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Brown—whose retrospective closed in San Francisco in March and moved to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it opens May 27—made her name as a budding Bay Area artist whose thick impasto style turned abstraction toward embodiment, sometimes with the air of a wry aside. The earliest works in the SFMOMA show gleamed at the top of layered oil surfaces that suggest a lot of searching underneath (the catalogue describes formative paintings by Brown “so thick they could weigh 100 pounds and take decades to dry”). But as soon as she scaled certain heights that would thrill so many artists making their way, Brown took a bow—and moved on.

Thanksgiving Turkey (1959) is emblematic of her early work for its mix of mystery and a sort of mastery that can be deceiving. The depiction of a carcass hanging in the air nods toward classicism—wall text describing it included an image of Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox as inspiration—but its strange coloring makes it an evocative oddity while its deadpan matter-of-factness makes it somehow funny in a way that’s hard to pin down. The same goes for Green Bowl (1964), an austerely geometric still life that marked an audacious turn for Brown away from early success (Thanksgiving Turkey had already been acquired by MoMA in New York, and she was secure with a dealer with whom she would soon part ways after her stylistic twists left him bemused) toward a more idiosyncratic calling that took its own cues.

“Brown’s aim was not to undermine the art world in a way that was consciously subversive; she simply did not care, and part of what makes her so interesting is this disregard for acceptance,” Nancy Lim writes in the catalogue. (Lim, an associate curator, worked under SFMOMA chief curator Janet Bishop in organizing the show, which after its stop at the Carnegie Museum travels to the Orange County Museum of Art next year.)

Following Brown’s circuitous trains of thought thereafter leads to different way stations and destinations for indelible visions that never stayed fixed for long. Even more indicative of her more mature years than Thanksgiving Turkey and Green Bowl are works like Noel in the Kitchen (1963), an early instance of Brown painting her son with a mix of motherly wonder and fascination with the dreamier dimensions of domesticity. The work tells a heartwarming story, with a bare-bottomed toddler reaching mischievously toward a too-tall counter while a pair of dogs stand sentry. But it also flies off into aesthetic revelry, with a checkered floor that shakes up the pictorial space and a curious patch of wall on the side rendered with enough acuity and care to make it class as a painting in its own right.

Brown painted her family a lot, and with enough earnestness and sincerity to suggest Norman Rockwell as filtered through a sense of post-Beat Generation San Francisco sass. She loved holidays (enough to name her son Noel), and the exhibition took care to pair certain family tableaux with the sepia-toned snapshots that inspired them. Brown became even more interesting, however, when she started painting herself.

Of the many things that figuration in deft-enough hands can do, revealing a sense of both inner and outer selves has to rank near the top. For Brown, the prospects of that compounded when she turned to self-portraiture in which she seems to have painted in service of her own and others’ gazes, all at the same time. A forthright, almost confrontational look projects from many of her paintings of the sort, but the stare-downs seem to have been staged first and foremost between the artist and herself.

Then there are signal-scrambling highlights like Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat (1970) and Woman Wearing Mask (1972), the latter featuring Brown standing, hand-on-hip, in red heels, black lingerie, and a cartoonish plastic cat mask. It’s simultaneously sexy and sexless, and a whole spectrum of degrees between—with the lingering result for a viewer (or some viewers, at least) of having been seen by Brown while in the act of looking at her look at her own figure figuratively rendered.

As later paintings chronicle the years that followed—with age, Brown falls in thrall to swimming the forbidding waters of San Francisco Bay, focuses on the joys of dancing with one of the four husbands she courted, and ventures into realms of New Age spirituality that surrounded her at the end of her life, when she died in an accident at the age of 52 while installing an obelisk in the ashram of her guru in India—the exhibition offered an unusually intimate vision of Brown, as an artist but also as a person who lived and loved and painted in a way that suggests a private practice would have suited her just fine.

If that reaction is right, consider it a testament to Brown’s approach to the art she made and art as a whole. If it’s not, more power to her.

Untitled (cooperative trees), 2021, measures just taller than knee-high. Atop a white plinth with spindly legs resembling the posts of a cast-iron fence, a tableau sets four ceramic trees against an indistinct blue-and-green background. The latter surface, made with a papier-mâché process that incorporates textile fibers, takes on color differently than clay, and Khoury has played up the contrast by affixing glossy abstract ceramic forms to this highly pigmented material. With a wormlike form creeping through one area and a solid rectangle of deeper navy hinged from the top, the resulting composition is a surreal blend of sea and sky.

Indeed, Khoury’s interpretations of the natural world verge on the absurd. With shaggy, loose branches piled onto roughly formed brown trunks, Khoury’s simplistic trees are mostly set off in pairs, one tree balancing another on its crown. This creates a playful sense of personification, with one tree giving another a boost, perhaps a better view.

