After training those artisans, Adams began working as he does to this day, unraveling Islamic prayer rugs and meticulously reweaving them with beads that evoke the zikr or Tasbih strand that Muslims use for prayer. It’s “a symbolic gesture,” he said, a way to make his own space within Islam as a queer mixed-race Muslim, and to consider “the aspects of my identity that were in conflict with each other.” Today Adams employs a team of 16, including his former painting students and their relatives, as well as his own family members, to help him finish sprawling tapestries that have the scale and wall-power of paintings. Several works incorporate worn-out linoleum flooring ripped up from friends’ and neighbors’ houses, a building material associated with working-class homes. His 2022 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Desire Lines,” included the 10-foot-long, earth-toned Langa (2021), made from wood, plastic, glass, stone, nylon rope, wire, and cotton. The beige X across its center is based on an aerial Google Maps image of the footpaths grooved into the land between the Cape Town community of Bonteheuwel, where Adams grew up—designated for “Coloured” people during the apartheid era—and Langa, an adjacent Black suburb.

Recently, many early-career artists trained in fine art have been following a path similar to Adams’s, turning away from painting—along with the art historical baggage and limitations that come with it—and toward fiber. They’re using the materials of craft in ways that look a lot like painting. But these artists take the material as an invitation to center personal and social histories, often from historically marginalized perspectives. Queens, New York–based Natalia Nakazawa, an artist of Japanese and Uruguayan heritage, first trained as a figurative painter at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In critiques and studio visits, she experienced what she called “terrifying” conversations, rife with exoticizing tokenism, about the brown female bodies in her paintings. After exhibiting figurative work at the Queens International in 2006, she “close[d] … that chapter.” Today, she uses textiles to address cultural heritage, diaspora, digital circulation, and institutional power. “One reason why I gravitated toward textiles was to escape obsessive conversations about the body’s particulars,” she said, during a visit to her studio in Long Island City, New York. “I wanted to talk about ancestry, history, past, present, future. I wanted to talk about globalization and markets—how images are translated from one medium to the next and are sold.” A recent textile, Demons and Protectors: Say their names #GuiYingMa #ChristinaYunaLee #MichelleAlyssaGo (2022), features images of three Asian American women who were murdered in New York during the pandemic, alongside images of beasts and fragmented sculptural hands. There is a “fragile quality to how much we can honor and protect our own community members,” Nakazawa said.

Brazilian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Lila de Magalhaes initially studied painting, but turned to embroidery after being introduced to the technique while working as an assistant in a painter’s studio. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Southern California (where she focused on video art), she worked as a studio assistant for Ivan Morley, and came across his “rickety Japanese analog hand-guided embroidery machine.” The tool took her back to her childhood making crafts as a Waldorf school student in Switzerland, where she was raised. She now makes tapestries that, from a distance, are dead ringers for paintings. Only when you get close enough can you see their otherworldly imagery is embroidered onto dyed bedsheets or silks, and embellished with layers of chalk pastel. Her visual vocabulary— kittens, worms, insects, abstract body parts, and often, a woman riding naked astride a horse—plumbs the unconscious. A self-professed Jungian, she refers to the dyed thrift-store bedlinens she embroiders as “the place of the unconscious and dreams.”

This new generation of artists freely mixes fiber and painting, addressing formal and political concerns in works that are dyed, woven, embroidered, and sewn rather than rendered in oil or acrylic. Indeed, on a trip to galleries in downtown New York this past winter, tapestries often dominated the wall space typically given to painting. One standout show was an intergenerational exhibition at Kaufmann Repetto, “Re-Materialized: The Stuff That Matters.” Millennial artists working in figuration—like LJ Roberts, who makes embroidered portraits of queer and trans individuals; and Erin M. Riley, whose tapestries often depict her own tattooed body, captured in iPhone selfies—were included, along with veterans like 80-year-old knotted-rope artist Françoise Grossen.

The turn from paint to textiles is a trend that has been brewing for a while. The ground was laid by a series of exhibitions that celebrated both craft and the tendency toward ornamentation and decoration, both of which have long been associated with women and non-Western cultures. Nakazawa pointed to recent surveys like “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985,” which opened in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as influential for celebrating ornament in contemporary art. “A lot of people relegate women and people of color to a decorative realm,” she said; for this reason, she considers the medium of textiles a tool for formerly marginalized people to reclaim full humanity

Other landmark shows foregrounding textiles and craft include “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present” (2014) at the ICA Boston; “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” (2018) at the National Gallery of Art; “Quilts and Color” (2014) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019” (2019–22) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Many of these exhibitions build on the legacy of feminist art history by reclaiming contributions to formal innovation created in domestic settings, celebrating collective practices, and leveling the hierarchy between fine art and folk art. In the process, they revealed how gender, race, and class underpin aesthetic biases.

Over two decades, major museum exhibitions have reframed works made in fiber as capital-A Art by showing how formal evolutions in painting developed alongside—and indeed borrowed from—patterns and compositions found in textiles. One touchstone is the groundbreaking survey “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” which traveled to 11 museums between 2002 and 2006. The show’s inventive geometric compositions, made from castoff fabric by a community of Black quilters in Alabama, were eagerly received as a particularly American style of abstraction. As Michael Kimmelman extolled in the New York Times, “Imagine Matisse and Klee … arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves.”

