Reviews

How did Van Gogh become the hottest artist of the post-quarantine, return-to-physical-spaces moment?
I speak, of course, not of the real artist named Vincent Van Gogh, with his old-timey tale of suffering and transcendence. I speak of the undead mash-up of Van Gogh’s paintings with projection mapping, animation, and music, now doing beaucoup business in dozens of cities across the globe in one of the largest coordinated art phenomena of all time.
A romantic scene set in a Van Gogh light environment was featured in the hit Netflix time-waster Emily in Paris, which certainly helped incept the idea in the public mind during quarantine. And, indeed, these ubiquitous immersive Van Gogh Gesamtkunstwerks have essentially the same relation to Van Gogh, the artist, that the real Paris has to the Darren Star version of Paris of Emily in Paris. Maybe less.
A message from Emily in Paris star Lily Collins greets visitors in the “Immersive Van Gogh” gift shop. Photo by Ben Davis.
There’s something ironic—or maybe just telling—in the fact that, after a year of viewing art only in placeless online spaces, the hot art ticket now is a digitally augmented simulation.
New Yorkers currently have two opportunities to participate in the phenomenon: “Immersive Van Gogh” at Pier 36, and the comically similarly named “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” at Skylight on Vesey, across from the solemn hulk of the Irish Hunger Memorial. Both share the same central attraction—a room where you bathe in projected versions of Van Gogh’s paintings accompanied by stately music—though each has its own bunch of add-ons thrown in to try to out-Van Gogh the competition.
Trying out the augmented reality feature of “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Immersive Van Gogh” offers a chic Van Gogh cafe; a series of light booths where, via some dubious science, you can experience how Van Gogh might have heard colors; a glitchy Augmented Reality feature where you can call up Van Gogh’s most famous paintings onto frames on the wall, via your smartphone; and an Artificial Intelligence component where you can write “Van Gogh” a letter on your phone and receive a response immediately, which you can then have printed out in the gift shop on vintage paper.
There is an “Immersive Van Gogh” date night package where you rent a special booth and get Van Gogh-themed massage oil (sunflower oil, presumably). The gift shop is ginormous and the place, currently, to buy a Sunflowers thermos or Starry Night bucket hat.
A 3D recreation of Bedroom in Arles at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” the rival, offers its own extras: an educational film about Van Gogh’s relation to color; a huge sculpture of a vase with animations of different Van Gogh still lifes projected on it, so that it seems to morph from one giant pot of flowers to the next; a 3D sculpture version of Bedroom in Arles; and a room where kids can do Van Gogh coloring pages and have them scanned into a projection.
Visitors enjoy the virtual reality component of “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Its high card in the Van Gogh Wars is a neat VR experience that floats you through an imagined pastoral landscape. Magic picture frames periodically appear over bits of your virtual surroundings, and are then filled in with paintings, illustrating how real places may have inspired Van Gogh’s famed works (even if you are not actually looking at real places, but at some kind of simulated videogame version of Van Gogh’s world). The gift shop here is beefy, but less impressive.
When it comes to answering the most basic question—which is better?—”Immersive Van Gogh” stands above “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” The animations are crisper, the environment grander and more spacious, the choreography of images somewhat less cheesy, the musical choices more interesting (Handel, Edith Piaf, and Thom Yorke versus a more generically cinematic sounding score).
Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” does lean a little more toward the informative, with portentous Van Gogh quotes dropped into the soundtrack and splashed across the walls, and some projections tagged with lumbering titles such as “Sunflowers series” or “Tree Roots (last known painting).” A corridor of Van Gogh Facts that you walk through to get to the central light room leans hard into the kind of florid mythology you don’t see in mainstream art institutions anymore, e.g. of the painting Wheatfield with Crows, it explains that it “symbolizes the arriving of a kind of smiling death that arises serenely in broad daylight in a golden and very pure light that leads to the following reflection: is this madness that makes an art genius of him?”
The Potato Eaters, animated, within “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Immersive Van Gogh” contains such incongruities as a giant-sized image of The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh’s image of destitute rural labor, or a god-sized figure of Van Gogh’s humble postman, from New York’s own Museum of Modern Art, towering down at you at bombastic billboard scale.