Khoury colors the reverse side of the sculpture’s blue-green surface a pale gray flecked with green and purple, and adds a thick, bending line of magenta, a dreamy take on a California sunset in winter. Here again, Khoury abstracts and interrupts what might appear to be a traditional landscape: a peach ceramic well or pool is appended near the center, and a deep amoeba-like emerald form hangs from the top left, like the canopy of another tree punctuating the sky. While one small representation of a tree lingers at lower left, the composition seems to abandon orientation, preferring a sense of atmosphere to the flipside’s emphasis on gravity.

Shin regularly creates installations in which meaning accrues through the accumulation and alteration of found objects. Her installation Everyday Monuments (2009), shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., brought together some two thousand sports trophies, donated by area residents, that she modified by giving the athletic figures props like brooms, hammers, and tires, so that the trophies became celebrations of everyday labor. For MaiZE (2017), at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, Shin drew inspiration from the local agricultural landscape. The work was a labyrinth of green plastic bottles stacked, cut, and molded to resemble cornstalks. She worked with eight hundred volunteers to realize the installation, involving the community in a project that engaged issues of plastic waste and environmental stewardship. “Pause,” too, was a collaboratively produced, environmentally minded artwork that bore an intentional relationship to the city in which it was shown—in this instance, a hub of the tech and telecom industries.

View of Jean Shin’s installation “Pause,” 2020, at the Asian Art Museum.

At the center of the installation was a sculptural work called Huddled Masses, which consisted of three hunched and twisted columns assembled from plastic and metal. As you looked at them, you recognized obsolete devices: PalmPilots, BlackBerry pagers, and Motorola Razr flip phones, among others. Computer power cables lay in waves around columns’ bases, forming curving patterns like sand in a Japanese rock garden. The mise-en-scene reminded me of depictions of the Fates, the Greek goddesses who are tasked with assigning people destinies and often shown weaving the future. Like the Fates’ threads, the power cords are components of systems that connect and disconnect people. Around the gallery’s perimeter were poufs woven from thousands of ethernet cables. Visitors were welcome to sit on them as they took in the work.

“Pause” invited the audience to slow down and reflect. While all museums are spaces for contemplation, the site of “Pause”—a small corner gallery closed off by black glass doors—seemed especially conducive to meditation. There was a tension between serenity and dread in the space. The installation was not just an archaeological presentation of electronics from the past two decades, but a confrontation with our present dependence on such devices, a spectacle of mass consumerism. Our drive to connect is tethered to a desire for novelty: we want more from our technology. We want to share and consume more information more quickly. And so the companies that employ a substantial portion of the Bay Area’s population innovate and release updates that render previous iterations of their products obsolete.

To gather the materials for “Pause,” Shin partnered with GreenCitizen, a Bay Area–based organization that collects electronics for recycling, and the museum helped distribute an open call for Bay Area residents to donate phones for the work. That the installation used waste from a mere fraction of a local population only helped viewers envision the massive environmental impact of the global production, disposal, and destruction of electronics.

Shin’s work has often been compared to that of Tara Donovan, who creates undulating, monumental installations out of mundane objects. But while Donovan’s installations are formal exploration of repetition and scale, and demonstrations of how those qualities create a sense of awe, Shin’s channel wonderment into social awareness. In “Pause,” her provocations pushed viewers to reflect on a condition Greenfield describes as follows: “What keeps us twitching at our screens, more even than the satisfaction of any practical need, is the continuously renewed opportunity to bathe in the primal rush of communion.” We are eager to connect even when there is nothing to see. Representing this nervous compulsion in an alluring sculptural installation, Shin forced viewers to pause, if only for a moment.

The exhibition, comprising work by thirteen individual artists and collectives, begins with a four-channel video installation about Bina48, a humanoid robot bust. In Conversations with Bina48 (2014–), Stephanie Dinkins documents her interactions with the android, which is modeled to look like a black woman. (Bina48’s appearance is based on a real person: the co-founder of Terasem Movement, a private foundation promoting maximum extensions of human life). The robot exhibits almost human expressions and movements (which Dinkins mirrors during her interactions), as well as a tendency toward delivering monologues and lectures. The videos’ demonstration of the flawed robotic limits of this humanoid design is a reminder of how assimilated AI has become into everyday life via stealthy software systems, most of which don’t try to emulate human forms. Bina48’s apparent gender and race also highlight how unchecked biases have affected the choices made by humans encoding such systems to date.