A new generation of artists’ work testifies to the Gee’s Bend quilters’ enduring influence. The 32-year-old artist Bhasha Chakrabarti, whose work was included in the group show “Fiber of My Being” last summer at Hales gallery in New York, studied textiles both in India and with the Gee’s Bend quilters in Alabama; her figurative portraits bring together textile and painterly techniques. Also in 2022, Legacy Russell organized “The New Bend,” a group show at Hauser & Wirth gallery that drew connections between the Gee’s Bend quilters and 12 risingstar artists, including Tomashi Jackson, Eric N. Mack, and Basil Kincaid. Russell described the Gee’s Bend makers as “artists and technologists,” positioning younger artists as their inheritors exploring the many links between textiles and digital tools. The warps and wefts of fabric, for instance, work like a grid of pixels, while their collage techniques recall the disjointed experience of browsing the internet.

The digital plays a significant role in much of the new textile work. Nakazawa turns digitally collaged images of artworks, often by non- Western makers, into jacquard-woven textiles made in North Carolina on recycled cotton. She then embellishes the fabric with hand-stitched elements like shisha mirrors and sequins. “Jacquard is the original computer,” she said, pointing out that women dominated computer programming before the field became lucrative. Digital imagery is also a source for New York–based Pauline Shaw, who studied sculpture at RISD before teaching herself felting through online tutorials. She now mines online museum collections, along with her personal history, to create textile works exploring cultural memory. A first-generation Taiwanese American, Shaw’s tapestries often rework motifs found in East Asian decorative arts. Taw (2022), made from felted wool and cotton scrim, features stylized forms representing a marble, a peony, a chrysanthemum—an emblem of good luck—as well as a poppy, symbolizing extraction and global trade. Small blown-glass objects, resembling flora, dangle from the tapestry’s bottom edge. “In the absence of heirlooms, familial stories and memories became folktales,” Shaw said during a walk-through of a two-artist show at Chapter NY gallery this past February.

For Shaw, the technique of felting—one of the oldest known to humankind—evokes “spaces of the home, care and nurture,” as well as the large-scale textiles that illustrated cultural origin myths in medieval and dynastic China. For Knight Knight (2022), she reinterpreted a Chinese tapestry from the late 16th–early 17th century that depicts the world through land, sea, and sky. Panel with a Phoenix and Birds in a Rock Garden, from the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is barely recognizable in Shaw’s flipped, vertical interpretation, where stylized birds circle a reddish center, surrounded by magmalike whorls of beiges, blues, and oranges. A similar tension between legibility and abstraction animated Shaw’s 2021 work The Tomb-Sweeper’s Mosquito Bite, commissioned by the New York venue The Shed. In that monumental installation, a 24-foot-long felted tapestry was suspended from the ceiling by a metal armature and cables, its weight counterbalanced by multiple blown-glass orbs. The delicate glass vessels contained objects based on Taoist altar objects and Chinese zodiac signs, while the felted textile’s abstract design, resembling a tangle of branches, was based on an MRI scan of the artist’s brain. “I liked that this large, seemingly abstract work actually held a lot of specific information,” she said.

These artists haven’t entirely abandoned painting; instead, they are recombining it into an expanded visual vocabulary. Nakazawa still makes paintings, but usually as part of a broader mixed-media work: Her 2019 piece History has failed us … but no matter, includes jacquard-print found fabrics and collaged images of the Japanese internment site Camp Minidoka, where her grandmother and other family members were held during World War II. Here, found fabrics attest to the international digital distribution of patterns and the cannibalization of cultures in contemporary textiles. Nakazawa said these contemporary textile patterns, such as flowers and pleasant abstractions, derive from specific decorative arts traditions. Today, however, they are digitally shared and reprinted around the world, with slight tweaks to color or scale. “Even things that do have deeper cultural meanings also exist in a weird ether of diasporic longing,” she said.

Traditionally, decorative art has been considered less valuable than painting. For these artists, however, textiles, and craft in general, are liberating. De Magalhaes described her turn to craft—she also works in ceramics, inspired by time spent in her mother’s pottery studio—as a “desire to unlearn” the “heavy cerebral” way of working that she studied in art school. Nonetheless, her evocative dreamy works often draw comparisons to painterly pieces. Writer Gaby Cepeda has likened de Magalhaes’s imagery to Old Testament figures, while Andrew Berardini has noted her work’s relationship to the Symbolism of Odilon Redon. Her own goal, she said, is to “find joy and pleasure and meaning within the chaos that is the human condition.”

Lippard’s 1971 catalogue statement attested to her nascent involvement in the women’s liberation movement, as she had “recently become aware of [her] own previous reluctance to take women’s work as seriously as men’s, the result of a common conditioning from which we all suffer.” Without reducing “women’s art” to a single aesthetic, Lippard made a sincere attempt to capture the range of formal impulses women artists explored. Many works aligned with her interests in Minimal, Conceptual, and Land Art, while others ventured into eccentric abstraction and material experimentation. “52 Artists” likewise avoids claims and categorizations based on gender or artist’s age, and is organized to intermingle the generations fluidly in smartly designed configurations. The curators’ handling of abstraction shows especially their dexterity in tracking a change in sensibility. The harder-edged work from the 1970s—such as Carol Kinne’s puzzle-like canvas Bob’s Draw (1973) or Merrill Wagner’s rectilinear paintings on steel and linen—seemed most distant from the selections of the 2020s. Conversely, paintings like Cynthia Carlson’s semi-abstract gynocentric landscape (Untitled Inscape #1, 1970); Mary Heilmann’s Malibu (1970), composed of dyed raw canvas and acrylic gel; and Howardena Pindell’s ladderlike rope grid consisting of rolled-up canvases (Untitled, 1968–70) spoke to younger generations’ interests in process and bodily textures. The latter theme emerged through Loie Hollowell’s painting referencing the pregnant body (Empty Belly, 2021), Rachel Eulena Williams’s wall-hung deconstructed painting (Pedestal Reeducation, 2021), LaKela Brown’s plaster relief of geometric doorknocker earrings, and Pamela Council’s vulvar sculptures in ring boxes.

