But the doodle isn’t exactly what you’d expect to see in a museum. Still, it wound up in one nevertheless—the Brooklyn Museum, that is, where the comedian co-organized, with staff curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, the instantly infamous “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.” The chunk of wall hangs beneath a gigantic Cecily Brown painting and among several Picasso pieces, with masterworks by feminist artists like Howardena Pindell, Dara Birnbaum, and Ana Mendieta sprinkled throughout.

It would be easy to write off “Pablo-matic” as a joke—it’s organized by a comedian and titled with a pun, after all. But doing so has proved polarizing: the backlash to the backlash casts the show’s critics as protectors of a dying canon. Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak rebutted the controversy in an interview with Curbed NY by saying, “if you talk to young art historians, they are like, ‘I don’t care if I ever see another Picasso.’ ‘I don’t care if I ever see another Degas.’” She seemed to side with these unspecified youths, adding that she wanted her museum to be a part of “the conversations that people are having today.”

“Pablo-matic” is the splashiest in a number of museum exhibitions on view in New York right now that urge us to rewrite art history, given all the progress we’ve made when it comes to gender and racial equality, and start the story anew. Fair enough. Most of us who have endured an art history survey—or have even seen a major museum’s collection—know how many white men populate the canon. This fact is underscored by one “Pablo-matic” artist, Kaleta Doolin, who made A Woman on Every Page (2018) by slicing out a vaginal void from every page of H.W. Janson’s landmark textbook History of Art, first published in 1962 and still updated and taught today. The book is shown open to a page bearing the image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

But rewriting is one matter, and recklessly argued hot takes, entirely another. “It’s Pablo-matic” falls into the latter category, offering works that allegedly contend with Picasso’s legacy in some way, but in fact have other references. There’s a Faith Ringgold painting that refers directly to an Henri Matisse canvas, for example, and a Nina Chanel Abney work that pays homage to a Manet. Picasso, who physically and emotionally abused women in his orbit while also using them as his muses, is deserving of criticism, but shoehorning in tangentially related works such as these is a weird way to do that.

There were brave women who exposed Picasso’s bad behavior during his lifetime, among them painter Françoise Gilot, who, after a decade-long relationship with him, wrote a revealing book about it. But the curators don’t even include any of her work, an omission that became all the more glaring when she died just days after the show opened.

“It’s Pablo-matic” is proof that the field of art history is changing, for better and for worse. Museums are somewhat newly self-reflexive about their role in shaping the culture and the discourse, and are working hard to stay relevant and expand the canon—and to grow their audiences. Once, museums were places to engage with meaning and beauty, to try to comprehend the human experience across time and cultures. Now, nuance is being swapped out for one-liners in an effort toward an elusive kind of “accessibility.”

“Rear View,” a cheeky meditation on artists’ obsession with plump rumps across the years at LGDR gallery in Manhattan, is also born from this tendency. This group show would have been dismissible as flimsy had the gallery not secured so many first-class artworks. There was a stunning Barkley Hendricks painting of a nude woman from behind, one arm holding the other, and a fabulous Félix Vallotton image of a female backside that doubles as a study of contrapposto. Prime examples of works by market darlings like Issy Wood and Jenna Gribbon were also on view, offering feminist perspectives.

Every so often, a sharp juxtaposition appeared: the Vallotton was cast beside the Yoko Ono film Bottoms (1966), a series of close-ups of men’s and women’s derrieres. In this context, the Ono film felt like a more equitable and less horny alternative to Vallotton’s male gaze. The works were amusing, but I didn’t come away feeling like I learned much about these artists or, for that matter, butts. I cringed at the pairing of an Anselm Kiefer photograph of the artist performing a Nazi salute—a work that once caused art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh to label Kiefer “a fascist who thinks he’s antifascist”—and a Carrie Mae Weems shot of the artist herself standing in the doorway of a Louisiana house where multiple white owners held enslaved people as their property. Buttocks appear in both these works, sure, but the reductive framing of keisters as their binding theme feels insensitive.

Much-needed attempts to revise the canon and offer retorts to the form it has championed are finally being made. But they’re being done hastily, and worse, as a disservice to the artists (and to nuance in general). This provokes a larger question: What do we want from art history?

The query echoes in the phenomenon that ArtReview recently termed the “blockbuster dialogue exhibition,” wherein a lesser-known figure is paired with a famous one, as if to secure the former’s spot in the canon and put them on equal footing with a bona fide “master.” Think Tate Modern’s current show about Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian, two pioneering abstractionists whose work has formal similarities, or the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s acclaimed Claude Monet–Joan Mitchell doubleheader.

When the pairings are successful, this formula has offered revelatory looks at beloved figures. But in New York this season, two smaller museum exhibitions following the model showed its limits, with tenuous matches for unlike artists.

At the Museum of Modern Art, “The Encounter” places Barbara Chase-Riboud’s and Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures side by side. His are spare, spindly figures; hers are blocky, metallic abstractions. Unlike af Klint and Mondrian or Monet and Mitchell, Chase-Riboud and Giacometti did meet—she visited his Paris studio in 1962. She was 39 years his junior and had just moved to the French capital after becoming the first Black woman to receive an MFA from Yale. The show features works by both artists with titles referring to female Venetians. Giacometti’s Femme de Venise (1956) boasts a slender white figure formed from white plaster; Chase-Riboud’s Standing Black Woman of Venice (1969/2020) is a towering monolith crafted from crushed black bronze.