Martine Syms’s Mythiccbeing and Threat Model (both 2018) put forth deliberately awkward performances of black femininity. In Mythiccbeing the artist’s computer-generated avatar maneuvers in virtual space on a large video screen. The monitor is set inside Threat Model, a wall-mounted vinyl graphic that outlines a risk-assessment map for network security. Instead of injunctions related to computer concerns, Syms’s map features incendiary phrases—e.g., “Rich PPL…WHAT DO I OWE EM?” “HE’S GOING TO GRAB MY BOOTY”—that evoke social stakes and pressures. The map also has a phone number and an invitation to send a text to it, in order to communicate with a chatbot named Teeny. In her responses, Teeny announces a disinterest in what humans have to say. Syms’s work refuses to gratify stereotypical expectations of either the vulnerability of her own black body or the validity of commercial AI’s claims of greater responsiveness to human wishes. It reiterates a point already raised by Dinkins’s performance awkwardly imitating an already awkward robot, namely: avatars and bots not only mirror human likenesses, limitations, and distortions but also help propagate them.

Lawrence Lek: AIDOL, 2019, video, 2019, 85 mins.

While works by Syms and Dinkins undermine AI’s anthropocentricism by pointing to ruptures in interactions with robots, Lawrence Lek’s animated movie Aidol (2019) expands the same theme in narrative. With darkly seductive video-game graphics, the 90-minute animation tells the surprisingly poignant story of Diva, a fading human pop singer who cuts a deal with a bot to sift through her back catalog to synthesize a new hit. One recurrent theme of “Uncanny Valley” is the insidiousness of programs that generate human culture. In Aidol, the bot and the human debate the relative merits of originality and consistency, thus presenting machine-learning algorithms as an exacerbation of the long-simmering antagonism between humans and their inventions. This rivalry centers on the issue of generating new art by mining already existing content, reminding us how formulas and archetypes underlie all cultural production, even as the machining of culture continues to accelerate.

View of Forensic Architecture’s installation in “Uncanny Valley,” showing Triple Chaser, video, and 3D-printed tear gas canisters.

Other works in the show address political issues head on. Some even attempt interventions. Forensic Architecture’s video Triple Chaser (2019), projected large, details the development of AI systems to track munitions used against civilians around the world. Across the room, in the group’s installation Synthetic Images: Extreme Objects (2020), 3D-printed models are arrayed on a narrow table. These are produced from specifications of actual munitions, and physically manifest the animated versions seen in the video.

The centerpiece of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker (2018–) is a touchscreen console that asks visitors to input their email addresses into an unseen computer. Visitors entering a small red square on the floor trigger motion sensors, projecting their bodies’ outlines onto surrounding walls as bright moving silhouettes filled with freshly mined personal data: names, street addresses, and places of employment associated with the provided emails. It is disturbing to witness the vulnerability of half-aware users willingly providing not only their data but also their bodies for imaging. The ease with which both types of profiling are generated in real time provides a stark visualization of how we are all dangerously surveilled, demonstrating that our identities have already been replicated as diminished, ethereal versions.

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Shadow Stalker, 2019.

In Hito Steyerl’s City of Broken Windows (2018), large-print quotes from economics and social theory texts fill a gallery’s walls, its floor-to-ceiling windows, and some painted fake windows, all arranged around two videos installed opposite each other. One video documents the volunteers who paint decorative boards to cover broken windows in poor neighborhoods of Camden, New Jersey, while the other depicts exuberant human testers training an AI system to detect the sound of breaking glass and alert authorities to intruders. The “broken window” profiling theory, which insists on policing small signs of disorder, is complicated by Steyerl’s more nuanced analysis of how breaks in physical buildings can be repaired to benefit the social fabric.

While turning back and forth to watch Steyerl’s two videos and walking the perimeter of the gallery to read the selected texts, viewers are confronted with her arguments in several modes of perception. As the number of online interactions increases at an accelerated rate, whether or not we’re aware of them, “Uncanny Valley” makes a case for the importance of physical, sensual experience for understanding our digital life. The immersion and cross-talk of Steyerl’s piece—as with the work of many of the other artists in the show—overcome the easy distancing produced by clicking a mouse and the distractions of the endless streaming possibilities offered by our too-smart-for-our-own-good AI-enabled technologies.

David Gilbert: Painted Lady, 2019, inkjet print, 35 by 25 inches; at Rebecca Camacho Presents.

The eight photographs in Gilbert’s exhibition “Painted Ladies” (all 2019) play fast and loose with art historical precedent, much like the glamorous architectural anachronisms evoked by the show’s title: San Francisco’s famous Victorian houses, whose brightly painted facades are fanciful 1960s reinterpretations of a nineteenth-century style. Gilbert took the photographs during a residency at Yaddo, where he had to work with a fixed repertoire of props, maximizing limited resources. Certain elements, like a piece of butcher paper painted with black stripes and a veil’s length of gauze, are ripped up and repurposed across multiple arrangements, the modest components used to create effects suggestive of both neoclassical portrait sittings and plein air painting. Like a drag queen fashioning a gown out of trash, Gilbert proves glamour is not so much about what you have as what you do with it.

