Earlier this year, Rajaratnam announced that she would leave her role as partner at Mnuchin Gallery after 15 years. During her tenure there, she was known for staging groundbreaking exhibitions of artists who had long been overlooked by the mainstream art world, including Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, Alma Thomas, Betty Blayton, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and David Hammons, whose five-decade retrospective in 2016 is still on one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of the elusive artist ever mounted. In the process, she also helped to build up markets for these artists.

In a statement, White Cube founder Jay Jopling said, “I have closely followed Sukanya’s exhibition programming over the past years and consider her to be one of the most outstanding market-makers in the art world. I am delighted that she has chosen to join White Cube and I look forward very much to working with her.”

Based in New York, Rajaratnam’s new role, according to a release, “will focus on market-making and exhibition-making” across White Cube’s various locations, which currently includes permanent ones in London, Hong Kong, and Paris, as well a seasonal West Palm Beach space.

In a statement, Rajaratnam said, “I admire the curatorial integrity that White Cube brings to its artists and estates and am excited to be able to contribute to that across a global platform. We may be at an inflection point in the market and I believe it is imperative for galleries to add value through exhibition programming and content.”

White Cube will also open its first New York location later this year and hired Courtney Willis Blair, a former partner at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, to lead the space last November. Located at 1002 Madison Avenue in New York’s Upper East Side, the space’s inaugural exhibition, organized by Willis Blair, will be titled “Chopped & Screwed.” Exploring “the idea of distortion as both a formal and conceptual tool used to examine and subvert well-established narratives or systems,” per a release, the show will include work by artists like Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Christian Marclay, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

In addition to news of Rajaratnam’s hiring, White Cube also announced that it will expand to Seoul, which was first reported by the Financial Times. Citing the success of the inaugural edition of Frieze Seoul last September, the new ground-floor, 3,230 square-foot space will consist of exhibition spaces, a viewing room, and offices. Located in the capital city’s Gangnam-gu district, it will be in the same building as the private museum Horim Art Centre, which focuses on Korean antiquities and modern art.

In the past two years, numerous Western galleries have expanded to Seoul, including Gladstone, Esther Schipper, Perrotin, and Thaddaeus Ropac, which recently announced that it will add another floor to its Seoul location. Two galleries, Pace and Lehmann Maupin, that had established presences in the city slightly earlier also recently grew their footprint. And in March, the Centre Pompidou confirmed rumors that it would open a branch in Seoul, tentatively scheduled to open in 2025.

“I feel incredibly privileged that I’ve allowed my core belief in equity and opportunity to dovetail into the work that I’ve been able to do on such a prestigious platform, thereby enabling it to be seen, validated, and celebrated,” Rajaratnam told ARTnews in an interview. “Fifteen years is a nice round number. I felt it was important to start writing the next chapter of my life, and to do it on my own terms.”

In a statement, Robert Mnuchin, the gallery’s founder, said, “Sukanya has been an important contributor to the gallery over the years, an effective voice in exposing the gallery to new artists and a great partner to Mike and myself. We wish her much success in her future endeavors.”

Rajaratnam joined Mnuchin in 2008 when it was called L&M Arts, and his business partner at the time was Dominique Lévy. (Mnuchin had founded his gallery in 1992 with James Corcoran as C&M Arts, which lasted until 2005.) In 2013, Rajaratnam was named partner of the newly formed Mnuchin Gallery.

During her tenure, Rajaratnam became known for staging important surveys of major artists who at the time were under-recognized for their contributions but who have since been brought into the canon, in part because of Rajaratnam’s efforts. In doing so, she helped bring those who had long been cast to the margins in.

Those exhibitions include the first New York surveys for Gilliam, Thomas, Ed Clark, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Betty Blayton, and Lynne Drexler. Another major artist Rajaratnam has worked with is Hammons, to whom Mnuchin first gave a show in 2007. But it was 2016’s “David Hammons: Five Decades,” organized by Rajaratnam, that was key, bringing together major bodies of work from both museums and private collections.  

“I feel like it has an important work and that it has been on the forefront of something structural at this point that should have happened decades ago,” Rajaratnam said. “I’m glad that it’s happening at all.”

