![]() But Karon Davis’s paperwhite sculptures of Black girls jumping rope, made with plaster bandages over steel armatures, deserve mention, as do Dana Sherwood’s strange feminist fantasias, drawings and paintings of naked women posed, along with idyllic living-room sets, in the bellies of enormous animals. Not all the work in “Feedback” is equally strong, though it’s all pulled along by the tide of Molesworth’s overall idea. But the images, wherever she got them, inevitably have larger resonances. Suss’s painting, which pictures a small classical sculpture along with an Egyptian god and queen, was actually inspired by a children’s book. Biggers is a Black artist making a comment about European art history, but he’s also, like Suss, who is white, an American drawing on global art history for his own contemporary aesthetic ends. But with juxtapositions like these, Molesworth offers a more robust example of inclusion, one that brings out the diversity of individuals as well as of the group. Efforts to diversify museums often fail in a similar way, making superficial additions without really involving their existing collections. One thing that makes our public discussions about race and identity frustrating is how quickly everyone is reduced to a single term. Both painters look better in the other’s company. You see how much context changes a painting’s effect, and how it can even transform what might otherwise have seemed like definitive statements. But while Pecis’s work is lush and expressive, Suss’s is drier and more prim, and the differences are enough, when you encounter them one after the other, to set up an entrancing visual dissonance. Their paintings are similar enough to cause a moment of confusion when hung together. Hilary Pecis and Becky Suss, young artists working in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, respectively, both paint well-ordered interiors with plenty of books and no people. We can keep it all - and in fact, Modernism will only look sharper if, like Locke, we’re honest about its shadow. But you don’t have to throw out Albers or his “Homage to the Square” to say so. But you can’t step back, because there’s only so much cord, and the moment you lift your foot, the music stops.Īround the corner Locke opens the conversation by putting the shape of a slave auction block at the center of concentric-square color studies à la Josef Albers, in a series of small acrylics he calls his “Homage to the Auction Block.” Thinking about “color” without reference to race is a luxury not everyone gets in our society. ![]() (A 30,000 square foot former high school, The School has a number of galleries on three levels, all of them used for this show.) When you step on the amp’s attached wah-wah pedal, it plays the guitarist Frank Jauernick’s recreation of the Hendrix version loud enough to shake your sternum. ![]() She took her inspiration, and the show’s title, from a piece by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, a large Marshall amplifier set close to the building’s entrance. But Molesworth organizes the pieces less by content than by visual rhythm and contrast, creating deeply evocative undertones that subtly connect the works and highlight their nuances while making sure nothing is reduced to any pat political message. Most of the work deals in some way with race, sex, or color, though not all of it. ![]() It’s something Helen Molesworth, the former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, pulls off brilliantly in “Feedback,” a 21-artist knockout of a show she organized for The School, Jack Shainman Gallery’s upstate outpost.
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