But the exhibition also includes Chase-Riboud works that don’t have a lot to do with Giacometti’s. One example is the gorgeous 1973 sculpture Le Manteau (The Cape) or Cleopatra’s Cape in which braids of rope spill from a structure covered in copper squares. This allows her to speak on her own, avoiding the “Pablo-matic” pitfall of framing a woman’s work as a retort to the male canon. But the show might have been just as effective without showing any Giacometti works at all.

Over at the Frick Collection’s temporary Breuer space, a newly commissioned Nicolas Party installation responds to a painting by Rosalba Carriera, whose Italian Rococo pastel portraits are badly in need of a retrospective. Party hung Carriera’s circa-1730 portrait of a man in a pilgrim’s costume against a mural of his own: it shows a pastel patterned dress floating and undulating in a black void. Two similar images also appear on adjacent walls, both with Party’s own garish paintings of blue- and white-faced people hung atop them. It’s clear that Party reveres Carriera’s sfumato—his floating garments are glossy and lush, just like her surfaces—but the similarities end there. Party’s domineering visual fanfare forces Carriera’s painting into the background even as her work overlies one of his. In the end, this feels less like a meeting of minds across centuries than just another feather in Party’s cap, proving that in some “dialogue exhibitions,” one voice will still be louder than the other.

The #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter pushed scholars and curators to look back at art history for figures who have been overshadowed, and ever since, each season has boasted a “rediscovery.” The big one this summer around was Gego, a modernist sculptor who fled Nazi Germany for Venezuela in the 1930s. The Guggenheim rotunda is filled with an array of delicate geometric sculptures that Gego formed by gently twisting steel into hanging grids and globes. The show began with sculptures of the ’50s formed from painted iron lines that intersect, creating the illusion of movement, but it is her signature sparse nets and weaves, made between 1969 and her death in 1994, that are the exhibition’s stars.

The Guggenheim version of this traveling show, curated by Pablo León de la Barra and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, generally relies on formalist readings of Gego’s art, pointing out that her sculptures were never just flat, static things. But these abstractions are ripe for plucking from their sociopolitical context, which has been relegated to the indispensable catalogue, as has Gego’s complex life story. In that book, curator Julieta González, who organized this retrospective’s initial showing at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, positions Gego’s grid-like arrangements as analogies for what was taking place in Caracas at the time: artists were creating networks of their own, often in opposition to the Venezuelan government’s preference for unruly modernist utopianism. It’s revelatory reading. Curiously, almost none of González’s points make it into the Guggenheim galleries.

Perhaps this is because the Guggenheim was afraid the nitty gritty of Gego’s context would be tricky to translate across time and cultures. So instead, the show positions her as an artist who “defied categorization,” a zeitgeisty phrase used to describe people and artworks that cross classifications of all kinds. This feels like a giveaway about what this show’s curators—and those of other “rediscovery” retrospectives—are really after: they want art that speaks to the present, not art that enhances or challenges our understanding of the world.

Against all this, you have a show by Darrel Ellis, an artist whose story resists traditional narratives of the heroic straight white male artist. In fact, he confronted this myth directly in his work, while also embracing more vulnerable and humble materials. His extraordinary Bronx Museum of the Arts retrospective provides a strong case for why he deserves greater recognition.

Before he died of AIDS-related causes in 1992 at age 33, Ellis frequently worked with the photography archive of his father, who was beaten to death by plainclothes police officers not long before the artist was born. Ellis rephotographed his dad’s black-and-white pictures of his family and projected them on uneven plaster surfaces. The resulting photos of those original shots against the plaster appear fractured, split, and rumpled, troubling the images of the past while also reanimating them.

It helps that Ellis himself was an art history enthusiast, and thus aware of his relationship to the canon, to which he responded directly. He grew up in the South Bronx, gravitated toward museums in Manhattan, and fell in love with Eugène Delacroix, Edvard Munch, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Curators Antonio Sergio Bessa and Leslie Cozzi point out that Ellis even cribbed compositions from these artists for his own paintings. Take Untitled (After Delacroix), ca. 1980–90, in which Ellis appropriates a Delacroix painting of Hamlet from 1839, with the Frenchman’s rich reds now rendered in brushy black and white. If Delacroix lavished attention on Hamlet, Ellis seems more focused on the man holding Yorick’s dug-up skull. Perhaps Ellis saw in that man a parallel for himself, an exhumer of the past, more than one of history’s protagonists.

Ellis also copied images of himself photographed by icons such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Allen Frame, whose picture of Ellis standing in a doorway Ellis translated across papers and canvases in varying sizes, in both ink and acrylic, all hung next to each other in the Bronx Museum show. In Ellis’s hands, the edges of Frame’s photo fade into stark blankness. We’re ultimately left with a ghost—a living memory of a dead image. Ellis was keenly aware of the specters of art history, and he welcomed them, even as he also distanced himself from them. We’d all be wise to do the same.

This installation, titled Palimpsest (2013–17), by Doris Salcedo, is an elegant and powerful tribute to the countless people who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as they attempted to migrate to Europe. As Salcedo has pointed out, these lost souls are countless by design; the European Union does not keep records of their names, denying migrants their humanity.

Salcedo has resisted such government callousness for nearly four decades, first in her native Colombia and more recently in work informed by an expanded global view. For five years, she undertook her own research to find the names that appear in Palimpsest, compiling a list of the drowned by way of interviews she conducted. Of the mourning mothers she talked to, Salcedo has said, “it was essential for them to make the names visible, because the pain they were feeling was attached to the specificity and splendor of an irreplaceable life.”