Rajaratnam added that though Mnuchin was not the first gallery to support up these artists—many others “have advocated for these artists and stood by them through thick and thin,” she said—it was Mnuchin’s space that could put the global spotlight on these artists.

“I knew that our shows would be game changers—and they were,” Rajaratnam said. “I knew that we could make all the difference to these artists, their markets, and their recognition. It was sort of trial by fire, but then became something that we could do over and over again. It wasn’t a flash in the pan because then subsequently their representation was being taken over by other blue-chip galleries, and our show basically cemented that place. That was an important contribution we were making.”

Rajaratnam said that after she takes some time off to recharge, she will focus on philanthropic pursuits. The first of these is to set up a scholarship fund for women from Sri Lanka to attend the University of Cambridge in England.

“That’s how I got my start—my entire trajectory was changed as a result of it,” she said.
“I would have been living a parallel life if I hadn’t done that. I want to make that available to other women who might not have the cultural liberty or economic liberty to pursue that kind of education.”

She said she also plans to work with arts institutions “to make sure that these changes are happening on structural and institutional level. I want to do that in a way that’s meaningful.”

She added, “I want my life at this stage to reflect the work that I’ve done.”

Alma Thomas, Summer at its Best, 1968, acrylic on canvas.

COURTESY MNUCHIN GALLERY

Alma Thomas, the restlessly inventive painter of vibrant abstractions, will be the subject of a major survey at the blue-chip Mnuchin Gallery in New York. Titled “Alma Thomas: Resurrection” and curated by Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner at the gallery, it will be among the largest solo presentations of Thomas’s work to date.

The show opens September 10 and runs through October 19, and will feature 35 paintings and works on paper by the artist, on loan from private collections and institutions such as George Washington University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she long lived and worked.

That opening falls right around Alma Thomas Day, which was instituted on September 8, 1972, by D.C. Mayor Walter Washington.

In an interview with ARTnews, Rajaratnam said that she started more deeply researching Thomas around the time of a 2016 retrospective of the artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem. “What piqued my interest in reading her life story and seeing her paintings was how powerfully her work spoke to the political dynamics of today,” Rajaratnam said. “The timing felt more and more urgent to the present situation that we inhabit.”

Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, and her family moved to Washington, D.C. in 1907. The artist was the first person to receive a degree in fine arts from Howard , in 1924, and she went on to work as an art teacher in the city’s public schools for 35 years. At the age of 68, she retired from teaching to become a full-time painter.

In 1972, Thomas became the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which acquired her painting Mars Dust (1972) following the show. The Mnuchin show comes as the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, readies a Thomas retrospective for the summer of 2021 that will travel to the Columbus Museum in Georgia in 2022.

Before her death in 1978, at the age of 86, Thomas exhibited at the Franz Bader Gallery, Howard, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, and other venues. In 1998, she was the subject of a traveling retrospective that visited the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, the New Jersey State Museum, the Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution, and the Columbus Museum.

Mnuchin’s exhibition is named for a 1966 Thomas painting that was acquired by the White House in 2015 and displayed in the family dining room.

Rajaratnam noted that “situating her in art history is an interesting proposition,” pointing to the ways her work aligns with the Washington Color School, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and other movements.

“She’s a very significant artist and I don’t know if she’s been celebrated as much as she should be, and that’s part of why we’re doing this,” she said. “A lot of people are still unsure about who Alma Thomas is or was, including a lot of our clients, and our platform offers a kind of reach that only few galleries have.”

Ed Clark, Flash, 1966.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MNUCHIN GALLERY

September 14 is shaping up to be a monumental day in the career of the renowned 92-year-old painter Ed Clark, who’s best known for exhilarating abstractions that he makes by pushing paint across his canvases with a broom. On that day, the traveling exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which includes work by Clark, will open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum, and that evening, a few miles away, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mnuchin Gallery will open “Ed Clark: A Survey,” with some 40 paintings and works on paper by the artist dating from 1962 to 2013.

