My pieces begin as titles. Titles come to me when I’m washing dishes, or running, or showering. A recent example is Aloha Sadness (2023): I thought, That’s so dumb, but also so real. Aloha means goodbye, but also hello. I asked what would Aloha Sadness look like? I did a little research—looked up tiki culture, watched Lilo & Stitch, played that song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” in the studio.

I’m driven by curiosity, and I can get interested in literally anything. I’m less interested in judging whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, than I am in asking, What is this thing? Why is this thing? Exhibitions are a helpful way of focusing my curiosity. I can point to one and say, “That’s my oceanography era,” or that’s my how-TVs-work era.

For me, “artist” is kind of like a catchall term. Takashi Murakami’s 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum drew me to art. He was making mugs, pins, paintings… I thought, Maybe I could do one of those. I’m also a writer, but there’s something about the authority of language that feels daunting, whereas in art there’s more wiggle room.

The title of my recent show at Tara Downs gallery in New York was “Live,” and I left it deliberately unclear as to whether I meant the noun or the verb. I wanted to permit the viewer/reader to take it however they want. There’s something beautiful about the state of not-knowing, and I want my viewers to feel curious. I never want it to be, “I’m the artist, listen to me.”

I started making my quilt works in 2013, hoping to combine my love for making with my interest in painting. I wanted to be able to physically pick up colors and move them around. I also love learning how things work, down to the molecular level. If you’re dyeing something, you have to ask, Is this a cellulose fiber or is it a protein fiber? Some pieces incorporate resist dyes using wax. Since wax is nonpolar and water is a polar molecule, the two materials don’t interact.

Recently I was Duolingo-ing Norwegian, and decided to make a Norwegian-language web drama called Svak. I wanted to write a script in Norwegian to explore the materiality of weakness; I’m weak in that language. The project was about carving space for curiosity without utility, learning just for the sake of it.  

Related Articles

The 15th Sharjah Biennial Does Better At Excavating The Past Than Pushing The Present

The Painter of Modern Life: Kerry James Marshall Aims to Get More Images of Black Figures into Museums

When Marshall graced the cover of Artforum in 2017, inside, artist Carroll Dunham called him “one of the most consequential painters among us.” Around then, his goal was to make seeing Black figures in museums no longer exceptional. By and large, his plan worked: around the 2010s, as critic Julian Lucas put it in the New Yorker, matters related to the representation of Blackness became “a national conversation,” led by artists like Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Charles White. Now, the conversation is shifting beyond representation, and as ever, Marshall is two steps ahead. His new commission for this spring’s Sharjah Biennial is not a painting at all. Instead, the artist created an installation resembling an excavation site that engages histories and fantasies of slave trade and colonialism in the Arab world.

It’s rare—and risky—for an artist to depart so dramatically from an approach that’s brought considerable critical and commercial success. But Marshall’s departure is less surprising when you look closely at what he’s doing: his paintings have always incorporated critiques of painting, and even as figures dominate his canvases, they’re also emphatically elusive and opaque. A.i.A. spoke to Marshall about his big pivot.

Why did you decide not to include a press release or any text for “Exquisite Corpse: This Is Not the Game?”

I didn’t want to give anybody a crutch for figuring out the show. I wanted them to really look. It’s become common for people to lean too hard on the press release to try and figure out what the artist is saying. I wanted to break that chain of behavior. I put a lot of energy into doing the work, and it’s not that opaque. The title is a clue to let you know that it’s not random choices being made.

What are some of those choices?

Each exquisite corpse has four segments, and each segment has a different version of my signature. They all represent me at different stages of my development. There are Black figures that look a lot like the images I do all the time, but there’s also some cross-hatching—I don’t use that technique much now, but I used to.

With each piece, I started with a head, then created a body. Together, those segments constitute relationships and meanings. I’ve described myself as a history painter, and that’s relevant here too. I’m looking at history and trying to draw out connections that people don’t automatically make.

What’s an example?

In Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Iceberg), 2022, there’s a man’s head at the top, connected to an iceberg. The iceberg becomes a pair of pants, and his feet are in sneakers on a basketball court. The portrait is of a man named Tippu Tip. He was one of the wealthiest African slave traders. He’s from Zanzibar; some people also describe him as Arab. There are viewers who might recognize him.

All kinds of people have profited from imperialist, colonialist, and commercial transactions, and all the exquisite corpses speak to those complicated histories. Today, you have the NBA and all those basketball players flying around and slam-dunking—this is happening in the wake of that history. History isn’t always tragic, but it is always complicated. My paintings tackle history in its most complex form. Nobody is getting off the hook.

Still, I really tried to avoid making any parts look grotesque, as the Surrealists often did. You can demonstrate how much you care about the representation of Black people by not treating Black people like silly putty that you can make into any kind of form you want. If “exquisite” means anything, it means do the thing well, make it elegant. I will not make monsters; that’s just too easy.

Doing the thing well has always been essential to your work, but at first glance, some of these paintings might look less finished. Have you experienced pressure to keep making art in your signature style?

Yes. Artists are professionals. There’s nobody who goes to art school who doesn’t mean to come out of there and be a professional. No matter what they say, all the things we do are aimed at a certain kind of mission. Part of that mission is to achieve recognition, and to establish the kind of singularity that sets your work apart from everybody else’s—and, in doing that, to try and produce something that might be meaningful. Some artists might call that a careerist position. But I think the moment you sign up to go to art school, you sign up for a profession.

Your project for the latest Sharjah Biennial, Untitled: Excavation, was certainly not recognizably Kerry James Marshall.

But it is consistent with the way I think about everything. The Sharjah Art Foundation asked me if I’d make a permanent installation. The title of the biennial is “Thinking Historically in the Present,” which is what I do. I developed a proposal for land they acquired in Al Hamriyah. In that square, the Foundation is building a café and doing some landscaping, expanding their footprint. I thought I’d do something to interrupt that development.

What disrupts development in that region? Hitting an archaeological site! Suddenly, you have to pause and figure out how to build around it. So I decided to create an excavation site. First I asked if there were an archaeological site in that particular place in Sharjah, what would it be? I had never been to the Middle East, but I did know 1001 Arabian Nights, that set of fairy tales from the Middle Ages based in the Islamic world. I wanted to confront how history is part fact, part fiction, and part fairytale, because people tell stories that sound nice and exciting to them.

The biennial also dealt with the impact of colonialism. Well, the Arab world participated in colonialism too. Egypt was a colonial empire, and today, people speak Arabic in a whole lot of places where Arabic didn’t originate. Egypt has been occupied by the Sudanese, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs—like an exquisite corpse, broken up into four parts. The installation includes a mosaic with four segments. The top segment says “head” in hieroglyphics; then “torso” in Arabic; “pelvis” in Roman; and “feet” in Greek. That mosaic is in an empty pool, part of the small villa I created.

What else is in the villa?

It has three rooms and a small courtyard. You view it from a footbridge that hovers above the site. It’s all connected to the 1001 Nights tales, and to the Arab slave trade out of Africa. Maybe the villa belonged to a merchant. In all the 1001 Nights tales, there are genies, or jinni, as they’re called in the Quran—mischievous or evil spirits. In fairytales, you rub a lamp, and the genie comes out, then gives you three wishes; they’re servants. In the 1001 Nights, they are always Black.

I read an early translation by Richard Burton. In that version, the whole narrative starts when two sultans discover that their wives have been cheating on them with a Black man. Then they decide women can’t be trusted. You marry them one night and kill them the next morning!

It sounds like for you, combining exquisite corpses with history painting is a way to get at the idea of history as a combination of fact, fiction, and fairy tales.

Exactly. I want to undermine that tendency to project a certain kind of image of who we are into the world, and to interrogate our relationship to the struggle, and to the history of slavery. None of it is as simple as it seems.

You were making figurative paintings before the big boom, and now, you’re onto something new.