Inside “Immersive Van Gogh,” one of two competing Van Gogh light environments currently open in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
But nothing in “Immersive Van Gogh” is quite so goony as those moments in “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” where various paintings are brought to life, so that Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette appears to literally puff a cigarette, or Sorrowing Old Man actually appears to weep, or, inexplicably, Café Terrace at Night is transformed into a curtain blowing in the wind, the image divided like one of those rubber curtains at a carwash.
Cafe Terrace at Night, animated, inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
To circle back around to where we started, though: Why Van Gogh? Why now?
I don’t really think that it is that complicated. Van Gogh’s paintings are beloved and beautiful, and escapism and beauty are what art-goers have said they want from the post-pandemic art experience over anything else.
A worker polishes one of the large mirrored sculptures in “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Van Gogh is certainly the most pop culturally pervasive artist, from Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life to Willem Dafoe in At Eternity’s Gate, with something-for-everyone stop-offs in between at Martin Scorsese playing Van Gogh in Akira Kirosawa’s Dreams or that one episode of Dr. Who where the doctor brings Van Gogh forward in time to weep at his posthumous fame at the Musée d’Orsay.
Van Gogh’s oft-biopic-ed story of the Artist as Suffering Outcast, of his missionary, suffering love for art, of failure vindicated by posthumous acclaim—“The Man Suicided by Society” as Antonin Artaud once put it—is one of the three major archetypes that form the bedrock of the broadest public’s image of artists (the other two being Artist as Rule-Breaking Free Spirit and Artist as Decadent Fraud).
inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
And yet, here is the interesting thing about the present wave of interest: Very little of the typical Van Gogh lore is to be found in what these immersive Van Gogh rooms are selling. There’s nary a severed ear on offer.
Both the New York experiences are startlingly abiographical. Both pass through Japonisme sections (“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” briefly exits his oeuvre entirely to animate some Ukiyo-e hits), and feature sections dedicated to projected galleries of his self-portraits staring at you in simultaneous judgment. Both animate the Starry Night in more or less inventive ways.
Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Both have mournful sections where the mythologized specter of Wheatfield With Crows suggests, if you know its place in the lore, that our hero is heading toward an end (and that the loop is almost over). Both have intimations of his time in the asylum, telegraphed via his paintings of it. But the famous beats of the Van Gogh biography really just linger behind all this like an afterimage, lending a sense of gravitas and narrative to an otherwise lightweight and amorphous experience.
Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Knowing anything about Van Gogh only very slightly adds to the experience in either case—in fact, “Immersive Van Gogh” probably works slightly better than “Van Gogh: The Immersive Van Gogh” precisely because it unburdens itself more completely of the half-hearted attempt to be educational, and so feels more comfortable in its own skin.
Mainly you just sit there and let the Post-Impressionist fireworks go off all around, saying “I recognize that,” “I recognize that,” and, sometimes, “now, what’s that from?”
Inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
It’s actually rather striking: Here is Van Gogh, an artist whose biography is as popularly known as any artist, ever. And here we are in a moment, within the museum world proper, when biography has never been more important, with the worthiness or unworthiness of an artist’s life casting its light over how everything is valued. But in this ultra-popular new kind of art space, biography is a setting sun.
The more I have thought about it, the more I realized that “Immersive Van Gogh” and “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” are not for fans of Van Gogh, the artist. They are for fans of the Starry Night, the poster. As a genre of art or art-like experience, these attractions are the product of several generations of Van Gogh merch and Van Gogh popular culture, so that the “original context” that these images tie back to, as memories, is not the museum at all.
“Starry Night—one of my favorites!”, the intrepid Emily declares in Emily in Paris as she enters the Parisian Van Gogh room on which “Immersive Van Gogh” is based. “Did you know Van Gogh painted it while having a nervous breakdown?”, her friend Camille says. “Uh… no, I did not,” Emily replies. Her combination of enthusiasm and obliviousness is meant to be relatable.