“The show has been percolating for a number of years, and it’s finally come together,” Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner in the gallery, said in a phone interview a few weeks ago. Rajaratnam, who spoke to ARTnews while taking a break from hanging the show, said that it will be the first career-spanning show for Clark in New York—the city that he’s called home for long stretches of his life—since 1980, when the Studio Museum in Harlem presented a retrospective of his work.

Ed Clark, Intarsia, 1970.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MNUCHIN GALLERY

In recent years, Clark’s art has been seen in New York at two shows at Tilton Gallery, in 2014 and 2017, the first of which was organized by artist and longtime Clark fan David Hammons, who’s had three shows with Mnuchin. “David certainly was a catalyst here,” Rajaratnam said, noting that the notoriously reclusive artist is one of Clark’s biggest collectors. “David’s the one who started talking to me more in-depth about Ed, how he would go into the studio and buy up all these works.”

The Mnuchin exhibition, which includes loans from a number of private collections, comes as interest in Clark is quickly rising. His work is currently on view in a permanent collection show called “The Long Run” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he was one of the stars of “Painting: Now and Forever, Part III,” the five-venue focus on the medium organized this summer by Matthew Marks Gallery and Greene Naftali in Chelsea. In 2014, curator Franklin Sirmans included Clark in the Prospect.3 triennial in New Orleans, where the artist was born in 1926.

Among Clark’s many achievements is showing what was termed the first shaped canvas in modern art by Lawrence Campbell in the pages of ARTnews in 1972, as Antwaun Sargent notes in his catalogue essay for the Mnuchin Gallery exhibition. That work was an untitled piece shown at the co-op Brata Gallery in New York in 1957.

Ed Clark, Untitled, ca. early 1990s.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MNUCHIN GALLERY

In 2013, the Art Institute of Chicago presented an exhibition of the artist’s work that included one of his early shaped-canvases abstractions, a scintillating untitled 1957 collaged piece that is in the museum’s collection. As it happens, the artist was raised in the Windy City, and went to school at the Art Institute after serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. After his time in Chicago, he attended the L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and lived in the French capital for a stretch of the 1950s. Known for traveling widely, he returned to the country in the 1960s for a stretch, working at his compatriot Joan Mitchell’s home in Vétheuil.

With the opening approaching, Rajaratnam was working on various layouts for the show, trying to capture the full thrust of Clark’s career. “I’ve hung one room so far,” she said. “I’m very tough on this sort of things, but it’s beyond my expectations. It will be a good surprise for a lot of people. People in the know know who Ed Clark is, but a surprising number of people don’t know who he is.”

Sam Gilliam’s work at the Venice Biennale this year.

ARTNEWS

The most prominently placed artist at this year’s Venice Biennale is Sam Gilliam, whose new drape piece hangs above the entrance to the central pavilion in the Giardini, greeting visitors to Christine Macel’s curated exhibition, “Viva Arte Viva.” In September, Gilliam’s classic drape pieces will take center stage at New York’s Mnuchin Gallery, in his first New York solo gallery show in 32 years.

The exhibition, which will include approximately ten works, will span Gilliam’s career, but will focus on his drape paintings, which in 1968 were his great innovation after he began making beveled-edge pieces the previous year. The gallery will also premiere new paintings from his “Homage to the Square,” which Gilliam has been making over the past year. Gilliam did a 28-foot-long one as a commission for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened last September, but the “Homage to the Square” works have never been shown as a series. “He is still staining and pouring,” said Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner in Mnuchin Gallery and curator of the exhibition, “and the goal is to draw the arc to the present.” The new pieces constitute “a different body of work, but there is that connection.”

Sam Gilliam, Leaf, 1970, acrylic on canvas.

DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART/GIFT OF TIM HEADINGTON

A profile in the Washington Post last summer told the story of Gilliam’s recent recovery from medical complications and his energetic return to painting. At 83, he lives and works in Washington, D.C. He began making art in the 1960s. That drape piece at the central pavilion is actually his second appearance at the Venice Biennale. The late curator Walter Hopps, a great champion of Gilliam’s, included his work in the Biennale in 1972. But Gilliam’s visibility faded in the 1980s and ’90s. In the past few years, interest in his work has been revived, partly through the efforts of Los Angeles gallery David Kordansky, which represents him internationally (and is cooperating on the Mnuchin show). Gilliam’s work was the subject of a traveling museum retrospective organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C., in 2005, and he will have another traveling retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Basel in June 2018, but he hasn’t had a solo gallery show in New York since 1985, when he exhibited at the Monique Knowlton Gallery in SoHo.