Figuration, meanwhile, has risen dramatically in popularity since the 1970s. The only figurative paintings from artists on the original roster are Susan Hall’s dreamlike, sensual canvas The Ornithologist (1971) and two works by Sylvia Plimack Mangold—the hyperrealistic Floor Corner (1969), from the 1971 show, and a 2016 painting of a wintry maple tree. The show’s younger artists have taken the style in various erotic, activist, and fantastical directions. Selections include an impressive woven piece by Erin M. Riley depicting the subject pleasuring herself on a webcam; Susan Chen’s bright, textured painting of an Asian American and immigrant teen group that she mentors; and a Mexican-folklore-inspired oil-and-cochineal canvas by Astrid Terrazas, illustrating a rageful female subject astride a horse.

Adrian Piper’s Conceptualism, engaging the politics of race, gender, and liberation, has its own generational legacy in the exhibition. For the “52 Artists” opening, several participants reperformed her Whistleblower Catalysis, originally presented during the 1971 vernissage as a semi-covert action in which Piper and her collaborators blew on police whistles while walking through the galleries. This show also includes Piper’s photo-text collage series Mokshamudra Progression (2012), depicting nine images of a clenched fist gradually opening. The title combines two Hindu terms referring to spiritual release and ritual gestures, which Piper has studied during her decades-long yoga practice. A list of nine corresponding terms are printed underneath both the first and last images. Under the fully closed fist, the words include “ego,” “cohesion,” and “possession,” while the last image, of the open palm, is associated with desirable collective values such as “non-ego” and “union.” Echoing Piper’s interest in how wellness practices and politics collide, Ilana Harris-Babou’s video Leaf of Life (2022) explores how the dubious claims of the late Honduran herbalist Dr. Sebi have gained traction with a new generation of followers seeking an alternative to Western medical practice, where racism is rampant. Aliza Shvarts’s Homage: Congratulations (2017), a printed card declining a wedding invitation because of the violent patriarchal roots of marriage, directly references Adrian Piper’s My Calling (Card), 1986, a business-size card informing conversational racists of Piper’s Black identity.

The 1970s works that engage with matters of ecology and labor appear freshest, particularly when placed in conversation with pieces by Millennial artists who explore land sovereignty and placemaking. The toil inherent in Alice Aycock’s Clay #2, a 1,500-pound installation resembling arid terrain bound by a plywood frame, and Jackie Winsor’s Brick Square (both 1971), comprising 300 bricks stacked in the stated shape, is reiterated in several works. For LJ Roberts’s installation Anywhere, Everywhere (2022), the artist constructed a “stone wall” from rocks found at the Aldrich and at the nearby property of a friend important to their queer community. Within the structure, they added a video documenting the process of digging up the stones. Adjacent to Roberts’s work, Kiyan Williams shows a life-size figure constructed of mud excavated from sites tied to the Black American diaspora. Tourmaline presents a photographic self-portrait related to her film Salacia (2019), which centers on a trans sex worker living in New York’s 19th-century free Black community Seneca Village. The film reimagines the neighborhood, which was demolished to create Central Park. These works suggest that environmental justice cannot be dissociated from displacement struggles that overwhelmingly impact BIPOC and queer people.

Through these and other arrangements, “52 Artists” draws meaningful connections among a great variety of practices, though it does have some gaps. Strikingly, few works fall squarely into the categories of social practice, documentary, or protest art. Direct politics was also overlooked in 1971, when John Perreault of the Village Voice observed of “26 Artists” that “there are no neo-Social Realist tirades for day-care centers, abortions, or attacks on male chauvinist-capitalist pigs. There are no burnt bras either.” At a time when women were grossly underrepresented in the mainstream art world, Lippard’s work of championing female artists was itself a political act. Now, when many artists—and curators, not least Lippard—claim activism is integral to their creative work, the exhibition can be seen as favoring traditional forms, even if it presents radical content. As in the early 1970s, we are at a crossroads of civil liberties, in which the core issues of the feminist movement feel connected to the stakes of the world. While this show rightly celebrated how far we have come, it leaves viewers to wonder what transformations feminist art will undergo in the next half-century.

Buchanan is often miscategorized as an “outsider artist,” likely because of her interest in folk art aesthetics and her having turned to art as a second career. She was raised in South Carolina, where, as a child, she accompanied her adoptive father—dean of agriculture at South Carolina State College, a historically Black institution—on trips to tenant farms. After working as a public health educator in New Jersey, Buchanan enrolled at the Art Students League of New York in the early 1970s and created Post-Minimal sculptures and drawings that memorialized urban decay. In 1977, she moved to Georgia, where she embarked on a series of public artworks that marked sites of racial injustice with gravestone-like mounds of concrete or tabby, a mixture of materials including lime, sand, and shells that was used in the region until the mid-nineteenth century. Her shack works, begun in the mid-’80s, honor the history of Southern vernacular architecture through a type of field study.