Palimpsest marks a departure for Salcedo, who has long preferred to veil the subjects of her work. Take, for example, an untitled installation that opens the exhibition: a line of nine stacks of white collared shirts of various sizes extends just off the center of the room. The shirts have been covered in white plaster, and steel rods have been driven through each stack. This work, made between 1989 and 2014, deals with a massacre of plantation workers in Colombia.

As with other works on view here—like pieces from her “Atrabiliarios” series (1992–2004), in which shoes are embedded in a museum wall and obscured by stretched swaths of yellowed animal skin—clothing is often the only evidence of a person who has been murdered or intentionally disappeared. That trace of them is all that remains. An exhibition text describes the shirts in the sculpture about the Colombian plantation workers as “stripped of their individuality, made uniform, anonymous and interchangeable.” That might read as cold and clinical, but systematic, state-sponsored violence is cold and clinical. For Salcedo, it is important to draw that out. But in her hands, the connection is never overly explicit or didactic. There is a sense of poetry innate to her work, likely drawn from the artist’s own love of writing by the likes of Paul Celan and Ocean Vuong.

Salcedo is careful never to replicate the violent atrocities that her work invokes. Instead, she offers a means for the families and communities affected by acts of violence to mourn and grieve, and ultimately process their profound sense of loss. That is best exemplified in two works that make use of flora. A Flor de Piel II (2013–14) consists of chemically preserved rose petals that have been sutured together using surgical thread, and installed like an undulating piece of fabric, covering nearly an entire room. Evocative of a funeral shroud, the grief here is palpable, an embodied pain that can never really be sewn back together and healed.

In the next room is the mazelike installation Plegaria Muda (Silent Prayer, from 2008–10) in which mounds of dirt are sandwiched between a pair of stacked tables (the top one being inverted). Between the cracks in the wood, blades of grass poke through. There’s a tension in this work that runs through much of Salcedo’s oeuvre. The dirt rectangles can be read as mass graves: no matter how much we try to cover them up with other structures in order to forget about them, they refuse to be silenced and forgotten. They will sprout up and remind us, and perhaps even destroy the structures we create to destroy them.

There’s resonance between Plegaria Muda and the shoe-embedded “Atrabiliarios” pieces: whereas there is a refusal to be forgotten in Plegaria Muda, the “Atrabiliarios” works show how easy it is to forget. The animal skin in them points to how memory can be foggy and start to slip away with each day, month, year. We mustn’t allow that to happen, Salcedo says in her work.

This is a beautiful and impactful exhibition—Salcedo’s art is always elegant, commanding, and poignant. As her first museum show in Switzerland, it serves to introduce her to new audiences, especially in Europe. But while it certainly was moving to see many of the works included—most of them several years and even decades old—this is an exhibition also in search of a purpose. Neither a retrospective of the kind mounted by the Guggenheim Museum in 2015 nor a survey with new scholarship about Salcedo’s practice (though there is an exhibition catalogue), it left me wanting more. For an artist whose work makes the world look so different by uncovering the stories of those who could easily be forgotten, it would have been even more moving to see what is currently at the top of Salcedo’s mind and how she might translate that into new work.

It matters that “If You Really Knew” opened in Miami, a city Holley called “one of the most moisty places in America.” One of the artist’s chief concerns—pollution of the planet’s waters—is tangible in the dampness of the place, a point he reiterated in a public conversation with exhibition curator Adeze Wilford: “I’m concerned about the pollution and waste—what’s in the rain once the precipitation draws it up, how that rain mixes with other waters,” Holley said. Where does waste go when the earth can no longer, as Holley describes, “bite and chew it”?

For Holley, the earth is a woman—he calls her Mother Universe—and he has spent the better part of his lifetime collecting and transforming into artworks that which she cannot digest. His sculptures of found materials are the heart of this 70-work exhibition, which traces the trajectory of Holley’s 40-plus-year career and aims to capture the breadth of his boundless multidisciplinary practice. Spray-painted canvases, quilt paintings, steel sculptures, and an ongoing screening of I Snuck Off the Slave Ship (a 2018 musical film codirected with Cyrus Moussavi) together encapsulate at least part of it. The show also includes an extensive selection of pieces by other Black artists from the South that Holley curated himself: Thornton Dial, Mary T. Smith, Hawkins Bolden, Joe Minter, and Miami native Purvis Young—all of whose works, like Holley’s, were part of the collection of William Arnett, the late collector and founder of Souls Grown Deep Foundation who launched Holley’s career in earnest. (The show serendipitously opened on what would have been Arnett’s 84th birthday).

Minter’s Queen (1998), an anthropomorphic figure with chains where her crown would be, takes on new life standing across from Holley’s In the Cocoon (2021), a wire sculpture shaped like a face in profile, a motif repeated throughout his oeuvre. Holley’s figure, like Minter’s, is draped in flotsam—nylon, rope, string, pieces of trees—and the assemblage appears to billow behind them. It might be hair, or a veil to be cast off. Reflecting on the rubble and household objects alchemized in his work and that of the artists shown alongside him, Holley said, “this is material revival: we all revived these materials, as if they were Christ himself. We were the humans who were concerned about them, who took them out of their deathly place.”

The exhibition begins with Holley’s sandstone sculptures, made in the 1980s (with “stone that the builder rejected,” he said, alluding to Psalm 118:22). Holley’s discovery of sandstone marked a turning point in his formative days in Jim Crow–era Birmingham, Alabama. After two of his sister’s children died in a fire, Holley used sandstone—found among the byproducts of a steel foundry he’d explored—to build tombstones for them. These monuments of love were his first artworks, and he made more, experimenting with shapes and materials to establish different kinds of consistency.