An enormous Van Gogh self-portrait greets visitors to “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
The character is a professional Instagram marketer. The most normal, relatable, and marketable mode of interacting with famous art, in the age of ubiquitous photography, is to take a photo of yourself standing beside it. Viewed from this angle, there is really nothing incongruous about turning it into an immersive-art backdrop. That was already how it was apprehended within the contemporary experience economy. Only secondarily was it an object with any kind of alterity outside of that.
Symbolic of this fact, at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” you are greeted at entry and exit by a gallery of blown-up reproductions of Van Gogh paintings, presumably to convey a sense of the actual artworks that inspire the light show. But these god-awful simulacra are rendered on canvas as completely smooth printouts, leaving you with the impression that the “originals” it is working from, too, were not the paintings but flat images. Van Gogh without the impasto is like, I don’t know, facetuning Frida Kahlo to give her Lily Collins eyebrows.
Display of replica Van Gogh self-portraits at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Van Gogh was and is known for how the tactility and physicality of the paint, as if he is conveying the intensity and rawness of experience. Fredric Jameson famously took Van Gogh’s paintings as the paradigm of modernism, with their suggestion of depth—physical and emotional—opposing them to Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, ghostly images of commodities reduced to shimmering, silkscreened flatness, symbolizing contemporary postmodern culture’s knowingly affectless, media-saturated superficiality. In that sense, these Van Gogh experiences have a kind of a symbolic potency as a synthesis of these poles: the idea of modernist depth itself is itself just a ghostly, marketable simulation itself.
The most dominant current of the most dominant mainstream commercial culture is defined by reboots and reanimations of nostalgia fare, permuted and remixed and given a contemporary makeover in terms of sensibility and special effects (e.g. Disney remaking its own beloved animated hits in shambolic live-action form.) The immensely popular Digital Van Gogh trend, appearing largely outside of museums and unrepentantly for-profit, is the art version of that same zeitgeist. That’s the culture that dominates in a moment as anxiety-ridden and overrun with images as the one we live in: safe bets.
A selection of Vincent van Gogh lollipops from the cafe in “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
I am using lightly moralizing language here, but let me just say, I tend to view such things as an effect and not a cause. They are the product of the way visual culture already works.
It was the museums themselves that merchandised Van Gogh into commercialistic ubiquity, as they leaned into blockbuster Great Men of Modernism shows. To claim now that a public that views Van Gogh first as a great poster artist are missing the point runs contrary to what the art context itself has been teaching for decades, in the gift shop. I imagine that for some, there is even a kind of pleasant honesty to the immersive Van Gogh experience, which is ingratiating without the tortured split personality of the museum presentation.
Inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Despite many reservations, I enjoyed these shows for what they were (“Immersive Van Gogh” more than “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.”) I suppose I can identify with Emily’s friend Camille rather than Emily (though, unpromisingly for my metaphor, Emily does steal her boyfriend). There are, of course, important dimensions of art that come with knowing something and looking slowly at the paintings, and these for-profit (and very expensive, ticket-wise!) experiences in some ways are deliberately scanting these to service the largest possible audience.
But the contemporary reality is that no one new arriving to Van Gogh will attain those shores except by crossing these waters, and its probably worth stating that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Immersive Van Gogh is a part of the Van Gogh legend now, as much as the letters to Theo.
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“Super-Rough” is a pop-up, one-off extension of the Outsider Art Fair that displays a curated selection of highlights from galleries associated with the event.
The hook for me is that I love this material. The hook from a broader cultural perspective is that the show was overseen by Takashi Murakami, the Japanese neo-pop artist famous for his collabs with fashion brands and stars like Billie Eilish (and sometimes, both, as in the recent Murakami x Eilish x Uniqlo T-shirt line).
The main novel installation device here is to show all the work arrayed together on one long waist-height display pedestal, a kind of buffet sampling of Outsider Art Fair fare. A few more spectacular works and larger sculptures are dotted around the edges, but mainly we are talking about a crowd of small, tabletop objects: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s remarkable little chicken bone thrones; Jordan Laura MacLachlan’s quietly surreal painted clay figures; the artist known as Jerry the Marble Faun’s limestone beast heads.
Installation view of “Super-Rough.” Photo courtesy the Outsider Art Fair.