Even if Buchanan didn’t fit the profile herself, folk artists were a motivating force of her later work. In this exhibition, the large drawing Blue Sky Shack (1988) functions as a manifesto. To the left of an illustration of two buildings, rendered in slashes of oil pastel, Buchanan has penned a statement about the evolution of her work: “As a Southern artist, I found that I was interested in the work of folk artists and . . . discovered that some of my ideas about returning to a ‘simple’ uncomplicated look in my own work, were shared with them.” She cites the artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) as an inspiration, noting that her home “was engulfed in a magic forest of her work. Every surface of her work had a mark from her hand.” Buchanan saw her works as “attempts to celebrate the spirit of the shack dwellers,” who expressed their creative innovation in their home design, gardens, and everyday rituals. 

Beverly Buchanan, Orangeburg County Family House, 1993, paint, sharpie, garland, necklace, wood chips, bark, buttons, bottle caps, license plate, film canister, thumbtacks, clay pot, glass bottle, thread and glue on wood, 14 ¼ by 14 ¾ by 10 ½ inches.

This selection of Buchanan’s shack works reflects an organic evolution in her formal process. In the mid-1980s, she favored expressionistically painted rectangular forms reminiscent of the tobacco barns of her native North Carolina. Her structures from the later ’80s and ’90s faithfully emulate details such as broken windows, tin roofs, and burned wood. In a series from 2008, responding to a hurricane that damaged homes in Florida, Buchanan adopted a neon palette, rendering light and shade in broad, bright strokes. While the sculptural details suggest serious reflection on specific sociopolitical conditions, Buchanan’s trademark sense of humor and awe comes through in the legends. A 1991 legend for Miss Mary’s House, not on view but accessible through a QR code, ends on a mystical note. After visiting Mary’s “imposing fortress,” Buchanan “left with the understanding of silenced secrets and a prophecy: ‘You’ll be famous long before you die.’ When is that, went unanswered.”

Buchanan’s architectural homages are conceptually linked with her “spirit jars”—an interpretation of the folk art form of “memory jugs” usually left on graves. Six of these compressed assemblages, which often include figurines, shells, and home decor, are exhibited in an adjoining gallery with work by Abigail DeVille. Only one shack on view shares the jars’ bric-a-brac aesthetic: Orangeburg County Family House (1993). The miniature wooden building is adorned with buttons, bottle caps, a wooden figure of a Black woman raising her fist, and a 1969 South Carolina license plate. On the surface, Buchanan has scribbled the names of people from her hometown. Like the artist’s public artworks of the early ’80s, and in light of her participation in lunch-counter protests in the early ’60s, this piece suggests a hidden subtext: civil rights activism. Some of the names displayed here as if on a memorial—Davis, Hildebrand, Thomas—match those of people injured in the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, in which police shot anti-segregation protesters on the South Carolina State College campus. A small spirit jar sits inside the structure. One can barely make out two words scrawled on it: “not magic.”

On a study-abroad trip to Cuba after Mitchell’s sophomore year at NYU, a documentary photography instructor told him that his portraits of chic friends were a type of fashion imagery—a realization that piqued the young artist’s interest. His early work responds critically to the conventions of fashion ads. In the short film Wish This Was Real (2016), young, stylish black men play with water guns and plastic chains against bright seamless backgrounds—a poignant rejoinder to the death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was killed in 2014 by a police officer, while holding a toy weapon. The playful scenes are cut between an unsettling sequence showing one actor lying with plastic wrap over his face, hinting at the danger that black men face even in ordinary jest. In 2016, Mitchell cemented his fashion ascent with a commission for Dazed that depicted a vision of black utopia: models pose in magic-hour light, sometimes with toys, sometimes casually embracing each other.

Mitchell’s first US museum exhibition, “I Can Make You Feel Good,” is on view at the International Center of Photography (ICP) through mid-May. Curated by Isolde Brielmaier, this expanded version of the show (which debuted at Amsterdam’s photography museum Foam) brings together video installations, life-size photographic prints, and a new work in fabric that pays homage to black domestic labor. Opposite the show’s entrance, the three-channel video Chasing Pink, Found Red (2019) tempers visual fantasy with an acrid dose of reality. Projected onto walls that form a triangle, the work shows lush images of picnicking black youths. Offscreen, various individuals describe racial microaggressions. “Feeling obligated to control people’s perception of you is an everyday black experience,” says one voice. Mitchell crowdsourced the stories from his social media accounts, receiving voice memos from followers located around the world: from Nigeria to the Caribbean.

Tyler Mitchell: Boys of Walthamstow, 2018, inkjet print, 40 by 50 inches.

The installation Laundry Line (2020), which debuted at ICP, takes its inspiration in part from African American photographer Gordon Parks’s image of two Alabama women at a wire fence loaded with clothes, part of the full-color series “A Segregation Story” (1956). Mitchell’s Laundry Line includes portraits of models, influencers, and friends printed using dye-sublimation processes onto a variety of textiles: blue terrycloth, a vintage floral Pierre Cardin scarf, and diaphanous materials that recall crinkly plastic. Mitchell’s engagement with Parks’s diverse oeuvre is ongoing; he is currently working on a commission based on the late artist’s fashion photography for the Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, New York, where it will be on view this fall.