A particularly striking trio of works features compositions that center on hanging forms: in Painted Lady, a length of white gauze dappled in paint is suspended from a bunched ball of reddish paper, the ghostly results uneasily recalling both a bride with her back turned and a freshly slaughtered chicken. By contrast, the roll of green-painted burlap with a slender piece of gauze hanging over it in Grande Dame forms an elegant silhouette recalling the couture worn by midcentury model Lisa Fonssagrives in photographs shot by her husband, Irving Penn. In Posy, a large silhouette of a flower cut out of butcher paper curls around itself like a sleeping bat.

David Gilbert: Grande Dame, 2019, inkjet print, 35 by 25 inches; at Rebecca Camacho Presents.

Not all of the photographs feature such suggestive figural elements. Gilbert’s sumptuous handling of light is best appreciated in the more abstract works, which propose a middle ground between still life arrangements and landscapes. In Ether, for example, a swath of light-blue fabric hangs before a piece of white fabric beyond which we can make out the outlines of a window. As if nodding to the view obscured by his arrangement, Gilbert has inserted a printed reproduction of a cloud painting by John Constable next to his own roughly executed copy of the same work. Constable printouts are also visible in several other photographs, including Posy, where one is tacked onto a painted backdrop that seems inspired by it, with wispy strokes of pale blue on a wrinkled white ground.

Instead of a sly wink from copy to original, Gilbert’s juxtaposition of the Constable reproductions with his own clumsy homages suggests that both versions have aesthetic value, contributing equally to the composition as a whole. What matters is the total look. Constable once claimed to have never seen an ugly thing in his life, explaining that “light, shade, perspective” will always make the form of an object beautiful. Gilbert’s photographs seem to take Constable’s quip as a challenge, capturing, with great tenderness and care, the potential of even the humblest of materials to enchant, while revealing and reveling in the manufactured nature of such beauty.

This article appears under the title “David Gilbert” in the February 2020 issue, p. 93.

Matt Mullican: Untitled (Computer Project), 1989, Ilfochrome classic print, computer generated images in lightbox, eighteen parts, 36 by 48 by 7 inches each.

Several of these types of work appear in the de Young’s “Between Sign and Subject,” a small retrospective that serves as the California-born, largely Europe-based artist’s first solo exhibition at a United States museum in twenty years. On view, for instance, are four of his bulletin boards from the early 1980s, each featuring tacked-up items relating to an aspect of his cosmological system. Untitled (Household), 1982, displays sheets, napkins, buttons, and the like—tokens from the zone of everyday life. Untitled (Bulletin Board: comics), 1982, for its part, addresses the order of language and representation by compiling images excised from comic-book panels and categorizing them according to their content or theme. The exhibition also includes a large flaglike banner composed of red and black halves superimposed with a central white circle (presumably representing the nexus of subjectivity and language), and a series of lightbox transparencies from the late ’80s depicting computer-generated designs for an imagined city laid out in five color-coded districts corresponding to Mullican’s cosmological orders. When taking such forms, Mullican’s symbology can, as skeptical critics have observed, emit a noxious whiff of totalitarian pageantry and control.

Matt Mullican: Untitled (Bulletin Board: comics), 1982, bulletin board, 97 1/2 by 49 5/8 by 3 inches; at the de Young Museum.

The centerpiece of the show is a new work, Living in That World (2018), comprising forty oil stick–on–canvas rubbings, each almost seven feet square, installed in a grid that covers the museum’s southwest atrium wall. The rubbings, made using etched glass panels that the artist produced for this purpose, feature a variety of images. Some of the imagery is Mullican’s own, and some he appropriated. An ornate nineteenth-century diagram mapping the New York and Erie Rail Road company’s organizational structure appears alongside one of Mullican’s early, similarly diagrammatic cosmological sketches depicting the emergence of human culture from a chaotic elemental landscape. Found engineering plans, architectural projections, cartoon image fragments, and a chart with the Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals occupy other cells in the mural-scale grid. Three words displayed along the installation’s periphery—WORLD, SUBJECT, and ELEMENT—offer something of an interpretive key to the imagery. With so few works in the show to provide context, however, such a legend is likely decipherable only to viewers already well familiar with Mullican’s idiosyncratic taxonomy.

What, then, can an uninitiated visitor expect to take away from this exhibition’s small slice of Mullican’s world? The introductory wall text proposes that the artist’s sign system should be considered an “early embrace” of the type of “visual emblems that populate and obsessively draw us to the screens of our smartphones.” Although anachronistic, the allusion to Silicon Valley is nonetheless illuminating. Mullican’s work models the systematization of knowledge—scientific, bureaucratic, linguistic, mythological, and otherwise—through which humankind orders its reality: an endeavor, his flags and urban designs suggest, that is never divorced from politics and power.