Talking to the New York Times, Murakami is endearingly effusive about the work. The name “Super-Rough” is a reversal of “Superflat,” the long ago title of an art exhibition that made Murakami’s brand of anime-inflected pop famous, and that also stood as shorthand for his theory of the cultural dynamics of post-war Japanese visual culture. I’m not sure, however, that he has quite as much of a theory of the material he’s marshaling here.
After circling the display a few times, I began to regret slightly the lack of attention on individual artists. Whether it’s because of Murakami’s pop sensibility—pop art being art relating to popular culture, which doesn’t really need a lot of explanation—or the event’s role as an extension of a commercial fair, the only contextualizing material on hand is a checklist with prices. (I should say: the online viewing room is a little more helpful.)
Jordan Laura MacLachlan, Woman with Three Pigs (2010-2011), from Marion Harris gallery, shows in “Super-Rough.” Photo by Ben Davis.
These are interesting figures—but not always easy ones to research outside of combing back issues of Raw Vision magazine. They tend toward personal, idiosyncratic ways of working—that’s part of this type of work’s pleasure—and there’s a benefit to knowing something about where they are coming from. The show’s knowing elevation of a yard sale is fun, but it doesn’t do anything to make entering the work easier.
Here’s a joke. Q: “Did you manage to get to know any artists you liked at Murakami’s Outsider Art Fair show?” A: “I did—but it was super-rough!”
Three works by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, from the Gallery of Everything, in “Super-Rough.” Photo by Ben Davis.
This is a technical gripe though, and a boring one. If you are interested at all in the Outsider Art Fair as a proposition, the show offers a tableful of starting points for things to get excited about. I recommend it.
Here’s a guide to a few figures I came away wanting to know more about.

Shinichi Sawada
Multiple works by Shinichi Sawada, from Venus Over Manhattan and Jennifer Lauren Gallery, in “Super-Rough.” Photo by Ben Davis.
I got to see a bunch of Sawada’s delightful clay creatures recently at Venus Over Manhattan, but it’s a delight to find them again here (they were also featured in the 2013 Venice Biennale). The artist, who is on the autism spectrum, has an immediately recognizable style. It evokes the frozen exaggerations of ceremonial masks or props for a festival of imagined creatures.

Gil Batle
Gil Batle, Abducted (2017), from Ricco/Maresca Gallery in “Super-Rough.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Having formerly spent multiple stints in a California prison for fraud and forgery, Batle (b. 1962) has created a novel new life for himself carving ostrich eggs, telling stories of people he’s met and known. They are tremendously detailed, displayed here with magnifying glasses for review (though you can’t actually see all sides of each egg in the “Super-Rough” display).
The fragile medium and decorative intricacy lends a kind of calming order to the often disturbing, frieze-like stories, as if the artist were turning painful lived experience into manageably controlled form. When you really look at the details, they are often bracingly grim—though a work like Abducted also includes a vision of flying saucers.

Monica Valentine
Three works by Monica Valentine in “Super-Rough,” from Creative Growth Art Center. Photo by Ben Davis.
There’s this wonderful all-over tactility to Valentine’s sculptures, which are simple foam volumes adorned with colored sequins. Now associated with San Francisco’s famed Creative Growth Art Center (you can see her at work in an Art21 episode from a few years back), Valentine lost her sight as a girl and composes her work by feel. When you look at the pieces up close you really get a sense of how intricately individual they are, each sequin carefully speared in place by a pin.

Moses Ogden
Moses Ogden, Twisted Head (ca. 1900), from Steven S. Powers, in “Super-Rough.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Ogden, who was born in 1844 and fought in the Civil War, is known for the sculpture garden of curiosities he created in and around his cabin in Angelica, New York, “Moses Ogden’s Wonderland.” His work involved taking found pieces of wood and transforming them into spooky sculpture, bringing out whatever form he saw haunting them. How great is this eerie Twisted Head?

Chomo
Chomo, Untitled (ca.1960/70) from the Gallery of Everything in “Super-Rough.” Photo by Ben Davis.