Rajaratnam wants to put Gilliam’s work in the context of the postwar art and Color Field painting Mnuchin shows. Three years ago, for example, the gallery did a show of Morris Louis’s veil paintings. “He has been getting all this attention lately,” Rajaratnam said, “And I thought, he needs to be contextualized with his peers.”

She said she started looking more closely at Gilliam’s work after the gallery did an exhibition of David Hammons’s tarp paintings in 2010, which, curators pointed out to her at the time, bear affinities with Gilliam’s drapes. She noted that, while Gilliam has been getting museum placement recently—the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art have acquired pieces—many institutions still do not own the early drape paintings. “Pollock took painting off the easel and put it on floor,” she said. “Sam took it off the stretcher, released it from its support. He hasn’t been given enough credit for radicalizing the medium.”

El Anatsui, Metas III, 2014, found aluminum and copper wire.

TOM POWEL IMAGING, INC./COURTESY MNUCHIN GALLERY

For one of the most famous colorists in the contemporary art world, it was a shock to hear El Anatsui detail his devotion to gray and its many shades. Anatsui spoke at Mnuchin Gallery for the occasion of his new exhibition, “Metas,” which opened yesterday at the gallery’s East 78th Street location and runs through December 13.

“I like gray because it is neutral; it is neither black nor white,” said El Anatsui, 70. “There has always been gray in my work. Sometimes, it is hard to see with the colors. Gray is the color of the insides. Sometimes it was on the back (of the work), so you don’t see. But it’s there, I know it’s there.”

“Metas” is the Ghanaian artist’s first exhibition on the Upper East Side, and his first show in New York since his “Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui” retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013. It is presented in collaboration with Jack Shainman Gallery, whose 24th Street location is mounting a sister show, “Trains of Thought,” which runs through November 15.

Anatsui said that the antique setting of Mnuchin Gallery, which is housed in a historic townhouse, interested him. “It’s not just a white box,” he said. “I thought it was a great opportunity to use a space that has a peculiarity to it, all the moldings, the details.”

Anatsui has made his career by building large, grand objects out of small, ordinary ones. Much of the work here, all of it from 2014, is similarly luminous and meticulous, made of the artist’s signature liquor bottle caps hammered and stitched together with copper wire into shimmering, infinitely malleable, porous tableaux that are half-tapestry and half-sculpture.

El Anatsui, Disciples, 2014, found aluminum and copper wire.

TOM POWEL IMAGING, INC./COURTESY MNUCHIN GALLERY

In his “Metas” series, Anatsui has traded the brilliance and vibrancy of his color for a more muted exploration of form and texture to thrilling, disorienting effect. Made of dulled metal bottle caps and newsprint transformed by printing plates—a new method and medium for the artist—these works still play with light and the transformation of everyday materials, but there is a softness and tactility not always present in his more baroque, bauble-like creations. These soft murals have ripples and waves, peaks and valleys, crests and falls, and, in their subdued attention-to-detail, invite intense scrutiny towards their many component parts.

“I didn’t want to work with anything with too much color,” said Anatsui, simply. “I wanted to keep it silent because there are already so many things going on.”

El Anatsui, TKT, 2014, found aluminum and copper wire.

TOM POWEL IMAGING, INC./COURTESY MNUCHIN GALLERY

Robert Mnunchin, the founder of the gallery and an avid art collector for the past five decades, stressed how rare it was for a decorated artist to try something new. “The courage that it takes to change, especially for so successful an artist, is immense,” he said. “El could have rested on his laurels, and given us what we expected, but instead he is still changing, still stretching, and for that we should be grateful.”

In Mary Boone with Cube, 2010, the gallerist holds a block of the compressed trash in Squeeze, Mika Rottenberg's 2010 video.