This article appears under the title “First Look: Tyler Mitchell” in the March 2020 issue, p. 14.

Lee’s quick ascent, fade into the background, and reemergence can be read against the art world’s cyclical patterns of embracing and ignoring identity politics. She debuted as an edgy shapeshifter during the last gasp of the ’90s vogue for multiculturalism. In the years after 9/11, as contemporary art trends drifted toward formalism and neo-Conceptualism, Lee’s work appeared to belong to a different time. Today, in a political climate dominated by Trump’s racist apologetics, artwork addressing identity has assumed a new weight. Cultural property and appropriation have become heated topics of debate, from Rachel Dolezal’s racial masquerade to Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till. Lee has always used appropriation strategically to explore issues related to race, gender roles and sexuality. Is her work a provocation or a genuine search for connection? Does she celebrate the mutability of identity or comment on the limits of assimilation?

Nikki S. Lee: The Punk Project (5), 1997, C-print.

Coinciding with her first solo show, Barry Schwabsky wrote a profile for the September 1999 issue of Artforum that delved into the social politics of Lee’s process. For each series, Lee would spend up to several months observing various groups, and a few weeks posing with them. Schwabsky, for his part, dodged the question of appropriation by insisting that Lee could not effectively pass in certain groups. “There’s no way this Korean could convince a group of Latinos, for example, that she’s one of them, though it is quite possible for them to act as if that were the case,” Schwabsky says of her Hispanic Project (1998), where she appears at the Puerto Rican Day parade and locations in Spanish Harlem, wearing a gold nameplate necklace (“Genie”) and a slicked-back ponytail with hair extensions. “The people who pose with Lee are her collaborators but they don’t have to understand why she’s doing what she does; they only need to be willing to play along.”

Lee’s debut earned further praise from the New York Times. In his review, Holland Cotter suggests that Lee’s work occupies a “post-ethnic” position that rejects essentializing notions of identity. He was especially impressed by Lee’s bleach-blonde persona in the Ohio Project (1999), where she was photographed alongside blue-collar white Midwesterners. Her ability to lampoon upper-middle-class white culture was also applauded. In a 2001 article for Art Journal, Maurice Berger analyzes her pitch-perfect emulation of preppy style in the Yuppie Project (1998) as a critical take on whiteness.

After Lee’s first show, interest in her work exploded. Several subsequent “Projects” were commissioned by institutions, including the Skateboarders Project (2000) for San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the Exotic Dancers Project (2000) for the nonprofit Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut; and The Hip-Hop Project for the exhibition “One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art” at the Bronx Museum of Art (2001), curated by Franklin Sirmans and Lydia Yee. The Hip-Hop Project shows Lee’s most dramatic transformation: with dark bronze skin and prominent lipliner, her hair either under a bandana or cornrow wig, she poses with African American friends. In a video interview produced by the English-language Korean network Arirang TV, she explains that she went to a tanning salon two to three times a week to darken her skin, and bought make-up to match her deeper skin tone.

Since the ’90s, Lee has spoken often about her motivations behind the work. She has emphasized the importance of group identity and social performance in Asia, as opposed to the more personal sense of identity in the US. In an interview with curator RoseLee Goldberg published in 2006, she says: “Western culture is very much about the individual, while Eastern culture is more about identity in the context of society. You simply cannot think of yourself out of context.” But more recently the cultural politics of Lee’s “Projects”—especially the Hip-Hop Project—have been questioned. In a 2016 essay, scholar and poet Eunsong Kim likens her use of “blackface” to works by the white artists Cindy Sherman—who donned dark makeup to imitate passengers she observed on her bus route in an early series—and Joe Scanlan, who created the African American alter ego Donelle Woolford and hired black women to play her in public performances. Kim also criticizes the anonymity of Lee’s subjects, highlighting the similarities between the work and “colonial travel photography.”

Cherise Smith, chair of African and African Diaspora studies at University of Texas at Austin, takes a contextual approach to Lee’s work. In her 2011 book Enacting Others, Smith writes about Lee’s practice alongside instances of racial and gender crossing in performances by Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith. In a phone conversation, Smith pointed out that Lee’s background as a Korean national certainly informed her worldview, and possibly made her subject to misrecognition in the US. Still, she concedes, there are “dubious politics” that “empower some groups and disempower others” in Lee’s work. Looking at the Hip-Hop Project, she says that “difference and incongruities” between Lee’s presentation and that of her fellow subjects is apparent. At the same time, Smith mentions that in many parts of the US— including Houston, Los Angeles, and Hawaii—black and Asian communities live side by side, sharing tastes in food, music, and clothing. Hip-Hop Project could be viewed as a commentary on class identity and assimilation.

Nikki S. Lee: Part (14), 2002, C-print.