This article appears under the title “Matt Mullican” in the December 2019 issue, pp. 98–99.

The seven untitled sculptures on view are, like all of Fecteau’s work, riddles without solutions. These acrylic-painted amalgams of foam, papier-mâché, and resin clay are placed on evenly spaced pedestals at eye level, so that viewers can take in their curious assortments of curves, squared-off corners, and cavities. Fecteau made the works iteratively: he would reevaluate the results of one piece, and then use the same materials and general shape as the basis for the next one, each “completed” sculpture but another resting point in the process. The works are roughly the same size—around twenty to thirty inches per side—and of indeterminate weight, given their smoothly painted surfaces.

From certain angles, the sculptures suggest architectural models. From others, they take on a biomorphic cast. The works’ strangeness comes into relief when they’re viewed up close, a vantage that also best shows off Fecteau’s irrepressible penchant for the statement accessory. One sculpture, painted a Prince-worthy shade of purple, bears strands of raffia and burlap patches, as if it has just enjoyed a hayloft tryst. Another, painted in a mottled peacock blue, is topped with two screw eye hooks that have all the attitude of a teenager’s eyebrow ring. Tucked into a hollow of still another is a black jute bow that could have been lifted straight from a Sunday church hat. Fecteau has said that the sculptures are “about” the Wizard of Oz. The works, with their contoured planes, might suggest Dorothy’s house whirling in the twister, and the raffia recalls the Scarecrow’s costume. More than just camp garnish, however, Fecteau’s found-scrap embellishments have a curious effect on the sculptures, making them at once more and less alien, like when ET appears disguised in drag.

Just as unexpected as those adornments are the four blown-up re-photographed photographs by the late Lutz Bacher that hang on the walls. These aren’t listed on the show’s checklist or mentioned in the press release, nor is the aforementioned installation of photographic prints on the Wattis windows, which was also by Bacher. The images in the gallery, suggesting outtakes from a portrait session or stills from a “Candid Camera” bit, form a sequence in which a little girl, facing the camera, goes from diffident to shocked as the chair she sits on collapses. In the catalogue, the show’s curator, Anthony Huberman, notes that Fecteau sent Bacher the original photographs, as he would do whenever he encountered an image that possessed a certain quality he thought she would appreciate. As you view Fecteau’s sculptures in the exhibition, the girl is always in your line of sight, gazing out and generating a kind of self-consciousness about your own looking.

The inclusion of Bacher’s work provides a glimpse into the creative impulses that animated their relationship. Seeing their works installed together highlights how much the two artists’ sensibilities overlapped, even if their practices diverged significantly. Both artists’ work contains a puckish sense of humor roiling beneath apparently inscrutable surfaces. Both feature ordinary materials in canny and unexpected ways. And both tug, gently, incessantly, at the structures that support a coherent understanding of the world, until the only way to reapproach “home” is as Dorothy or ET or the little girl in the photographs does: through a crash-landing in which the everyday is rendered unfamiliar, strange.

Corrections

An earlier version of the review gave incorrect information about the photograph displayed on the Wattis Institute’s windows. It was taken in 2007 or 2008 and not during a 1990 ACT UP demonstration. The opening paragraph has been adjusted.

The review also implied that Fecteau decided to include Lutz Bacher’s work in the exhibition after her death. Bacher collaborated with him on the show before her death. Wording concerning her work here has been revised.

Fecteau did not have The Wizard of Oz playing in his studio as he made the sculptures, as the review had suggested, but, rather, realized that the sculptures related to the movie after he had made them.

This article appears under the title “Vincent Fecteau” in the November 2019 issue, p. 106.

“Show Me as I Want to Be Seen,” an exhibition on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco through July 7, is a rare opportunity to see Cahun and Moore’s original prints from the Jersey Heritage Collection. On average, the pictures are three by five inches; the display of these small objects, however sturdily presented in frames, recalls a pocket album or a desk drawer scattered with treasured souvenirs. These images destabilize gender through cumulative contrast. In one, Cahun lies nude on a beach, revealing her backside through tangles of seaweed that evoke rope bondage. In another portrait she appears as a solarized tough guy, popping a blazer collar and looking at the camera.

At the entrance to the exhibition, the couple’s photomontages are reproduced as wall-mounted vinyl prints that include the edges of the pages from which they were scanned. They reveal the surrealism that inflected the artists’ work: mannequin hands and tilting chess boards hover amid kaleidoscopic repetitions of Cahun’s bald head. These photomontages and accompanying prose were originally published in Cahun’s 1925 anti-memoir Aveux non avenues by Editions de Carrefour. It was their most widely distributed work—at a modest five hundred copies. The book was first published in English as Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions in 2008; Cahun and Moore only entered the canon of Western photography in the late 1990s.