COURTESY NICOLE KLAGSBRUN GALLERY, NEW YORK

For most of the 20th century, the modern world was so involved with progress and abstraction, the utopian and the man-made, the disposable and the throwaway, the obsolescent and the newer-and-better, it was hardly noticeable that the underlying material of modern art and life wasn’t really any of those things. In fact, from our early 21st-century vantage point, it appears that the true fabric of the modernist century was none other than trash. Rubbish was the repressed that is now making its return.

We should have guessed. Picasso’s earliest collages with scraps of newspaper and wallpaper should have warned us; so should have his sculptures using old handlebars and seats. Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, pieced together from canceled tickets, tram receipts, and other discards, made it clearer still. Think of the very process of collage. Remember Joseph Cornell, fitting nostalgic premodern bits and pieces into his compartmented boxes like a jackdaw into its nest, from his brother’s naive drawings to outmoded clay pipes. And let’s not forget Gaudí’s ceramic shards in Barcelona or Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in L.A. or Arman’s most radical pieces, called Poubelles—Plexiglas boxes containing trash, ranging from household detritus to the waste-bin refuse of other artists (Lichtenstein, Kosuth, and LeWitt among them).

In Italy, Alberto Burri stitched together old burlap bags into elegant abstractions, and the arte povera artists made equally refined use of impoverished objects. In the United States, Louise Nevelson, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and a host of others, including the scatter-work artists, Richard Tuttle, Jessica Stockholder, and Tony Feher, employed discards and debris in ways sometimes considered formalist or decorative. John Miller’s excrement-brown sculpture gave way to gilded miniature dump sites. The throwaway culture infiltrated art so slyly over the years that its presence went unnoticed, even in discussions of Abject art, Funk art, and Grunge.

For much of the 20th century, trash was a material that referred to the past—recycled by artists whose credo was to make it new. By using materials that hadn’t yet made their way into art, they were making it new: recycling was an oblique way of trashing the past during a period of optimism about the future. Garbage could also be a source for making form that fit the ethos of the time: it was based as much on chance as on choice. But now, with a subtle but crucial shift in attitude, trash has become a subject with ecological and environmental importance. Context is everything—should we call it ironic that in our society, suddenly aware of greenness and zero-carbon coupons, garbage is coming to the fore? The striking survey of Rauschenberg’s work at Gagosian Gallery in New York last fall couldn’t have been better timed. It revived the full greatness of Rauschenberg’s trash-based oeuvre and managed to obliterate our memories of Rauschenberg’s many late imitations of himself.

It wasn’t until the 21st century that it really began to dawn on most of us: trash, detritus, and the results of what Robert Smithson called entropy are the by-products of the Industrial Revolution and the consumerism it engendered. Trash is the inevitable outcome of a century of disposal. It is also the consequence of an age of earthquakes, floods, melting glaciers, tornadoes, and tsunamis. The earth itself very likely gets several tons heavier every day simply by absorbing garbage. It has also been calculated that if laid end to end, the nonbiodegradable plastic bottles on earth would reach to the moon and back. Space itself is littered with satellite debris, just as the seas are inundated with waste.

Recently, there has been a radical shift in our consciousness of trash, with artists now using obsolete things not just as materials but also as content—turning them into landscape, still life, and other artistic genres. This awareness informs the work of artists like Sarah Sze, Mike Nelson, Christoph Büchel, Marjetica Potrc, El Anatsui, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Kristen Morgin.

Consider three unlikely pioneering artists who chose early on to engage with trash in this way. German action artist HA Schult, feminist service-oriented artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and elusive African American conceptualist David Hammons have long been considered almost as atypical and eccentric as the man in Houston who built a house from 50,000 used beer cans. What is more interesting is that, in the work of Ukeles, Schult, and to some extent Hammons, the trash quotient—while perfectly obvious—has gone mostly unremarked upon.