The mutability of identity has been a common theme throughout Lee’s work—with gender, sexuality, professional personae, and national concepts of beauty as various anchor points. Following “Projects,” Lee embarked on “Parts” (2002–04),  a series of staged photographs in which she posed with different men, cutting their bodies out of the prints before they were mounted. “I realize that my own identity changes depending on whom I’m going out with or who becomes my boyfriend,” Lee tells Goldberg. Her willingness to change her behavior or looks is an expression of emotional labor not unique to women or heterosexual relationships, but nonetheless common to them. Formally akin to torn post-breakup photographs, the artfully composed pictures seem more like cinematic stills. In 2006, she made a feature-length mockumentary, a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee (2006), that depicts “Nikki One” (a serious, buttoned-up artist) following the life of “Nikki Two” (an enfant terrible art star) in locations including the Venice Biennale and the Armory Show. The film, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, was one of Lee’s last works made in New York: she returned to Seoul in 2008.

Nikki S. Lee: AKA Nikki S. Lee, 2006, video, 57 minutes, 56 second.s

In the years since, Lee has largely focused on writing and directing a forthcoming feature-length film called Two Monks, chronicling a gay love affair between American and Korean monks. However, a recent body of video art, “Scenes” (2014), sees her picking up where she left off with “Parts.” In the short videos, Lee makes out with various male partners across the Korean capital. While Lee is fully in control of the scenes, they explore various gendered power dynamics. Cherise Smith calls some of the clips disturbing, including an instance where a man puts his hands around the artist’s throat.

Lee’s work gives viewers much to unpack. Gesturing beyond ’90s-era platitudes about multiculturalism, Lee put herself—or some version of herself—into her pictures. What distinguishes her alter-ego performances is how contingent they are on relationships, on how much she can adapt her style and affect to those of others, even when they are literally cut out of the frame. Her work foregrounds questions of cultural assimilation, even though she does not try to assimilate with the groups that she studies. Using this push-pull dynamic of approximation and distancing to imitate stereotypically white styles of dress and mannerisms, she makes a powerful statement about privilege and neutrality. When she emulates the clothing, gestures, and beauty standards of historically marginalized groups, however, she risks reinscribing racist stereotypes—or suggesting that attaining power is as easy as changing one’s clothes.

Has the intensive study of cultural difference influenced her film work, which touches on questions of sexuality and ethnicity? Perhaps. One of the goals of her monk film, as she wrote in an email, is to “see Buddhism in a different way from orientalism.” Orientalism operates by fetishizing and propagating cultural stereotypes about Asia. Presumably, Lee is crafting the film to reach both Western and Korean audiences. Lee has made a name for herself as a reverse Orientalist, as an expert mimic of primarily Western subcultures. It seems that she has primed herself for yet another reinvention.

Ragen Moss: Senior Lender (with Mezzanine Lender, with Heart), 2019, acrylic, polyethylene, aluminum, and steel hardware, 53 by 30 by 22 inches; at Bridget Donahue.

Los Angeles–based artist Ragen Moss creates sci-fi-ish sculptures in which biomorphic forms made of clear polyethylene contain organlike objects and hang from metal armatures, suggesting cocoons or alien pods. She applies acrylic paint and handwritten text to the sculptures’ interior and exterior surfaces, playing with transparency and opacity and creating dialogues within and among the works. Her solo show at Bridget Donahue, “8 Animals,” comprised eight new sculptures (all 2019) suspended from metal hooks attached to the ceiling. Most of the polyethylene forms resembled torsos and housed heart-shaped vessels.

While Moss’s sculptures resemble otherworldly creatures, she titles them after human archetypes. Some of the roles she refers to (leader, lender, borrower) have institutional functions, while others (puritan, hellcat, unteachable) are more amorphous. Her interest in social relationships was reinforced by her organization of the exhibition’s works into formal and conceptual couplings. The works in one such pair, Senior Borrower (with Mezzanine Borrower) and Senior Lender (with Mezzanine Lender, with Heart), both decorated with chevron patterns and a confetti-like spray of colored stars, hung across the room from each other, creating a call-and-response in the gallery.   

Ragen Moss: Unteachables I (with double Hearts), 2019, acrylic, polyethylene, aluminum, and steel hardware, 24 by 15 by 8 inches each; at Bridget Donahue.

In a statement accompanying the exhibition, Moss—who is a practicing lawyer in addition to being an artist—wrote that her work “ask[s] sculpture to productively press the linearity of language against the roundness of form,” and included a bullet-pointed list of notes for interpreting the show, their somewhat inscrutable quality echoed by the fragmentary texts incorporated into the sculptures themselves. Inside Senior Lender, which sports a Lamborghini logo on one side, are two hearts bearing written inscriptions: KICKER! and MANIPULATIVE DECEPTIVE DEVICE OR CONTRIVANCE. The latter phrase is borrowed from a part of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that refers to insider-trading violations, but in this context evokes the frailty of bodies and the heart’s metaphorical dishonesty. The polyethylene surface of another work, Puritan (with hellcat Heart), features two sunken pits dotted with dark circles, resembling inverted breasts or eyeballs, and holds a red-painted heart that reads, FIRST QUALITY. On the work’s interior wall, Moss has copied a set of guidelines about butter grades from the California Food and Agricultural Code. The text’s placement within the suggestively corporeal sculpture calls attention to the bizarre, anthropomorphizing quality of the text—one sentence reads, “the body shall be fairly firm, but may show slight defects in texture”—and nods to the way legal language can distort the relationship between human and nonhuman entities.

Ragen Moss: Puritan (with hellcat Heart), 2019, acrylic, polyethylene, aluminum, and steel hardware 43 by 22 by 15 inches; at Bridget Donahue.