“Show Me” is a selectively nostalgic celebration of nonnormative sexuality and vibrant creative lives, which Cahun and Moore could afford thanks to family wealth. In 1937, the two moved from the avant-garde milieu of Paris to Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. Three years later, the island was occupied by Nazis, and when Cahun and Moore were not making art, they intercepted and scrambled radio transmissions from German U-boats. They were captured, and narrowly escaped a death sentence when the war ended. In Untitled (Portrait of Claude with Nazi insignia between her teeth), 1945, Cahun wears a scarf over her hair, grown out from the shaven head of her youth. She stands with a butch authority: one hand in the pocket of her trench coat, the other in the pocket of her baggy trousers. As if commemorating her release from prison, Cahun smiles subversively with a Nazi badge—possibly torn from a uniform—in her mouth.

Cahun and Moore inspired Natasha Matteson, assistant curator at the CJM, to explore how race, gender, and sexuality are visualized through various mediums and methods by ten contemporary artists. Their works are interspersed with Cahun and Moore’s, and the connections among them are at times literal. The petulant pose Cahun strikes as a heavily made-up bodybuilder in Untitled (I am in training don’t kiss me), 1927, matches that of Tschabalala Self’s multilayered figure in Perched (2016): both sit cross-legged and twist to face the viewer. Others are more thematic. Davina Semo’s sculpture SHE SHOUTS BECAUSE IT MAKES HER BRAVE, OR SHE WANTS TO ANNOUNCE HER RECKLESSNESS (2018) is a concrete slab coated with shattered auto glass. It sparkles but does not reflect, suggestive of Cahun’s poetic refusal to define herself.

Matteson activates a dialogue among Cahun, Moore, and the ten other artists by asking how art can respond to forces that marginalize targeted identities. Meanwhile, another framework for “Show Me” was offered by artists Micah Bazant and Jordan Reznick, lead organizers of a protest against the exhibition, who arrived on opening night with a crew chanting slogans and holding signs; one read UNMASK ISRAELI APARTHEID, perhaps referring to an iconic image in which Cahun wears a cape decorated with party masks. The protest’s main accusation was that “Show Me” engages in pinkwashing, a term describing Israel’s use of a media and cultural campaign of accepting LGBTQ people in its society, while falsely framing Palestinian Muslims as transphobic and homophobic, in part to distract from the horrors of Israel’s ongoing militarized occupation of Palestine. Reznick told me in an email that Cahun and Moore function as “role models . . . not only because they were queer and trans but because of their radical politics.” Their example moved the protestors to “come forward more publicly about the museum’s complicity with Israel’s abuses of human rights.”

The protests ask: if Cahun and Moore were alive today, how would they would disentangle their Jewishness from the ethnostate of Israel? The CJM receives money from the Israeli Consulate through the Brand Israel initiative, which promotes a positive image of the country overseas, and the Koret Foundation, which also funds a plethora of organizations and institutions that are attempting to defend Israel amid a growing movement for solidarity with Palestine. I worked toward understanding the funding situation by reading Jasmine Weber’s “Protesters Accuse SF Contemporary Jewish Museum of Pinkwashing” on Hyperallergic and Zoé Samudzi’s article on the exhibition on Medium. Like Weber, Samudzi chose not to illustrate her text with images of the works in “Show Me,” instead using documentation of the opening night protest. Samudzi also reproduces the protesters’ pamphlet, which prominently features the line “There will be no freedom until everyone is Free,” from the 1938 Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art—a statement signed by Cahun. The pamphlet’s text argues that Cahun and Moore’s art cannot be sanitized and extricated from their political activism, which was based on the same principles of freedom and equality that lie at the foundation of the present-day movement for Palestinian self-determination.

Protestors have asked the public not to support the museum by buying tickets—a demand aligned with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. The protests have succeeded in raising awareness about the CJM’s funding. But the accusations of pinkwashing seem tenuous because Brand Israel is not directly involved in this exhibition. “Show Me” does not feature any Israeli artists or pro-Israel content. Was the museum consciously pinkwashing? Or was “Show Me” just intertwined in the daily operation of an institution and its collaboration with nefarious political powers (which, it should be added, are made no less nefarious when the institution shows art that challenges the status quo)?

While I am in support of the protesters’ aims, I also considered how their demands for justice are already embedded in the artworks on view in “Show Me.” Semo’s sculpture “I WON’T BOTHER YOU” SHE SAID (2019) punctures the wall of the gallery, a narrow diamond-shaped incision lined with stainless steel. The work could be read as a literal and metaphorical attack on the institution, breaking it apart from the inside.