French artist Roger Chomeaux, aka Chomo (1907-1999), was known, like Ogden, for a world he built: the Realm of Preludian Art, located in the forest near Fontainbleau, where he lived, building up his many creations. Pieces like this untitled one have a quality of suggesting a gargoyle for some kind of pagan cathedral but not quite arriving at a recognizable shape, floating confidently at the edge of meaning—sort of mirroring the way Chomo himself floated at the edge of the official culture, in self-imposed exile.
“Super-Rough” is on view at 150 Wooster Street, New York, through June 27, 2021.
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Purple velvety body suits hang limply from the walls and ceiling, like regal, deflated aliens. You can see them through a human-sized hole cut into one of the four walls of the late artist Nicola L.’s La Chambre en fourrure (The Fur Room) (1969/2020). On the outside are arm and leg holes, so that, in a previous time, people could put their limbs through, activating these furry body suits and even reaching out to caress those who wandered inside.
“I wanted to oblige people to participate,” Nicola L. said of this body of work, which she called her pénétrables, back in the 1980s. Today, however, will not be obliged, or even allowed, to participate while it is installed at the Hammer Museum, as part of the Made in L.A. Biennial. Instead, we’ll have to imagine the kind of intimacy the installation was meant to invite, thanks to a global pandemic that has left it seeming more radically sensual than it possibly ever did.
The biennial, titled “a version” and installed across two museums, was supposed to open in June 2020, but instead privately debuted in November to just a smattering of press and VIPs. The institutions and the show’s curators, Lauren Mackler, Myriam Ben Salah, and Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi, opted to place only a few programs online and, now that it has opened to the public, that seems like a wise decision.
Rather than try to adjust and normalize what wasn’t normal, the show’s organizers left it largely unseen until viewers could experience it as it was meant to be. And there are, thankfully, more interesting aspects to dwell on than the pandemic’s effect, including the newly flexible connection some of the artist have to Los Angeles. The event has been plagued by boosterish, L.A.-centric language since its inception, in 2012, even as a biennial made just for L.A. began to seem needlessly provincial.
The artist Nicola L. moved to Los Angeles 18 months before her death, in 2019, and built her Fur Room while based between Paris and Ibiza. Other works in the show were made by artists not currently in L.A., like Ser Serpas, who is from Los Angeles but lives in Zurich. Unable to travel for the installation, Serpas instructed others in Los Angeles to scavenge the city for the curbside detritus that comprises two installations, one elegantly scrappy in the Hammer’s antiseptic first-floor gallery, and the other a symphony of discarded printers and domestic objects (dresser drawers, an upside-down ironing board) in a yard across the county at the Huntington.
Some artists are relatively new arrivals to the city; others are based here and elsewhere. (Even if previous editions also included artists with roots outside the city, the link to the local has tended to feel more blatant, such as through the 2014 focus on the L.A.’s alternative spaces). This loose relationship to residential status is welcome, given how much Los Angeles has changed as an art scene in the past decade. The increasingly international gallery scene has made other cities feel like worthier contenders for its formerly romanticized underdog status, and the skyrocketing cost of living has prompted artists who once chose the city for affordability to look elsewhere.
Made in L.A. 2020: a version. Installation view at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
But if the artists’ residential status no longer matters so much, place and site still do. The biennial is spread across two main locations—the Hammer’s Westwood building and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens—both containing work by each of the show’s 30 artists. This format was proposed by the Huntington, located 25 minutes away in San Marino, as a way to “unite east and west,” according to its president, Karen Lawrence.
But it is notable that the “east” chosen here was San Marino, which has a lower minimum wage than Los Angeles and a median income that’s nearly six times higher, and not East Los Angeles, the unincorporated area east of downtown that has one of the highest population densities in the county and is 97 percent Hispanic.
In 2017, scholar and poet, Cecilia Caballero, described driving with her friend and son from their East L.A. home to see the Huntington’s exhibition of the Octavia Butler archive, and watching “the landscape shifting from a brown space to a white space as we traversed from freeway to freeway, through smog and sunlight.”
Installation view, Nicola L.’s La Chambre en fourrure (1969/2020). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
When going anywhere becomes an exception to the rule, as it has this past year, accessibility becomes ever more crucial, and the Huntington is difficult to reach by public transportation, and admission is expensive ($25 to $29 for adults). In contrast, admission has been free at the Hammer since early 2014. (Visitors to Made in L.A. can receive a voucher for free admission to the Huntington portion of the show, but they must visit the Hammer first to receive these.)