Arranged on shelves that allow for a close look, Holley’s early sculptures range in size from around 8 to 24 inches and, with his recurring facial profile motifs or shell-like whorls, resemble the stone sculptures of traditions including Mesoamerican statues, royal Egyptian reliquaries, and Mesopotamian reliefs. One diptych comprises sandstone slabs, displayed together like plaques (Untitled, 1980s). On the right, two figures lovingly embrace and look upon a child, under a bright sun with carved swirls that indicate its shine. On the left, a face emerges from a strata of small rectangles, a topography of Holley’s imagination.

The sandstones’ contours rhyme with those of Holley’s tall steel sculptures (all Untitled, 2019), which are stacked, like totems, with faces again in profile. They are softly curved and seem to breathe, and they appear again in his spray paint works and quilt paintings (made with acrylic, oil, spray paint, and gesso on quilt over wood). In The Communicators (Honoring Joe Minter), from 2021, the visages are rendered in black and gray, and seem to move, as if Holley has animated Minter’s face, abstractly, over time. In Drifting Souls (2021), a diptych of a mirrored image, the faces float obliquely toward a pink-blue cosmos, like butterflies. In Back to the Spirit (2021), they are overlaid upon each other, swirling like clouds.

These faces might be oneiric representations of the soul, visible shadows of the otherwise incorporeal human spirit. Holley speaks often about the violence inflicted upon the planet—specifically, the way it mirrors the racialized terror of hegemonic powers wreaked on vulnerable people, with cruelty born from the same place. But he speaks just as much about his hope for its future. Though titles like Which Tear Drop Will End the Violence? (2022) might serve as warnings, Holley’s images depict states of transcendence and harmony. They look like heaven, but their scenes are set right here, on earth.

This somber work is a welcome outlier in Wiley’s oeuvre. His current exhibition, which debuted in Venice in 2022 before traveling to Paris and the United States, takes its title from this monumental equestrian. Wiley is better known for idealistic paintings of Black people dressed in designer streetwear and presented in heroic poses typically reserved for their white counterparts in European art history. His 2019 equestrian sculpture, Rumors of War, places a Black rider boldly gazing down Richmond’s Monument Avenue which, until recently, was lined with statues of Confederate generals. Often, his paintings quote directly from the Western canon; horses, borrowed from an iconography of glory that dates back to the Roman Empire, are a frequent motif.

Wiley demands Black representation in the canon and the museum by adhering to the strict artistic formulas that these exclusionary institutions champion. His monumental paintings use naturalism, painterly skill, and intricate details—from curling foliage to designer logos—to fashion his subjects within the long tradition of European court paintings.

Surely, these skills helped him secure the presidential portrait commission in 2018 from Barack Obama. In a sense, Wiley trained to paint this portrait of power his entire career; tellingly, his non-presidential paintings look similar to that commission. The former president, like Wiley’s work, has come to exemplify how merely placing a Black person in a position of power is not enough to change the racist status quo. (In addition to his historic victory as the first Black US president, Obama’s legacy also involves brutal deportation policies and a ready embrace of drone strikes.)

Wiley’s new paintings and sculptures, made between 2021 and 2022, only render the disturbing dynamics of his older pieces more pronounced. “An Archaeology of Silence” makes abundantly clear that reckonings with history cannot be as simplistic as supplanting Black protagonists into narratives and compositions built on imperialism and anti-Blackness.

This latest body of work reinterprets scenes of martyrdom, war, and slumber from the European art historical canon. In this, they more or less rehash his “Down” series (2007–09): glowing paintings of Black figures in various states of repose set against jewel-toned florals and foliage. He attributes his return to this subject matter to the summer 2020 global uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.

When “Down” debuted 15 years ago to an art world even less diverse than the present one, Wiley’s focus on dignified representation long absent from popular visual culture felt urgent. Now his depictions of fallen soldiers, saints, and even Greek gods are set explicitly against the backdrop of systemic violence that has long eluded Wiley’s inquiry.

In Christian Martyr Tarcisius (El Hadji Malick Gueye) (2021), Wiley replaces the young boy from Alexandre Falguière’s 1868 marble sculpture with a man he knows. The original work depicts the moment Tarcisius refused to surrender the sacraments he was carrying; for this refusal, he was stoned to death. Here and elsewhere, Wiley borrows compositions concerning sacrifice and martyrdom. But unlike Tarcisius, Saint Cecilia, and Christ—all of whom are referenced in the show—Floyd, whose death inspired the series, was not a martyr who chose to die for a cause. The implication recalls that of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, when she thanked Floyd for “sacrificing [his] life for justice.”

Throughout the show, Wiley spares viewers the explicit, bloody gore of death so often circulated online. He depicts his subjects with unwounded skin, echoing the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox belief that the bodies of saints are incorruptible and exempt from the rules of nature reserved for ordinary human bodies. The bronze Dying Gaul, after a Roman Sculpture of the 1st Century (2021) features a Black man in a hoodie in a semi-recumbent pose, supporting himself on one arm as vines wrap around his extended leg. Although it references an ancient Roman sculpture of a gladiator bearing a mortal wound to the chest, replete with intricate blood droplets carved in marble, Wiley’s Dying Gaul has no visible signs of injury.

Several of Wiley’s works quote European precedents but keep his subjects largely unharmed. The clothed figure in his painting Reclining Nude in Wooded Setting (Edidiong Ikobah),2022, lies on a grassy ground with her hips twisted to face the viewer, much like the woman in Victor Karlovich Shtemberg’s work of a similar title. It’s unclear whether she is slain, like many figures in the show, or in repose. This seems like an important distinction. And either way, Wiley’s subject manages to keep her bright white shirt unstained and shoes unscuffed as she lies in dirt.