I went to see “Show Me” on a quiet weekday afternoon. No protest was orchestrated out front. I was breaking the “picket line” set by the protesters, but I gave the museum no money; I used my business card from a one-year fellowship at the Jewish History Museum (JHM) in Tucson, Arizona, to get in free. A month earlier, my friend had texted me a photo of my book The Estrangement Principle displayed in the CJM gift shop. She teased me that I had been pinkwashed. My being “out” as anti-Zionist—I identified as such on two panels at the Council of American Jewish Museums Conference, and organized a reading group on the recently released anthology The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History at the JHM—refuses and complicates the “use” of my queer and trans identity by institutions to appear progressive. I do not follow the scripts to avoid discussion of the occupation. While they are not as immediately visible as protests, actions taken by workers inside museums can also function as forms of resistance.

The protests were met with silence from the CJM and my request to interview Matteson was politely declined. I imagined a future when an exhibition like “Show Me,” predicts and even responds publicly to the contradictions between themes in the exhibition and museum’s funding through dialogue and discussion. This type of programming cannot happen if an institution’s leaders censor critique of the Israeli occupation to appease funders. Bazant also envisions a paradigm shift: in an email to Hyperallergic, they write, “As trans Jewish artists, we dream of a Jewish museum that embodies the Jewish values of justice and solidarity . . . a space that actively supports liberation struggles.” Jewish museums in the United States are particularly well positioned as educational sites for narrating the role of conquest and dispossession in the creation of the state of Israel and its ongoing occupation. In the meantime, museum workers, visitors, educators, writers, artists, and activists—and those who identify as some or all of the above, as I do—are speaking to each other at the edges of institutions about how to subvert and ultimately change support for the Israeli occupation in the United States and, more broadly, how to undo ties between the commerce of war in halls of culture.

Hiwa K’s Pre-image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), is a single-channel video installation tucked in the back corner of “Show Me.” Recreating a journey—by foot—he made when migrating as a child from Iraqi Kurdistan to Europe through the Turkey–Greece border, K balances a sculpture of tiered rearview mirrors pointing down and around him like shower faucets. The mirrors capture faint, fragmented reflections of the artist’s environment as he walks. I took it as a subtle reminder that viewers can see beyond the words of the museum, as well as of those who critique the terms on which museums present art.

Frequently, Goodroad will float forms in unexpected colors atop his compositions like algae blooms. Glowing in the foreground of an untitled landscape painting from 2018, for example, is a reddish-orange blob. Connected to an applelike shape above it and a pair of blue ovals below, it recalls a torso, though whether we are looking at a figure remains unclear. The dark green field in the painting’s middle distance, meanwhile, is dotted with flecks of blue and orange that give it the appearance of cooling magma. In one of two paintings on copper, Wind Mill (2017), the titular building is nowhere to be found amid the dun- and mustard-colored landscape. A burgundy-hued splotch toward the top of the image brings out the blush of overpainted pinks in the cloud bank it hovers over, and has all the drama of red wine spilled on a pristine tablecloth.

Elsewhere, Goodroad’s brushwork becomes more concentrated and rippled, further tickling one’s pareidolia. The figure in the show’s second painting on copper, a small, untitled piece from 2018, has what looks to be the face of a lapdog. Or it could be no face at all: Goodroad exploits the surface tension between paint and metallic surface to slippery effect. In Gill (2018)—a portrait done on linen—a figure decked out in clothing suggestive of historical costume (is that a segment of a ruffled collar poking out?) has a smudge of muted peacock blue where their face would be. The paint throughout Gill is swirled and mottled, showing its manipulation, save for the realistically shaded leaves in the canvas’s upper left-hand corner, which could have been cut from a wallpaper catalogue.

Four untitled monotypes (all 2018) made from the same plate—the composition having been reinked and reworked for each successive printing—show a seated figure variably enveloped in a fog of fantastic creatures worthy of Goya or fading amid a gray haze of repeated hatch marks. Humorous, odd, and packed with ambiguous detail, these prints further attest to Goodroad’s curious vision and unique handling of materials. Like the paintings, they are at once romantic in their evocation of art historical styles and almost forensic in their technique. Shorn of self-reflexivity and topicality, and eschewing any engagement with a politics of representation, Goodroad’s work offers beauty without sentimentality.

To start the show with this work was a deft decision by curators Gary Garrels, from SFMoMA, and Ian Alteveer, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (The exhibition will travel to the Met Breuer in the fall.) It demonstrates their sensitivity to the singular oeuvre of this reticent artist, who was born in Latvia and has developed her practice over the past half-century, first working in Los Angeles and then, beginning in the early 1980s, in New York. Although the exhibition is laid out in chronological fashion, motifs recur throughout, given Celmins’s steady focus on the same themes throughout her career. In Letter (1968) we find another envelope, this one exquisitely rendered in graphite on prepared paper. The envelope was for a letter Celmins’s mother sent to her at her studio, and the artist kept it for two years. “I thought of these images that I worked with as something dead that I was looking at,” she said in a 2011 interview. “So I brought them alive by redescribing them.” While Celmins depicts the envelope in Letter accurately, noting every crease in the paper, the stamps are her own drawings of bombs, clouds, and houses—subjects familiar from her earlier work. The drawing thus exemplifies her keen attention to different modes of description, her interest in repetition, and the tension between veracity and illusion that permeates her best work.