In recent years, a cadre of thinkers, notably the feminist theorist Donna Haraway, has mapped relationships between the zoological, the anthropological, and the technological. Moss’s quasi-mammalian objects offer an enticing formal analogue to these lines of thought. Her sculptures prompt reflection on dyads such as the conscious and unconscious body, parasite and host, parent and fetus. They also remind us of language’s role in shaping these dynamics—language that is not confined to science fiction, but that defines the laws that govern everyday phenomena, from financial transactions to agriculture.

This article appears under the title “Ragen Moss” in the February 2020 issue, p. 87.

Udemezue found his artistic tribe early. As an undergraduate at Parsons, he befriended members of the queer ballroom and art collective House of Ladosha (est. 2007), including performing artists Antonio Blair (La’Fem Ladosha) and Juliana Huxtable. Udemezue adopted the name Neon Christina when he joined the House in 2008. He discovered the power of collaboration while working with his Ladosha sisters on events that spanned drag, performance, music, video, and installation. Udemezue’s first solo exhibition, in 2015 at Bushwick’s Stream Gallery, fused his interests in gender, sexuality, and ethnic heritage. Paying homage to the heroic resistance of a group of impoverished gay and trans youths in Kingston, Jamaica, known as the Gully Queens, the artist photographed friends in poses that borrowed from art historical tropes of religious and political martyrdom. Dwayne (2015) shows a person in drag, complete with blue wig and long false eyelashes, who portrays the expiring protagonist of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793).

Mixed-medium paintings in Udemezue’s series “Yard,” 2019, at the Shed, New York.

In 2016 Udemezue founded RAGGA NYC, a roving series of nightlife and art events for queer Caribbean artists. The New Museum’s public engagement department invited RAGGA NYC to participate in a residency in 2017. Udemezue worked closely with assistant curator Sara O’Keeffe on programming—including family-style dinners for RAGGA NYC members and friends—as well as an exhibition featuring work by members of the group. Udemezue contributed photographs reenacting the vodou ceremony that precipitated the 1791 Haitian slave revolt. The religious ritual, led by the priestess Cécile Fatiman, helped spark the thirteen-year Haitian Revolution. Udemezue cast RAGGA NYC member Maya Margarita Monés, an artist of Dominican and Haitian heritage, as Fatiman. Dressed in scarlet among white-robed figures, Monés performed Fatiman’s ritual actions, including taking an oath of revenge against oppressors.

Udemezue’s work remains committed to confronting and rectifying cultural trauma. As part of the Shed’s Open Call program this past summer, Udemezue presented a new series called “Yard” (the Jamaican term for “home”). He printed on canvas portraits of himself, family, and friends, and incorporated small items—sand, gold leaf—into the compositions before dipping them in resin. The ghostly, neon-hued images—transformed from more traditional photographs in the process—were inspired by Udemezue’s 2018 visit to Jamaica and his mother’s stories about her childhood. One work from “Yard,” She said they call it ‘Poco’ (2019), references the religion Pocomania, showing mysterious shrouded figures bathed in blue light. In addition to producing new work for Recess, Udemezue is co-organizing the second annual trip for CONNEK JA, a cultural exchange organization that brings international allies to connect with LGBTQ artists in Jamaica. The tour is scheduled for spring 2020.

“Nobody Promised You Tomorrow” is not only a survey of young queer artists, however, but a reclamation project for gender-nonconformists and people of color: groups that have been largely excluded from LGBTQ history. Understood in this way, the show updates the sexual politics of Judy Chicago’s monumental artwork The Dinner Party (1974–79), permanently installed at the center of the Sackler Center and comprising a large, triangular dinner table with places set for female figures sidelined in history. While Chicago’s installation focuses on mostly white women, this exhibition posits a more expansive definition of feminist practice that demands allyship with the most historically marginalized groups.

As a corrective to the exclusion of trans people of color from gay-rights history, the show foregrounds the legacy of individuals like Johnson (1945–1992) and Sylvia Rivera (1951–2002). The two activists cofounded the organization Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970. According to some accounts, Johnson ignited the Stonewall uprising by throwing a shot glass or a brick. This incident has frequently been disputed—including by Johnson herself—and, regardless, Happy Birthday, Marsha! does not revel in the drama of the raid. The majority of the film follows Johnson throughout her day. As art historian Jeannine Tang writes in the New Museum anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017), the scenes that portray Johnson’s support network—such as one that depicts her having a tearful phone call with Rivera after her friends forget her birthday—are especially important, since art and cinema rarely illustrate “structures of kinship and familial affection” among transwomen. Johnson and Rivera also figure in other films by Tourmaline and Wortzel in the show, while their heritage is honored in Tuesday Smillie’s drawings about raids and her re-creation of a STAR protest banner.

The exhibition highlights lesser-known protagonists in LGBTQ history as well. David Antonio Cruz presents painted portraits of murdered black trans women, and Kiyan Williams, in the video Reflections (2017), pulls together archival footage of genderqueer poet and artist Jesse Harris that was shot by Marlon Riggs for his documentary about black gay men, Tongues Untied (1989), but ultimately cut from it. LJ Roberts’s Stormé at Stonewall (2019), an installation of Duratrans prints on light boxes, offers a punkish memorial to Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014), who was a biracial lesbian drag king and bouncer in New York. In some Stonewall accounts, DeLarverie incited the riots, by slugging a cop outside the bar after she was arrested during the raid. Roberts’s collagelike prints repeatedly incorporate a line from a correction that the New York Times issued in response to a 2016 article about Stonewall: “They were primarily gay men, not just gay men; at least one lesbian was involved.”