Seeing both “versions” of the show is central to “a version’s” conceit. The exhibition plays with notions of doubling, mirroring, and continuation, with which co-curator Mackler has often experimented (at her alternative space Public Fiction, certain exhibitions would transform multiple times over their course).
Fulton LeRoy Washington, aka Mr. Wash, Mondaine’s Market (2005). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
Sometimes, this works remarkably well. The Compton-based artist Fulton LeRoy Washington, aka Mr. Wash, couldn’t locate his 2005 painting Mondaine’s Market, when the biennial’s curators asked to include it. A portrait of a Kansas City grocery store, the painting includes two heads floating in the sky above—John L. Mondaine’s, the one-time owner of the store and a fellow inmate of Mr. Wash’s at the Florence Federal Correctional Institution in Colorado, and Mondaine’s grandson.
Mr. Wash, whose lifetime sentence for a drug offense was commuted by President Obama in 2016, spent months looking for the painting, which he had shipped to Mondaine’s family from prison, and then, after the curators asked repeatedly, agreed to paint a replica. Before the show opened, he found Mondaine, who had the painting above his couch and agreed to lend it. The original hangs at the Hammer, while the replica, nearly twice the size but otherwise similar, hangs at the Huntington.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, the input of this machine is the power an output contains (2021). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
Other successful doublings include Nicola L.’s work, her wall of wearable canvas bodies at the Huntington close enough to the Fur Room to recognize but so different in texture and resonance—the Huntington installation feels more like skin—that they invite a sensual experience all their own. Similarly, Jacqueline Kyomi Gork’s multi-room sound chamber on the Hammer’s balcony engulfs visitors in a slow experience, while her constantly inflating and deflating sculpture at the entrance to the Huntington installation is much more immediate.
In some cases, however, the pairings don’t as effectively weather the 25 miles between the two institutions, and the multiple days (or weeks) between visits. For instance, Mario Ayala’s vivid, multi-layered acrylic-on-canvas montages of Latinx material culture at the Hammer are complimented at the Huntington by his source material: a collection of 1980s and ’90s zines, including issues of the cult-status Teen Angels, laid out in a vitrine. All of this is great to see, but it is hard to conjure Ayala’s virtuosic renderings clearly enough in the mind’s eye to enjoy all the resonances between them and the ephemera.
Buck Ellison, Dick and Betsy, The Ritz-Carlton, Dallas, Texas, 1984 (2019). Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
In the end, the Huntington, which has been working in recent years to examine its own white, wealthy history and collection, benefitted most from this cross-venue venture, and the decision to allow interplay between some biennial works and the permanent collection led to a few memorable contrasts: Umar Rashid’s epic paintings (based on subversive narratives of the colonial era that Rashid develops across his work) framing a view into the American decorative arts galleries; Buck Ellison’s uncomfortably well-composed photographic indictments of American elitism (filled with lacrosse shorts, tennis balls, and well-appointed interiors) hanging alongside John Singleton Copley’s The Western Brothers (1758). Yet these destabilizations of the Huntington’s legacy still manage to give its collection pride of place.
Kahlil Joseph, BLKNWS® (2018–ongoing). Two-channel fugitive newscast. Courtesy of the artist. Installation view, Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hilltop Coffee +Kitchen, Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Thankfully, two projects in the biennial ignore the restrictions and baggage of these institutions altogether—Larry Johnson’s pithy billboards installed citywide, like the sign on Rampart and Seventh that says “notary” and points down toward a notary’s office, and, more notably, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS. The latter, produced in partnership with the non-profit Los Angeles Nomadic Division, has been screening across Los Angeles, primarily in Black-owned businesses in historically working-class neighborhoods, since November.