Celmins is a famously slow artist, prone to fallow periods, and the 140 pieces on view constitute nearly half of her body of work. The exhibition is weighted toward her drawing, painting, and sculpture, and contains only a small sampling of prints, which is unfortunate, given her dexterity with numerous printmaking techniques. The nuanced presentation of her practice across various mediums distinguishes the retrospective from previous surveys of her work in the United States, such as a 2002 exhibition of her prints at the Metropolitan, and a show of her drawings that in 2007 traveled from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where Garrels was the organizing curator. He began working on the current exhibition two years later.

The most successful galleries in “To Fix the Image in Memory” chart the artist’s movement between materials. The first space, for instance, exhibits portrayals of everyday objects in two- and three-dimensional mediums alongside one another, placing the oil paintings Fan and Heater (both 1964) near oversize painted-wood sculptures of a comb, three Pink Pearl erasers, and a pencil. Elsewhere, a heavily worked oil-and-wax image of the night sky, Barrier (1985–86), is displayed beside the softly rendered graphite Drawing Saturn (1982), as well as a suite of four prints, Concentric Bearings (1984), in which Celmins juxtaposes depictions of her motifs in varying combinations of aquatint, drypoint, mezzotint, and photogravure. The revelation of this exhibition is not how staggeringly beautiful Celmins’s work is—we already knew that—but how fluidly she moves between mediums, with each shift answering an aesthetic problem. When Celmins felt that her painting was becoming too concentrated and tight, for example, she began using charcoal to try to “trick” herself into making “work that was a little more open,” as she explained in an interview in the catalogue for the 2002 Met show. The outcomes of this decision are seen in the night sky series, as well as her drawings of spiderwebs.

Celmins has long been known as an artist’s artist, and so it was no surprise to find visitors looking closely at her works’ tacking edges or trying to discern the nature of the acrylic grounds (sprayed? brushed?) she uses for some of her drawings. The lack of a technical essay in the excellent exhibition catalogue is a missed opportunity. The catalogue contains a useful chronology and essays about her time in Los Angeles and New York, though more needs to be done to contextualize this artist’s work in the currents of postwar art. While she is continually out of step with artistic movements, as Garrels notes, she is attuned to her place in history. She described her first show—held at David Stuart Galleries in Los Angeles in 1966, and featuring, among other works, paintings of historical news images—as “bringing WWII to the middle of LA when everybody else was looking at Duchamp and Warhol.” She dismissed the soup can paintings Warhol exhibited at Ferus Gallery in 1962 as too commercial, but her eraser sculptures are unmistakably Pop and suggest kinships with Claes Oldenburg’s work. Warhol haunts Celmins’s depictions of car crashes, and Celmins once observed that she and Gerhard Richter “must have found the same World War II books,” given their shared imagery. Russell Ferguson’s essay in the catalogue begins to unpack the impact of Robert Irwin’s phenomenological approach on Celmins’s practice, but more could be said about the perceptual effects of her oceans in relation to the work of her peers in Venice, such as James Turrell and Doug Wheeler.

Throughout the exhibition, Celmins’s work builds upon itself, recalling the centripetal forces of her motifs: “the plane spiraling down, the rotary device spinning, the stars turning,” as she put it in the 2002 interview. There’s also the perpetual feeling of violence. Table with Gun (2009–10) comprises a wooden desk (built by Celmins) with a blackboard tablet and gun placed on top and three more blackboard tablets resting on an interior shelf. Three of the blackboards are found objects and one is a replica, prompting viewers to try to determine the fake. The pistol is a bronze cast of the gun depicted in the paintings Gun with Hand #1 and Gun with Hand #2 (both 1964), which Celmins based on a photograph she’d taken of a model holding the weapon. The three-dimensionality of Table with Gun obviates the studied remove of the earlier paintings, creating a chilling sense of impending danger.

Celmins rarely leaves her viewers on solid ground. Rather, they must constantly negotiate the paradoxical sense of familiarity and reserve that animates her work. The artist is acutely aware of these qualities, as she made clear when discussing an experience she had in the desert, a setting that figured prominently in her work from the 1970s. “At first I thought there was nothing there,” she said. “Then I began to see things. I was always having to adjust my eyes back and forth—both far and close, which is how I think about my own work sometimes. It lies somewhere between distance and intimacy.”