I’ve always gone against the grain. In 1966 Ad Reinhardt declared he was “making the last painting which anyone can make,” referring to his monochromatic black abstractions. Well, that was just a few years after I was born.

You told an interviewer that when you were applying to school, someone said your portfolio was too varied, that they wanted to see more consistency.

That comment has haunted me for most of my career. I make works because I want to see what they look like. I make works because I want to understand how images operate, so that I can best use those operations to do the kinds of things that I think need to be done. I’m not limited to doing one thing, because one thing never covers all the bases. When Jackson Pollock hit the end of the road—when he couldn’t see himself doing any more of those drip paintings—he crashed his car. Mark Rothko, too [he took his own life]. You can only make ephemeral rectangles for so long.

Some younger artists have expressed skepticism toward the rise of figuration. It’s less a critique of a work itself, more an uneasiness toward the tokenism institutions bring to it. They’re also wary of the way representation gets conflated with material change. Such criticism is only possible because of the work that artists of your generation have done: now, it’s no longer so exceptional to see Black figures in museums. But do you share any of that skepticism?

You can’t be all that worried about what other people might do with things that you produce and also reap the benefits of making them. It’s all about finding a formal solution to whatever problem of representation you’re trying to address. The market forces people to look for a gimmick, but those things won’t last long. Novelty is not that interesting, but for a moment.

The best way to sum it up comes from the avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor. An interviewer asked him about how he felt watching younger artists, who seemed to be capitalizing on his innovations more than he’d been able to. The interviewer asked if he was bitter. He said [paraphrasing], “Bitter?! I am not bitter; nobody asked me to do this.”

For me, I’m just doing what I think needs to be done. I do the pictures I want to. I always have. If they have an impact on people, that’s fine. 

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, sculptor Catherine Telford Keogh explains how she conglomerates trash and landfill into striking sculptures.

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington

Mostly, I guessed wrong about the show. The exhibition focuses on works she made around the 1910s, in series and on paper. Still, I was fascinated by how similar the early and late works are. In both periods, she often used watercolor to draw bold lines. And in both, her watercolor was rarely, well, watery. O’Keeffe laid the paint on thick. She liked pairing greens with pinks—though the complimentary combo grows much bolder in those works from the end of her career. She’d try out the same composition with subtle variations, often leaving lots of the paper raw, working in series. You get the sense that spending time with the scene at hand is more about grasping and distilling its essence than it is copying it precisely.

One of O’Keeffe’s assistants, Carol Merrill, writes in a memoir that the artist kept her blindness private during her lifetime. She also recounted to Merril that she lost her vision slowly, but adjusted to blindness rapidly. Still, O’Keeffe was encouraged to keep it private by her dealer, who worried it would devalue her work. So often, we celebrate artists for helping us see the world differently; yet so often, we are reminded that certain perspectives are too different, unwelcome.

The oil on canvas works are traditionally considered her greatest hits, but critics everywhere—Jackson Arn in the New Yorker, Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post, Johanna Fateman in 4Columns—are loving these works on paper. They point to the obvious sense of freedom she felt in her youth, and absent the perssure of a canvas. It made me wish that more of the works she made late in her career, hiding her truth from an ableist world, could have been up at MoMA, too.

There is actually one painting on view that she made while blind. But it’s not on the checklist or in the catalogue, and it’s displayed in more of a stairwell than a gallery. Don’t miss it. It’s called From a Day with Juan II (1977), and it’s from a series of canvases she made that shows a foreshortened, rectangular gray gradient extending upward into a blue sky. In the slideshow up top, I’m including some other works she made after going blind—excerpts from series, works that I’d have included if it were up to me. They speak, I think, to the astonishing persistence of her artistic vision, which outlived her ocular one.

Other sculptures—delicate and glassy, hearty and crystalline—sit on plinths that are made of dirt, yet perfectly rectangular. Upstairs, she’s showing photographs made from an astrophysics archive. As art-science crossovers proliferate in the art world, Akashi’s stunning work stands apart as it cultivates wonder, humility, and awe for the beauty and complexity of the natural world. Below, the Los Angeles–based artist discusses how curiosity and chaos inform her approach.

