from others, precarious. Whatever the sculpture’s source, it has been entirely transformed.

Simpson’s process—progressing from source images to detailed axonometric drawings to sculptures—is full of such transformations. Yet the perspective Simpson achieves in the two drawings of Enclosure on view here is so literally transcribed to the three-dimensional form that the sculpture is more like a drawing in space, possessing a disorienting and skewed flatness despite its depth. It is drawing, then, that emerges as the crucial aspect of this sculptor’s practice, the initial site of translation, wherein she transforms the commonplace into something more beguiling.

By including the original drawings and the new version of this forty-year-old sculpture in her exhibition, Simpson provides historical context for the other, more recent works on view, while drawing attention to a body of work that was woefully under-recognized in its time. What could be seen as a regressive act, revising old work, is ultimately one of reclamation.