Most of the show seems to gloss over loss, but this is punctuated by Wiley’s Youth Mourning (El Hadji Malick Gueye), After George Clausen, 1916, (2021), a sculpture of a child hunched over on the ground, head in hands. This work, in capturing the feeling of all-consuming, earth-shattering grief, succeeds where much of the exhibition fails. It is decidedly empathetic, and does not endeavor to make metaphor out of tragedy.

In the audio guide, Wiley says, “There’s so many opportunities now to talk about lost potential as a means to create a scaffolding for a better future.” By using the visual language of European colonial power and religious iconography without scrutiny, Wiley’s vision of the future is a constrained one. He may play with systems of power, but he does not shatter them.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The exhibition rewinds to Wong’s student days in Oakland at the dawn of the ’70s, as he dived headfirst into West Coast counterculture while trying not to erase his heritage. Here are his long paper scrolls covered in Beat-esque prose poetry, their unfurling format recalling Chinese calligraphy, and the jazzy Zap Comix–like prints Wong designed to advertise San Francisco drag-performance act The Cockettes, which he joined, later becoming part of their offshoot, Angels of Light Free Theater. A through line in the show is Wong’s outsider nature and gravitation to local communities, such that, after moving in 1973 to Humboldt County, he began painting local bars, crab fishermen, and compositional stews of non-Western lore and racial stereotyping like Tibetan Porky (1975–78), a watermelon-eating, many-eyed deity perched atop a crablike creature and surrounded by skulls. During his studies, he had also traveled in Afghanistan and India, and there is a sense in canvases from this era of Wong’s patching together a cosmology to make sense of the workings of chance and destiny. In Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball (Eureka), 1978–81, a fortune-divining sphere sits amid billowing burnt-orange smoke—clay-reds, browns, and oranges had become his signature downbeat palette—against a map of constellations advertising his devotion to astrology.

In 1978 Wong moved to down-at-heel New York, working as a night porter in a waterfront hotel on South Street in exchange for lodging and painting there. From this point, his paintings addressed secrecy and things happening out of mainstream sight. Numerous canvases of this period employ the vocabulary of American Sign Language. Clones of Bruce Lee (1981), created with sign-painter fluency, features chubby hands shaped to spell out the work’s title for a Deaf audience. In My Secret World 1978–81 (1984), Wong presents his old hotel room as seen through the windows—with miniaturized versions of his own paintings and books on shelves inside—along with text identifying the site as where the “world’s first paintings for the hearing impaired came into being.”

By this point Wong had relocated to the working-class, mainly Puerto Rican neighborhood known as Loisaida in downtown New York, and was befriending (and collecting the work of) graffiti artists. His paintings, while retaining ASL elements, began focusing on tightly painted architectural facades, some with bricked-up windows. Such works pivot on precarity: The decaying area he lived in was at once prey to gentrifiers and home to immigrant communities living lives that were mostly unseen. The series of paintings of shuttered storefronts he made in the mid- to late ’80s are startlingly economical evocations of hiddenness and displacement expressed through grimy geometry. At the same time, though, Wong was walking through walls in his mind, beginning a long series of paintings set inside New York prisons—their inhabitants disproportionately POC—that soon trade melancholic images of sleeping prisoners in stacked bunks for beefcake fantasies of hunky inmates (such as Top Cat, 1990), sexualizations of corrections officers, and the power-inverting cop-taunting scenario of 1994’s Come Over Here Rockface (“and suck my dick,” the text beside a shirtless prisoner clarifies).

Whatever harsh realities surrounded him, Wong’s art asserts that, on canvas at least, he was free. There, New York’s firemen, like its policemen, couldn’t stop him from sexualizing them, and, by 1990, he’d begun folding his long-standing fascinations together in near-hallucinatory ways. Orion (1990–91) is a baroquely framed painting in which a giant phallus made of city-building bricks is framed against a night sky speckled with labeled constellations. He’d also begun what would be his art’s final movement, a series of paintings reconsidering and plasticizing his heritage, and creating a kind of pantheon-like Chinatown of the mind. See Bruce Lee in the Afterworld (1991), with the martial-arts master striking a pose amid a sea of faces suggesting stereotypical Chinese mythology, or the spectacularly phantasmagoric Chinese New Year’s Parade (1992–94), with its googly-eyed metallic dragon looming behind an intricately patterned frieze of blue and green Eastern deities.

The New York art scene in this latter period was increasingly enraptured by “slacker art,” a low-budget recession-era phenomenon with which Wong’s ambitiousness and technique had nothing in common. As for many rediscovered artists, though, his out-of-step approach has ended up paying dividends: Much of the KW show looks startlingly fresh and interesting now, especially as it resonates with present-day identitarian issues and consideration of communities of care.

Wong’s final painting, completed on the day he died, is an idiosyncratic fusion featuring a smiling, blue-skinned Patty Hearst as the Hindu goddess Kali the Destroyer. Above her is the title, Wong’s plangent and defiant final words: Did I Ever Have a Chance? Back then, given the world Wong moved through, maybe not. But the stars, since then, have realigned. 

How does an artist stand out amid that kind of action? The German painter Katharina Grosse modeled an exemplary approach in a solo outing at Gagosian with a dozen large canvases, easily the hardest-punching of any new paintings on offer in the city. Wielding her trademark spray tools, Grosse shot thin bands of overlapping paint diagonally atop white grounds. Her attack was so quick that each tight mass of acrylic appears to be blazing across the surface, smoking at its edges. The paintings deliver an almost comic dose of wall power: Morris Louis’s “Unfurled” series at warp speed, unsettled and unfixed. Conservative? Sure. Also very satisfying.