A lot of people pointed to the wads of chewing gum and asked me, is that bronze? Is that glass? But no, it’s just gum! I was drawn to the idea of mastication, and to having this unnamed material—saliva—as a crucial component. I tried to choose pieces of gum that had visible tooth marks, impressions of the body. Actually, I had a nice chat with [artist] Haim Steinbach, who also shows with the gallery, and he called the gum “sublimely offensive.” I thought, well that’s a nice summary; I think I’ll borrow the term.

The plinths are rammed earth, an ancient building technique where you use tools to stamp and pound dirt and Portland cement into layers. The cement works as a binder; without it, the dirt would just crumble once it dried. With this and other materials, I wanted to play with ideas of permanence. The gum might seem like the most temporary material in there, but in actuality, it might be the most archival material I’ve ever used. Some of these sculptures feature a broken friendship necklace as well.

I was trained in photography, which got me thinking about time, and how to make fleeting moments permanent. But as my practice has grown, I’ve been playing with longer timescales and different ideas about permanence, trying to get outside of the human perceptions of duration. My first step into deep time involved working with fossils. Now, in this show, I’m working with images of different objects and phenomena in outer space—these exist on their own timescale, too.

In the galleries upstairs, I’m showing images taken by researchers using telescopes. I made contact prints of these from glass-plate negatives housed in an astronomy archive in Pasadena. They have 100 years of glass-plate negatives, and someone made copies that I was allowed to borrow and take into the dark room. When you make a contact print, you lay the negative directly on the paper; you don’t use the overhead enlarger.

I trained in the dark room, in analog, chemical-based photography. I graduated in 2006; and by now, that equipment barely exists any more. So I was forced to figure out what was important and meaningful to me about that way of working. I really liked the idea of creating such a direct image. And, some aspects of those processes are similar to making molds and casts.

In the archives, I was initially trying to find images of phenomena in outer space that I thought would mirror different kinds of interpersonal relationships on Earth. There’s one photograph of a galaxy merger, which occurs when a larger galaxy latches onto a smaller galaxy and starts to pull it into one of its arms. It’s also known as galaxy harassment.

I used to always say that I liked materials I could have conversations with, and I still believe in that. But more and more, I’m starting to think about my process as containing both control and chaos. I’ve realized more and more that I’m using control to figure out how to talk about that entropy with other people through sculpture. I’m not premeditating a form and then executing it precisely—there’s always an engagement with chaos.

My work is often about encouraging people to look at things in broader, less human-centric perspectives. It’s not about forgetting about humans entirely, but considering where humans fit in a much bigger system. I’m after that feeling of being humbled and experiencing wonder at the same time. I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything, but I do I have a certain sensibility, or a particular approach to existence, that I am trying to get across in the works.

—As told to Emily Watlington

The more gimmicky the space art, the more headlines it generates. Jeff Koons and Elon Musk—a match made in neoliberal hell—have teamed up for a new project launching (literally) this summer that allows collectors, perhaps bored of buying on Earth, to own art on the moon. Koons is sending 125 sculptures depicting different lunar phases to the moon on a SpaceX rocket, then pairing them with Earth-bound editions, each featuring a gem that plots the precise location of their lunar counterparts. Naturally, the editions all have corresponding NFTs.

If you could send anything to the moon, why would it be … a moon? Never mind that the lunar phases are irrelevant up there, since they exist only from an earthling’s perspective. If the collaboration is supposed to make gonzo ideas like colonizing Mars seem more humane, then Koons—whose shiny balloon dog sculptures are infamous for their abrasive vacuity—is an odd choice of artist. Instead, the collaboration has the opposite effect: it underscores the idea of the private space sector as a plaything for the ultra-rich.