“I started to work with trash in 1969,” notes Schult, whose public extravaganzas have sometimes been compared to those of Christo, but whose pioneering environmental art acknowledges the crucial role of trash. “We live in the era of trash and we are running the risk of becoming trash ourselves,” says Schult, who has his own museum in Cologne. In 1969, in an installation titled Biokinetic Situations, he filled a museum in Leverkusen with molds, fungi, algae, and anaerobic bacteria and littered a street in Munich with trash. In 1976 he covered the whole Piazza San Marco in Venice with wadded newspapers. In 1977 he staged the crash of a Cessna nose-first into the Staten Island garbage dump. Since 1996, when he began producing life-size “Trash People”—1,000 in all—he has taken this nonbiodegradable army, fashioned from crushed cans, bottles, and discarded electronic parts, to major tourist sites, such as Red Square in Moscow, the Great Wall of China, and the pyramids of Giza. (In addition to the 1,000 figures, he made 500 others for sale at $14,456 each. And they’ve been selling well, according to his manager.)

In the summer of 2010 he built a temporary rubbish hotel on a beach in Spain. Sponsored by Corona beer at a cost of about $720,000, it consisted of 12 tons of refuse that had washed ashore on beaches. Then, this past March, he took the trash people to Longyearbyen, in the Arctic.

Ukeles, too, began her trash work in 1969, issuing her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” in which she stated, “My working will be the work.” The artist, who shows with Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, queried, “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” The manifesto proposed an exhibition titled “Care,” which was to include interviews with maintenance men, maids, and sanitation workers; the contents of one garbage truck; and containers of polluted air, Hudson River water, and ravaged land. It was all to be serviced, depolluted, and conserved throughout the exhibition. Ukeles’s other projects have used recycled materials and garbage trucks. Between 1978 and 1980, her Touch Sanitation Performance involved shaking hands with more than 8,500 workers at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Since 1977 she has been the official artist-in-residence of the New York Sanitation Department.

Cultural overtones have prevailed in Hammons’s work from early on, with his attention to racial content in the ’70s. He has consistently chosen worthless and distressed materials—chicken wings, cheap wine bottles, basketball hoops, gnawed barbecue bones, plastic garbage bags, torn plastic tarps—as a way of paying homage to the inner-city black tradition, forged by necessity, of making the most of hand-me-downs and leftovers. His installations and performative works stress the dirty, worn, and impoverished rather than the clean and pure. His esthetic may appear almost accidental, but the nearly invisible Concerto in Black and Blue—an installation in pitch-black rooms at the former ACE gallery in New York—or the partly hidden tarp-covered paintings in his most recent show in the city, at L & M Arts, are deliberate ploys. They signify that his art is—spiritually, politically, and materially—from and for the streets, not the art world. (Nevertheless, gallery director Sukanya Rajaratnam reports, the show sold out at prices of $800,000 to $1 million.) His art appears to highlight not only deprivation but also the moral beauty of debris.

The landscape of waste as it relates to the inner city has also had an impact on Paul Chan and Vik Muniz. Chan’s 2004 double-screen digital animation, My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future, is a 17-minute two-sided exploration of utopia and violence based on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the Book of Leviticus (it also refers to Goya, Blake, Pasolini, Biggie Smalls, and the Iraq war). Chan went on to stage Waiting for Godot outdoors in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, in Rio, Muniz—who has a long history of making images out of chocolate and other unlikely substances—began collaborating with an association of “catadores,” or trash pickers, who think of themselves as environmental recyclers as they sort through one of the largest garbage dumps in South America. The result of the collaboration was a monumental series of portrait photographs made from dirt and trash and containing references to early Picasso and to other purveyors of clichéd masterpieces. Muniz calls them “Pictures of Garbage.”

By intention, or merely coincidence, three solo shows in Chelsea in the late fall had trash as their overt content: Ester Partegàs at Foxy Production, Mika Rottenberg at Mary Boone Gallery, and Chris Doyle at Andrew Edlin Gallery.

The Barcelona-born Partegàs has been making sculpture and installations about formerly overlooked spaces of consumption and the rubble that follows progress since 2001, when she constructed a quarter-scale airport lounge, complete with luggage and litter. From 2001 to 2003 she made a series of “Detours,” pencil-on-paper drawings replicating shopping receipts, and then a series devoted to food labels emphasizing the additives, preservatives, and emulsifiers in packaged food. Hollowmess, her 2003 installation at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, was a full-scale, trash-littered version of a highway underpass. On view at Foxy Production last fall was “More World,” in which the gallery was wallpapered with a photomural of an empty lot: weeds and trees behind a construction fence. Hanging on the mural were candy-package drawings, while sitting on the floor was Partegàs’s sculpture of a potted plant and plastic bag; adding to the mix was her video Ghost (2009), which reflects the world in a trash-strewn puddle.