Those seeking genuine Color Field work could venture one floor below Gogo in the Pedder Building, where Pearl Lam Galleries had on view attractive, atmospheric paintings made by the New Yorker Cynthia Polsky between 1963 and 1974 using Chinese ink brushes and sponges. Informed by her travels in Asia, these drippy, speckled, and generally bright all-over abstractions suggest hazy visions of distant nebulae or rough translations of hallucinogenic visions. Many dazzle at first glance, but then betray a disconcerting formlessness as you spend time with them. They are trying to do just a bit too much.

The most potent show of painterly force came not from a gallery but from an art advisory: Art Intelligence Global marshaled a bunch of heavyweight Gerhard Richter “Abstrakte Bilder” in a single gallery within one of the towers that line Wong Chuk Hang Road on Hong Kong Island’s south side. There were a couple certifiable classics by the Meister here, the chief one being a beguiling 8½-foot-tall example from 1990 with blues and reds smoldering through a scraped field of icy gray—a koan-like exegesis on the role of chance in determining what is seen and what is obscured. Some fraction of the pleasure came from the severity of it all: black-suited security guards, dramatic lighting, the sense of walking into an anonymous vault stocked with high-value assets.

After inhabiting such hypoxia-inducing environs, a little warmth, some evidence of human presence, is called for. Mercifully, the South Korean artist Kimsooja is an expert in such matters, and had an airy solo show a few blocks away at Axel Vervoordt, “Topography of Body.” It had just eight pieces, created through simple movements, like tiny clay spheres arrayed in a circle on a pedestal, and Korean rice paper that had been crumbled and then smoothed, its surface covered with craggy lines from the pressure. The main attraction was an 18-minute video, Thread Routes–Chapter III (2012), that intercuts sequences of intricate architecture in India, like the Sun Temple of Modhera, with artisans doing meticulous work: sewing, weaving, block printing, and more. In a neighboring room, Kimsooja displayed an installation from 2012–15, comprising cotton sheets used by block printers to cover their tables thin, slightly tattered, and stained with indigo—hanging from twine. What saved all this from becoming too precious (or Pottery Barn bland) was the reverence with which the artist treated her raw materials. Presenting these work surfaces just as they are, unaltered, she mounted a tender paean to the possibilities that result from joining skill and repetition.

Over at De Sarthe, the art stared back. Beijing-based Wang Jiajia printed tall glowing, glowering pairs of eyes on canvas and surrounded them with swirling waves of paint. A news release for the solo show (titled “A/S/L,” after the archaic chatroom introduction meaning “age, sex, location”) cleverly compared these menacing cartoon eyes to those of the final bosses that loom at the conclusion of video games. They are goofy, mildly endearing pictures, teasing fears about the identities and agendas that loom behind screens—and contemporary artworks. If they are also repetitive and one-note, well, so are most online (and art) experiences.

Over in nearby Aberdeen, at one of Kiang Malingue’s spaces, Guangzhou’s Liu Yin exhibited paintings that give Shōjo manga–like faces to pink roses, juicy pears, and (why not?) a gargantuan skull that sits on grass and winks at the viewer as butterfly-fairy hybrids flutter about. (The show’s title: “Spring.”) The cuteness level is off the charts in these charismatic pictures, which range from watercolors smaller than a sheet of paper to canvases almost 7 feet across. In one, a group of flowers has tears in their eyes; another has a pair sharing a passionate kiss. Liu hijacks kawaii tropes and lays bare how easily they can manipulate, even though (or because) these characters are generic and impossible to differentiate. Seductive artworks about seduction, they have their cake as they eat it. Liu also has a talent for slipping bizarre notes into otherwise benign scenes: one work contains a bunch of cyclopic bananas; cute for a minute, they’re likely to reappear in nightmares.

More discomfort was in store at Empty Gallery’s Aberdeen branch where new wall works by Tishan Hsu smashed bodies into digital space. Their inkjet-printed patterned surfaces teem with additional sculptural elements, such as unplaceable orifices and the odd body part, including at least one glaring eye. A rare sculpture from the New York–based artist took the form of a futuristic life-size hospital bed on top of which silicone molds resembling hunks of a person—a pale blue face, expanses of sticky looking tan skin—appear to be awaiting implantation. Surveillance-style images are embedded in some of Hsu’s pieces, like the 2023 pareidolia-conjuring screen-body-data, which sports a black-and-white still of footage from CCTV. It shows a man in a balaclava standing in an empty room and doing something on his phone—a slice of raw reality intruding into the artist’s harsh, unreal world.

While Liu toys with the coercive power of popular culture, Wang and Hsu channel the dark truth that someone or something is always watching these days, whether on social media or within a bureaucracy, and threatening to act. In Hong Kong the week of the fair, a theatrical run of the slasher flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) was canceled under hazy circumstances (the adorable bear has been used as a caricature of Chinese president Xi Jinping, and censored in the mainland in the past), and the Sogo department store removed a video by Angeleno Patrick Amadon from a digital-art program running on its LED billboard after the artist revealed that it included information about pro-democracy activists jailed in Hong Kong.

It can be risky for dealers and artists to address anything remotely controversial when a fair is on—it is a time for selling, not activism—and a brutal political crackdown hardly helps matters, yet there were a handful of exhibitions engaging the difficult present.