You might think that the sky’s the limit with space art, but in fact, there are many constraints. Even Koons—one of the richest living artists, collaborating with one of Earth’s richest humans—complained about cost. His solution is the most obvious one: make the sculptures tiny. But other artists are getting clever and resourceful, finding ways to work around the material and corporate limitations.

LAST YEAR, WHEN CHINESE CONCEPTUAL ARTIST XU BING had to postpone his rocket launch, it wasn’t due to the technical delays that are all but expected with such a complex feat of engineering. Instead, it was because Chinese officials required the artist to prove, before sendoff, that the Chinese-looking characters painted on the rocket’s exterior were indeed, as Xu claimed, nonsense. If he were sending a secret message to the world—or to extraterrestrials—the government didn’t want to be the last to know.

This was challenging. How do you prove that something is nonsense? The prompt stumped the artist for a while, until he reframed the question—how do you appease a government bureaucrat? Eventually, he offered a certificate confirming the message was indeed gibberish, and that seemed to do the trick. Ready for takeoff.

When I visited Xu’s Brooklyn studio last fall, he told me he got the idea for Xu Bing Tianshu (2019–20) when a space company approached him to collaborate. He had already developed the characters for one of his previous works, Book from the Sky (ca. 1987–91), a set of scrolls containing 4,000 of them. When I asked him which company, he said he couldn’t tell me. It wasn’t hard to look up, though: it’s i-Space, a private Chinese company. I suspect he avoided naming them because the rocket didn’t make it through the atmosphere before it blew up. Xu and his team found the beat-up spacecraft the next day in the Gobi Desert, where it left a 90-foot-wide crater, then displayed it at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing. The resulting installation was a reflection on our species’ small role in a big world, one that inspires humility and awe in the face of a universe that we can barely comprehend. It’s a poignant piece, but a big hole and a broken rocket probably isn’t the publicity the company wanted.

Then there are size and material constraints: exorbitant costs, limits as to what can survive temperatures far below freezing, the whole zero-gravity thing. Rockets often drop off several satellites belonging to various parties in a kind of rideshare. The more weight and room they take up, the more expensive the lift. The New York–based artist-investigator Trevor Paglen came up with a clever solution for his 2018 project Orbital Reflector. He sent up a balloon in a satellite with a device that would inflate it when it went into orbit. Paglen chose lightweight, reflective Mylar that would reflect the sun, making the balloon visible from Earth at twilight and dawn. The artist wanted to highlight the best that the private space industry has to offer—exploration and innovation free from military or surveillance agendas—with a project that, like the best of space artworks, was meant to inspire wonder and awe. Sadly, during that year’s government shutdown, furloughed FCC workers weren’t able to grant the clearance necessary to inflate the balloon after it went up. The satellite was lost in space, along with the $1.5 million that it cost to produce.

Failure and humility are part and parcel of space exploration, though. That’s how Xin Liu, an artist and curator in MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, put it when we spoke in February. Liu was amazed by all the resources offered at the Institute when she arrived as a graduate student in 2015—not every artist gets to share a water cooler with world-class scientists and engineers. Liu, who has a background in engineering and in performance, had long been interested in “experiments in measurements,” and was eager to scale up. But she confessed that it was only after her first zero-gravity flight that she began to ask an important question about sending art into space: why? Often, in STEM, the answer is, “to see if we can,” but that risks the consequences posed by nerds eager to see if they can split an atom who wind up inventing weapons of mass destruction.

In zero gravity, Liu found herself feeling sad and lonely. Something she had known her entire life—“the ground that had always held me”—was gone. She felt a similar sense of loss when she had her wisdom teeth removed: a part of her body was gone. And so, in 2019, she mourned by sending one tooth briefly into space. Soon, she began to wonder why many humans share such profound curiosity about the universe, and thought perhaps the impulse might be as natural as hunger or love.