With the show’s focus on visibility politics, what doesn’t make the cut? Queer abstraction, for one. Explicit sex, for another—with the exception of spreads from issues of Camilo Godoy’s zine Amigxs (2017–). Instead, the show probes various approaches to desire. Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos consider queerness and dependency in their spoken-word video about care networks, Scores for Carolyn (2019), while Felipe Baeza creates evocative drawings of male lovers using twine, covering the results in dark ink to the point of near-obscurity. Rindon Johnson’s video poem It Is April (2017) shows his white lover caressing his head, as the dynamics of their interracial, queer relationship, including the impossibility of pregnancy, are limned in voice-over.

For a show largely featuring Millennial artists, there are surprisingly few works concerning the Internet. Two artists delve into online networks and the messy politics of solidarity. Juliana Huxtable’s sculptures display buttons and prints with memes and slogans that proliferate online. One button reads, TERF WARS, referring to “trans-exclusionary radical feminists”; another, DON’T CALL ME CIS. A manifesto-like work by Mark Aguhar (1987–2012), a transfeminine Filipinx artist who gained notoriety as her Tumblr avatar “Call Out Queen,” appropriates the language of the Beatitudes. Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body (2011), rendered as a vinyl wall text, begins, BLESSED ARE THE SISSIES, and goes on to say the same about sex workers, the disabled, gender illusionists, and consent. Just as Johnson and Rivera, as shown in the films by Tourmaline and Wortzel, rechristened the Hudson as the River Jordan, Aguhar reverently molded the tenets of faith to give voice to her experiences.

In “Junction,” which occupied both of Jack Shainman’s Chelsea galleries, Smith explored the collision of influences that characterize Caribbean and Caribbean-American culture. A number of works were based on photos he took at Brooklyn’s West Indian Day Parade, including a trio of untitled depictions of individual women wearing elaborate Carnival costumes with feathers and jewels. The exhibition’s title work—one of the most inscrutable images on view—portrays a large crowd at a gathering, with horizontal bands of picotage effectively blurring out most of the faces. But one figure is left largely untouched: a young woman in the foreground wearing a black baseball cap, her body seeming to weave between the bars of stippled white. 

Breeze block walls, which were popular in mid-twentieth-century architecture, are built with hollow-patterned concrete blocks and typically found in warm climates. Part decorative, part functional, they absorb heat and allow air to pass through. Among the works featuring patterns based on such walls was Furtively Advancing Down Jones Lane (2018–19), which shows several men hanging around outside a nondescript “Italian pub,” as its sign identifies it, in Jamaica. A man in the lower left of the frame wears a crocheted Rastafarian beanie. Though the image is casual and candid, it hints at a larger historical context: Rastafarians revere the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, who led a fight against Fascist Italian colonizers in the 1930s. Other works on view drew on architectural languages perhaps more common in the United States. In Only in America (2017), fragments of a photograph of roll-up gates seen through a chain-link fence are topped with a picotaged brick design and a black spray-painted chain-link motif. Invoking metaphorical and physical barriers to access, Smith offers an ironic commentary on a society in which pervasive racist fears of invasion by people of color contradict supposed values of freedom.

Most of the works on view were in color, but there were also several black-and-white examples dramatizing the historical roots of contemporary inequality. The Violence of His Embrace of Things American Is Embarrassing (2018–19) shows a group of black subjects standing in a modest graveyard among small white crosses. Smith has overlaid the image with vertical picotage stripes that form a triangular pattern based on alternating dark and light values. The title is drawn from James Baldwin’s 1954 essay “A Question of Identity,” in which the author explores the attitudes of American students, primarily ex-GIs, studying abroad in Paris in the 1950s as they confronted their own national identity from an outsider’s perspective. As Baldwin argues, they were forced to recognize the paradox at the heart of American culture: that their uniquely ahistorical attitudes were the products of their national history—a “history of the total, and willing, alienation of peoples from their forebears.” Smith’s picotage barriers visualize historical erasures, certainly, but his photos also channel the vibrancy of hybrid cultures that persist in spite of them.

After receiving her MFA from Columbia in 2016, Harris-Babou decamped to Richmond for a teaching fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University. The city’s legacy as the former capital of the Confederacy inspired her 2018 video Reparation Hardware. Filmed mostly in a barn in Williamstown, Massachusetts—where she currently teaches at Williams College—the video appropriates language from a Restoration Hardware commercial to advertise clunky ceramic homages to figures important in black history like Marcus Garvey, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. The video’s nostalgic tone collapses the past and an unspecified future. “Their liberation was handcrafted,” Harris-Babou explains in one scene. The voice-over accompanies a black-and-white photograph of the artist standing with a rake, as though she were both historian and liberated slave.

For the Whitney Biennial, Harris-Babou is working on a new video, Human Design, that further probes connections between forced migration and material culture. In it, the artist portrays an urban explorer who traces the history of objects for sale in a high-end design store. As she travels from New York to Africa, her documentary-style narrative slips from modernist platitudes about “good design” to Picasso’s exoticizing remarks about seeing African masks in the Trocadéro Museum. When she reaches the House of Slaves on Gorée Island, Senegal, it becomes unclear whether her search for origins has been focused on objects or on herself.