In the tony H Queen’s tower, at David Zwirner, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija installed the kind of well-outfitted umbrella repair store that was once common in Hong Kong. Visitors walked through it to enter the rest of his exhibition (titled “The Shop”), which housed 3D printers manufacturing red sculptures of broken umbrellas and robot vacuum cleaners that cruised wall-to-wall black carpeting, tracing Chinese characters. An accompanying text explained that these various components referred to novelist Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy “Three-Body Problem,” but it was also tempting to read the show in the context of Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, when protesters fighting for universal suffrage used umbrellas as shields against pepper spray and surveillance. In Tiravanija’s realm, nonfunctional umbrellas are being memorialized as machines try to maintain order and cleanliness; every single person walking through thwarts their efforts.

Meanwhile, at Blindspot Gallery, on the 15th floor of a Wong Chuk Hang Road warehouse, the Beijing filmmaker Wang Tuowas showing The Second Interrogation (also the name of his one-man exhibition), an elegant and incisive two-part video production that pits an artist and a censor against each other in a public forum and a private tête-à-tête. The two debate how artists should operate amid authoritarianism and why democracy has never taken hold in China. As their talks progress, they appear to switch positions. Wang trained as a painter, and he also hung vivid portraits of artists, musicians, and writers in China—a network operating outside or underneath the system. Some read books, one sings into a microphone. He titled the series “Weapons,” implying that the way one chooses to live can be a means of fomenting change or defending oneself.

A similar punk commitment was evident in scattered places around town all week. The magic of viewing art here is that marginal spaces still somehow endure amid extreme wealth. “Hong Kong is very small, isn’t it?” as Kitty Fane tells her about-to-be-ex-lover (with a dash of menace) in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925). And so you can be at the latest luxury mall one moment, and after a brief MTR ride, find yourself at the alternative space Current Plans, above a café in Sham Shui Po, where wig artist Tomihiro Kono and photographer Sayaka Maruyama, both Japanese, teamed up for a multifarious show centered on Kono’s outrageous avant-garde wigs, which suggest alien life-forms. Or you might stroll to the commercial Property Holdings Development Group, in a disused rooftop clubhouse high in the sky, and find Hong Konger Michele Chu’s “You, Trickling,” an experiential show about the traces that people leave behind, with heaters at the entrance, an invitation to hold incense, and emotionally loaded sculptures. One that would make Joseph Cornell proud involved a wooden drawer from the home of Chu’s family filled with salt, her fingernails, and cigarette butts, like the remains of an occult ritual.

But the most heartening and vertiginously exciting material I saw while traversing the Special Administrative Region was actually in the heart of officialdom, at Tai Kwun Contemporary, the former police station renovated in 2018 by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the local government. “Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III,”curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, articulated a vast universe of LGBTQ art from Asia and its diasporas, via more than 60 artists spanning almost a century, some of it coming from collector Patrick Sun’s Sunpride Foundation. Among the highlights were a luscious 1941 drawing by the Filipino American Alfonso Ossorio of a nearly nude Job, resplendent and attractive despite the sores consuming his body, and alluring 2018 prints by siren eun young jung that collage images she acquired while researching yeoseong gukgeuk, a theatrical form in her native South Korea that emerged in the mid-1940s as a protest against the patriarchy of the country’s theater world. The show has already made stops in Bangkok and Taipei, and if no one brings it Stateside, it will be a shame.

Again and again, with humor, and mischief, and invention, the artists in “Myth Makers” make and remake history, cultural tropes, and even the Bible (who knew Job could be hot?). In an unforgettable little painting from 1962, Self-Portrait with Friends, Patrick Ng Kah Onn depicts a rollicking party in Kuala Lumpur. It is a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns, as five people in ultra-chic outfits dance. The scene is—returning to the poet Huang—“embroiled in a sea of music and song.”

Taken together, the cast of characters in these paintings is incredibly varied: lovers, healers, heroes, villains, and mystical creatures engage in worship and dancing; running and fighting; reading, lounging, sleeping, and reflecting. On the whole, the show’s framework suggests a sense of positivity attained through pride and self-recognition. Large swaths of the show focus specifically on Black joy: there’s Moke’s 1983 Kin oyé ou Coulier Madiokoko à Matonga, which depicts a group of men and women dancing in a club radiating with dim, rainbow lights, and Joy Labinjo’s Gisting in the Kitchen (2018), in which three women appear to gossip in a cheerful orange room.

Another significant portion of the show highlights contemporary works featuring figures with exaggeratedly black, even jet-black skin, like Kwesi Botchway’s Green Earflip Cap (2020), Zandile Tshabalala’s Conversation (2020), Amoako Boafo’s Teju (2019), and Cinga Samson’s Ibhungane 16 (2020). Tshabalala’s Two Reclining Women is a striking standout: bright-red lipstick and leopard print nightgowns leap off the canvas, showing two women with shaved heads lounging luxuriously on a sofa.

Both the overbearing optimism and focus on skin tone pose problems. One cannot help but wonder about the limits of the show’s optimistic spin in the face of continued anti-Blackness worldwide. In her catalogue essay, Dhlakama quotes writer Kevin Quashie, who laments that “nearly all of what has been written about Blackness assumes that Black culture is, or should be, identified by resistant expressiveness—a response to racial oppression.” Still, she writes that the exhibition was formulated to counter that prevailing sentiment of exploitation and persecution. It’s an understandable impulse, but at times, it feels forced, as if stemming from a need to prove something about Blackness or Africanness.

The exaggeratedly black skin tone can be traced back to artists like Kerry James Marshall and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—but it’s unclear what the new generation is doing to advance or complicate the technique. And it’s important to do so, since its prevalence can play into tropes of easy visibility and representation without always challenging how the Black body is seen. When artists draw such a tight connection between Black life and Black skin, they risk positioning the Black body as a gimmick.