Liu documented the launch of her wisdom tooth in a virtual reality video, Living Distance (2019), which will be on view this summer in her solo show at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. For another project, she launched potatoes into space for 30 days on a payload she designed herself; now, she’s planting them in the Pioneer Works garden. These are the basis of educational workshops that will culminate in feeding those potatoes to the children who sign up. When she told me this, I was flummoxed, and I followed up with that question she mentioned earlier: why? And she said, because she wanted to insist that space exploration shouldn’t just be a domain for eccentric billionaires. She hoped to bring it home for the next generation, so they might start to imagine their roles there.

DOES SOMETHING TAKE ON NEW MEANING when you send it into space? If it’s that easy, it would explain the odd symbolic gestures that litter recent history: humans have sent up dinosaur bones, a Nobel Prize replica, September 11 artifacts. In 2001 Pizza Hut even made a delivery to the International Space Station on a resupply rocket. But for Xu Bing a work doesn’t count as true “space art” when you just launch objects made for Earth into space. (For instance, Amoako Boafo’s 2021 project “Suborbital Triptych,” for which the Ghanaian artist sent up three paintings via Jeff Bezos’s private rocket company, Blue Origin.) But Tavares Strachan’s Enoch—which hitched a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 with Paglen’s balloon in 2018—is a good example of work that engages meaningfully with the conditions of outer space. Strachan’s work comprised a 24-karat gold urn containing a bust of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut, who tragically died in a 1967 supersonic jet crash, before ever making it to space. The work is a monument to what could have been, a way of helping Lawrence realize his dream posthumously.

This summer, Xu is planning to launch the world’s first satellite designed strictly for art’s sake. He knows it’s the first because there are about 6,000 satellites floating around right now, and each is categorized by its primary function. Xu hopes to collaborate with museums and invite artists for “residencies.” This is welcome news: the most thoughtful of the space artists is now leading the next wave. Xu’s satellite is less a tool for sending up objects than a conduit for using space as a medium. If all goes as planned, it will have screens to play videos, and cameras to take photos. The satellite should also be able to collect data from neighboring satellites, and transmit Morse code. Xu told me he wanted to start the residency because he hoped that encouraging free exploration from other artists might help expand his own imagination when it comes to this vast newly accessible territory.

It’s surprising that so much space art is so dull, given that outer space, like most good art, inherently asks all these existential questions about where we come from and what it means to be human. It’s why Bill Clinton had a lunar rock in his oval office—he’d point to it when debates got heated, and it would calm people down by making whatever problem seem smaller. If a rock can have that effect, you’d think it’d be almost too easy to make good space art.

The problem seems to be that, for a few powerful men, space elicits not humility, but a desire to conquer. Today, artists have a unique opportunity—and even responsibility—to shape our perception of, and role in, our extraterrestrial future. What could possibly go wrong?!  

Art in America‘s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, painter Madeline Peckenpaugh explains how she creates her beguiling paintings. Her show “Farsight” is on view at Alexander Berggruen through May 17.

I start by mixing a palette, and as I mix, I get an idea of what the painting will be. I’ll have a general sense of the palette within a few minutes: they usually involve interactions between earth tones and bright, saturated colors. But I spend a lot of time figuring out the light and contrasts, and a palette can take a sharp turn quickly if it’s just not feeling right.

Lately I’ve been starting with the background, then working my way to the surface of my paintings. I like making the background look like it was the last thing that happened, even though it was first. I’m often building up thick paint, then wiping it away, and the wipes leave marks. But I change the process up from painting to painting—I always want to stay surprised and spontaneous.

I mostly draw imagery from everyday experiences: memories, places I’ve lived, things I see on walks. Sometimes, I’ll see something I liked in one painting, and then I’ll try it again in the next one.

For Convergence (2023), I started off building up layers of dark acrylic dye washes. But I couldn’t figure out the space at all: it was too abstract and looked almost underwater. Eventually, I flipped the canvas over and started painting on the back. You see the stains from the reverse side at the top, and at the bottom, I painted over them in oil. The harsh horizon line helps both parts feel like they’re in the same space, even though, material-wise, they’re very different.

I keep paint skins in my studio, made from paint I took off old paintings. I’m often holding them up to canvases to see what needs them. Sometimes I’ll throw in paint from another palette. I almost want it to feel like you could just peel it off.