Partegàs summed up her enterprise this way in a 2006 issue of the magazine Slave: “I find the subject of garbage especially fascinating as a suggestion of ‘inner dust.’ This way of looking at the city stems from my anthropological interest in the rituals of the body/community in which a decision is made to hide or to celebrate its impurities.”

Rottenberg’s Squeeze (2010), a 20-minute video loop shown last November in a boxlike room within the Mary Boone Gallery, is a mystifying allegory about trash and the globalization of production, the exploitation and pampering of women, and “the mechanisms by which value is generated,” says Rottenberg. Accompanied by the noise of compressors and compacting machines, the video depicts elevatorlike cubicles, conveyor belts of lettuce in Arizona, women being squeezed by walls closing in, and rubber being expressed from trees in India. It shows a tongue poking through a wall, and a row of buttocks appearing on an opposite wall. Migrant women workers in the lettuce fields thrust their hands into holes in the earth to be massaged by a row of kneeling Asian women in a cramped underground space. It is a surreal expression of ideological structures, fusing the social, the economic, and the political into an absurdist symbol of a global production system that is a torture chamber and a massage parlor, as well as an elaborate way of producing garbage.

In yet another sense, Squeeze is about the production of its own materials. It can be seen as a 21st-century update on Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961). To fully explain Squeeze, two details outside the video room were crucial. The first was a photograph of Mary Boone, all dolled up, holding the outcome of this global labor: a cube of compressed garbage. The second, affixed to the opposite wall, was a shipping certificate stating that the cube was sent to be permanently stored “offshore” in the Cayman Islands.

The content of Doyle’s Waste_Generation (2010), at Andrew Edlin Gallery, is also trash, but it is completely virtual. Doyle manipulated the subject into a hand-drawn, animated video in which things continually morph into other things. This approximately six-and-a-half-minute loop is from a series of five videos based on Thomas Cole’s cycle of paintings The Course of Empire. Doyle’s first video, Apocalypse Management (2009), was about destruction—the sack of a city, an approaching storm. As he explains, “In 2009 I was thinking about landscape in general—the destroyed landscape, the landscape of trash. I began thinking about trash as the other side of production or generation, and also what to do about the downside of that overwhelming technological generation.”

Waste_Generation is not only about trash but also, like Squeeze, about global technology and creativity in the face of destruction. Opening to a dump overflowing with computers and other devices, it segues into oil rigs morphing into a paper mill, whose smokestack churns out currency that flits away in the breeze. Weeds sprout, then turn into flowers, and felled trees become wallpaper patterns and oriental rugs. Factories spring up, their smokestacks belching smoke and vultures. A suburban subdivision is subsumed by ornament and symmetrical patterns. All these images mutate, adapt, and transform to the accompaniment of a soundscape composed by Joe Arcidiacono. Doyle has also begun working with dust. His 2011 performance piece and installation, titled Red Rovers, considers the lifeless landscape of Mars—the two robotic rover explorers and the red extraterrestrial dust itself.

But dust is another matter. It is related to trash but is not the same. Dust has to do with disintegration and mortality rather than with obsolete material goods. A study of dust might begin not with Picasso but with Marcel Duchamp; it would move through Joseph Beuys to the Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad, who in 2000 installed a wall-to-wall carpet piece in an exhibition in London. Those who looked closely at the carpet underfoot saw that Auad had fashioned clumps of lint into minuscule animals and figurines.

Detritus continues to be a fertile subject. Consider “Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life,” running through August at the Wellcome Collection in London. The show is about dust and rubbish, but also about bacteria, excrement, and soil. Viewers are left to contemplate Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s installation of five huge slabs fashioned from latrine waste gathered by Dalits (Untouchables) in India.

Kim Levin is an independent art critic and curator.