The paintings in the show that depict groups rather than individual figures, especially those by older and historical artists like Gerard Sekoto, George Pemba, Meleko Mokgosi, Fred Oduya, Beauford Delaney, Helen Sebidi, and Maria da Silva, deal more pointedly with social and political issues. Mokgosi’s Pax Kaffraria:Graase-Mans (2014) is a 30-foot-wide triptych that, in combining several scenes, reflects the richness and plurality of Black life. In one scene, a helper cares for a small child as a man cleans his stoop with a bucket and cloth; in another, a man leans back in a chair in what looks like a classroom. The work forms part of Mokgosi’s exploration of transnationality and “Africanness,” paying close attention to Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies. It reflects on quieter and ordinary moments that make up daily life outside grand narratives about colonialism
and its afterlives.

Uneven as it necessarily is, given its size, “When We See Us” unambiguously succeeds in one respect; it brings lesser-known artists to new audiences: an artwork by self-taught Louisiana painter Clementine Hunter—among the earliest pieces in the show—introduces the artist to viewers on the continent. The task of “When We See Us” is urgent and timely, and it reflects the need to expand the language of Black art and to reassess the limits of figurative painting. It has become too easy to think the art world has transformed and become more diverse simply because we’re seeing more Black faces on the walls at art fairs and in museum and gallery exhibitions. But seeing is not enough, and eye-catching images of Black bodies can shift attention away from pressing social and political issues. Nevertheless, these failures, tensions, and contradictions open the door for generative questioning that will fuel the way forward.  

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Prior to this exhibition, Pareja (1608–1670) may have been known to many not as an artist, but as the subject of a stunning painting by Diego Velázquez, which was acquired by the Met in 1971. Velázquez was not only Pareja’s portraitist but also his artistic master and erstwhile enslaver. This bond is mentioned in early biographies, which also inform us of how the old master brought Pareja with him to Rome in 1650 when he was sent to purchase artworks on behalf of the Spanish king. The Met’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja was executed during this journey and, if we are to believe his biographer, Velázquez had Pareja carry his own likeness through the streets so spectators could marvel at his master’s artistic skills.

At the end of their Italian tour, Velázquez granted Pareja his freedom. In fact, one of the most moving objects in the exhibition is neither a painting nor a sculpture but the manumission document, first discovered quite by accident in a Roman archive in 1983 by Jennifer Montagu. The circumstances of Pareja’s original enslavement remain unknown, but one thing we learn from an essay by Luis Méndez Rodríguez in the exhibition catalogue is just how common such uneven relationships were in the 17th century: Caravaggio and Murillo are implicated in such exploitative practices, as are numerous lesser-known painters, sculptors, tile makers, glaziers, and other artisans who similarly kept enslaved people in their workshops and households.

The exhibition takes care to contextualize Pareja’s art. The first of four sections is devoted to a précis of the scholarly activities of the Black Puerto Rican intellectual and polymath Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) whose essays “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925) and “In Search of Juan de Pareja” (1927) were among the first to explore the painter’s background. The second locates Pareja in the multiracial communities of enslaved and freed Africans in early modern Seville. At one end, the section is haunted by three lavish silver vessels from the Met’s collection that were produced by enslaved artisans; at the other end are three near-identical paintings by Velázquez of an African kitchen maid, indicating an interest in such images. With this generous introduction in place, Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja and a portrait attributed to Pareja appear in the third section alongside his “donation of freedom,” while the final section assembles a grouping of large-scale religious paintings by Pareja and his Spanish contemporaries.

The artist’s 18th-century biographer Antonio Palomino described how Pareja fashioned himself “a new self and another second nature” after he was freed, and the curators take care to underline that his liberation from Velázquez had both personal and stylistic consequences. Three of Pareja’s large-scale religious works—The Flight into Egypt (1658), The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661),and The Baptism of Christ (1667)—as well as a portrait of the architect José Ratés Dalmau (ca. 1660s), make evident just how far he went beyond his master’s house. Gone is the lugubrious chiaroscuro of Velázquez’s late style, replaced now with clear lighting and a jubilant chromatic palette inspired by artists such Claudio Coello, whose shimmering Saint Catherine of Alexandria Dominating the Emperor Maxentius (ca. 1664) hangs on the opposite wall. At the left edge of The Calling of Saint Matthew, Pareja inserts an image himself holding a cartellino that bears his name and the date. The elegant subject looks out from the composition, waiting for the spectator of the future to come and acknowledge him.

If his relationship with Velázquez marks one end of a historical timeline in Pareja’s life, the other end connects him to Schomburg, the political activist, engaged essayist, radical bibliophile, Black Freemason, expert archivist, institution builder, and world traveler whose dedicated research helped recover Pareja’s identity as an Afro-Hispanic painter. Told as a child by a teacher that the “Negro had no history,” Schomburg devoted his life to proving otherwise. In the process he amassed two great collections of books, documents, and other artifacts attesting to the presence of Black excellence throughout history. The show includes personal photographs Schomburg took during a journey throughout Europe, including Spain, where he went in search of Pareja’s Calling of Saint Matthew. He wrote of his emotional encounter with the painting in the back rooms of the Prado Museum: “I had journeyed thousands of miles to look upon the work of this colored slave who had succeeded by courageous persistence in the face of every discouragement.” While Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja holds pride of place at the physical center of this exhibition, it is ultimately Schomburg’s portrait of Pareja that shines as the true heart of the story told here.