Usually, I’m working on four or five paintings at a time. It’s helpful to bounce between works. I can finish a painting in one day, and usually I find those to be the most successful—it means I got the full idea out and I don’t have to go back in and fix it, which sometimes makes me feel on the verge of “designing.” For me, it’s always about spontaneity. —As told to Emily Watlington

You can see this in the canvases he made as he neared that surgery and post-op. Viewing a painting like The Japanese Bridge (Pont japonais), ca. 1918–24,one assumes that the vibrant chartreuse and heavy dabs of crimson must have looked slightly more naturalistic to the artist—they are so unusual, so different from his earlier, iridescent pastel palettes. In Weeping Willow (Saule pleureur), ca. 1921–22, gestural lines blur the image until it veers into abstraction. Without the title as a guide, the arboreal referents of his arching brushstrokes would hardly be recognizable.

In “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape,” on view at the St. Louis Art Museum through June 25, the enduring impact of Monet’s vision hits hard. I mean both his literal and artistic vision—these were inextricable for the plein air painter. The show highlights the rhymes between his work and that of the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), focusing specifically on works both artists made in the gardens of Vétheuil, in northern France.

In the catalogue, curator Simon Kelly notes that Monet’s late work had a profound impact on Abstract Expressionism more broadly, prompting painter and critic Elaine de Kooning to coin the term “Abstract Impressionism.” The AbEx movement took off across the pond a couple decades after Monet’s death, and it’s clear that Monet charted some kind of path for the movement.

The connection is so strong, in fact, that in this show, guessing which paintings were made by whom is not as easy as you’d think. “Monet/Mitchell” ought to be in the curatorial handbook of how to make an argument with objects: their shared sensibility is wholly irrefutable the minute you enter the galleries, and its significance deepens the closer you look, the more you read. This is an elegantly pared-down version of an exhibition that premiered at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris last fall, where some 60 canvases portrayed their shared immersive and intuitive approaches to landscape.

Early on, Mitchell claimed a debt to Monet. Mitchell was born in Chicago and active in the New York AbEx movement in the 1950s, but after that, she worked as an expatriate in France for more than 30 years, arguably following in Monet’s footsteps, joining him posthumously in his garden. But eventually and understandably, she grew tired of being bombarded with lazy comparisons to a canonical male artist. In 1957 she stated with characteristic directness that she “liked late Monet but not early.” By this, she meant—whether she realized it or not—that she liked the paintings by the Monet whose vision had grown dull and blurry.

Both artists painted on big canvases, often polyptychs, using vibrant colors and gestural lines. For Monet, but never Mitchell, this sometimes meant muddying up the hues in a tumbleweed-like haze. By 1986, she was disavowing his influence, and declared him “not a good colorist.” The muddy blobs help her case. She was sure to heighten her colors: lemon yellow where he might have opted for gold, for example. And certainly, she was more comfortable with raw canvas than he (the Impressionists were always dodging claims that their works looked “unfinished”). To distance herself from him even further, she began to mispronounce his name intentionally, calling him “Monnet,” to rhyme with “bonnet.” Monet who?

Both painters nevertheless drew imagery from the same garden and deliberately abandoned horizon lines, that hallmark of landscape painting. They both created all-over effects, though with Monet, you might glimpse a fuzzy arch that’s supposed to be a bridge, or a hazy tree that orients you ever so slightly in space. It seems undeniable that Monet’s vision helped free him from some of painting’s conventions, the ones instilled in him during his time at the French academy, and that this freedom prompted Mitchell and her peers to forsake them more emphatically.

History rarely proceeds in a linear fashion that allows the tracing of cause and effect. Still, the question of whether a few visually impaired painters changed the history of art forever—remember Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas too!—remains a tempting one. The paintings here seem to make such a trajectory plain as day, and it matters because it has implications about disability I consider political.

Too often, the vital contributions of disabled people to history and society are overlooked, or considered exceptional rather than foundational. Too often, the history of innovations born of impairment—the telephone, the curb cut—gets forgotten, and ableism carries on, despite all evidence of its illogic. Too often, blurred vision like Monet’s is described as “bad” or in need of correction; it gets labeled a deficit rather than a valuable alternative perspective. And too often, we look for annals of disability in the margins, when time and again, they are right there, in the canon, altering art history’s course.

As with most of his works, a voiceover accompanies the dance. It has a narrative that doubles as prompts for the dancers, but also bleeds into the realm of description. This comes naturally for Núñez, who is visually impaired, though he also includes a separate, live audio description track conceived specifically for blind audiences. For The Square, Núñez, who was born and raised in Costa Rica and is currently a fellow at Princeton University, instructs his dancers to feel the elements, the vibrations of their ancestors, and their third eye. He sounds more like a yoga instructor than a ballet master, encouraging dancers to listen to their bodies rather than dominate them. He wants them to get into a trance.

Núñez says he is unlearning his training in the school of German expressionism as typified by Pina Bausch; in that context, he was taught that to dance is to suffer, an attitude he regards as both Western and ableist. When his dancers generate momentum, they’re instructed to let the energy carry them where it may—a method he describes as decidedly decolonial. Rotations and undulations mark his choreography, dancers revolving around one another as they move, their spines billowing like inchworms. Núñez said his “vortex” method evolved from his trouble judging distances: when everyone rotates around one point, it helps him predict their positions to avoid collisions.

The Square has a score by Alfonso “Poncho” Castro, who uses indigenous Central American instruments like the carraca, basically, a donkey jaw modified by ants; the insects slowly remove the flesh and loosen the teeth. Played with a stick, the carraca produces a sound that Poncho mixes electronically to intone at 432 hertz, “the frequency of the universe,” as Núñez describes it. He presents the frequency as a gift to both the dancers and the audience, saying it “automatically invites people to rest.”

Despite all this, Núñez insists his practice is not one of healing. “I want to nurture and energize my body,” he said, “but I also love this state of feeling the wounds.” He added that, “in marginalized communities, when you are communicating to the world that you are healing, you risk removing the responsibility from all the oppressive structures.” His nuanced approach to the dynamic is a sort of extension of his “vortex” method, with a focus on neither nurturing nor wounds but, rather, both, swirling together. 

In a time when so many artists dabble in video, Nguyen-Chi stands apart for her mastery of cinematic storytelling. Like a true filmmaker, she collaborates with skilled cinematographers and musicians in beautifully shot works built around compelling narrative structures. In Violet Belly, her mother is onscreen telling her story, so it’s understood that she survived, but we’re never told how—just left suspended in blue.

Before studying at Germany’s famed art school Städelschule, Nguyen-Chi, now based in Berlin, worked for a Swiss NGO helping people exposed to Agent Orange. Violet Belly completes a trilogy that deals with Cold War history from her Vietnamese and German perspective. All three personal, poetic videos ensconce viewers in a blue expanse, and she plays with modes of display. When she showed Violet Belly last year in a former refugee center in Amsterdam, now an art space called de Appel, Nguyen-Chi shoved a large, jagged mirror through a slanted projection screen. One evening, a musician performed a live version of the soundtrack on a cello as the projection danced across her instrument. 

This summer, Nguyen-Chi will cover the floor of Norway’s Kunsthall Trondheim with hundreds of ping-pong balls, where she will show two works from the trilogy together for the first time. A mirrored game table will bounce the light from video projectors instead of balls, in reference to Cold War “ping-pong diplomacy.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen-Chi is at work on a new trilogy about three Vietnamese women: her mother (once again) plus an activist and a filmmaker. She said that each of them “embodies some form of resistance, and defines their own freedom despite limitations.” She has borrowed footage left behind by the filmmaker, who documented the Vietnam War, some of it literally drenched in blood. Nguyen-Chi is an artist who handles haunting stories without reducing or sensationalizing them, so it’s hard to imagine such delicate material in better hands.