It appears on two screens mounted high in Naturaliart Jamaican Restaurant in West Adams, and on two screens mounted on the wall in Hank’s Mini Market in South Central. The footage riffs on news show formats, mixing new footage with found clips, celebrating Black culture while excavating its media representation and reveling in the possibilities of video collage. It has been available all over, to anyone. Perhaps in future iterations there will be still more of this kind of site-specific, community-focused placement, and ideally even less focus on what is “Made in L.A.” (if the biennial even keeps that title). How and where the art is placed, and who it is for, is far more compelling.

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In a new format called La Trienal, El Museo del Barrio’s survey of contemporary Latinx art “Estamos Bien” asserts that Latinx art is defined by a confrontation to systems of power. Bringing together a collection of works from intergenerational artists without a history of exhibiting at the museum (save for Candida Alvarez), curators Susanna V. Temkin, Rodrigo Moura, and guest curator Elia Alba argue that while there is no singular form or aesthetic to Latinx art, it is intrinsically tied to social critique.
The show gathers works by 42 living artists and collectives spread over eight gallery spaces including the entry and a brand new gallery. These artists outline the resilience in Latinx culture, reclaim lost histories, elevate the quotidian, and some even laugh at the absurdity of it all.
With a diverse crop of diasporic artists with backgrounds from all over Latin America, Guyana, and some that identify as Indigenous, La Trienal shatters a rigidity within the ‘Latino’ label exemplified in previous gatherings. However, the political framing here that ties the artists to traumatic social issues isn’t necessarily novel. “Estamos Bien,” the museum’s first national survey, emphasizes strong convictions about the detrimental state of our environment, class and racial dynamics, and the forces powering displacement, but at times these convictions shine brighter than the works. Though the show spotlights artists who have been deserving of recognition for decades as well as many young artists demonstrating excellence early in their careers, the need to display the concerns of Latinx communities does take the front seat.
Upon entering, Peaceful Protest (2020), a photograph of Black Lives Matter protesters at a die-in by Philadelphia-based photographer Ada Trillo, sets the curatorial tone, which wavers between the serious, the sarcastic, and, at times, the poetic.
Ada Trillo, Peaceful Protest from the “Black Lives Matter” series (2020). Courtesy the artist.
Nearby, a wall painted black is dedicated to Dominican-American artist Lizania Cruz’s work Obituaries of the American Dream (2020-21). Taking a nod from the New York Times’s revisionist obituary project, Cruz’s participatory project inserts excluded narratives taking the form of a stack of newspapers one can take from the gallery. Each newspaper contains testimonies highlighting sad truths about the country’s failure to live up to its commitment to immigrants.
Lizania Cruz, Obituaries of the American Dream (2020- 21). Courtesy the artist
One gallery over, the same critique takes the form of pink cake frosting with Chicago-based artist Yvette Mayorga’s paintings that also embody the idea of phony American idealism. (I reviewed Mayorga’s work in 2019.)
Yvette Mayorga, The Procession (After 17th Century Vanitas) In loving memory of MM (2020). Courtesy the artist.
The floor-to-ceiling vinyl chart Who Defines your Race? from San Diego-based Collective Magpies, also setting the tone right at the entrance, gets straight to the point of proving Latinx people exist as multitudes. The massive infographic shows survey responses about the complexity of personal and collective racial and ethnic perceptions, which quickly nods to a self-awareness in La Trienal that identity labels such as “Latinx” are imperfect. (The show is organized using the term ‘Latinx’ as a “placeholder” from which to unite and organize, curator Elia Alba said in a curatorial talk posted online.)
Collective Magpie, Who Designs Your Race? (2020-21). Courtesy the artist.
Like this infographic, there are several pieces in the show that favor straight-up facts in lieu of more poetic form. A 2018 video from the collective Torn Apart/Separados shows data visualizations taken from its interactive website using mapping technologies to draw conclusions or explore culpability for the humanitarian crisis of family separations in the U.S. The website is a response to an urgent need for justice that persists even with the country’s new administration under Joe Biden where minor detention centers continue to be built in Texas. Though the work is a clever use of technology, is it art and does it belong in a survey with the most reputable Latinx artists of our moment?
Torn Apart/Separados, video demo from website. Courtesy TA/S team.
Los Angeles-based artist Carolina Caycedo, known for her poignant works about environmental justice, uses the recognizable format of a memorial: a drawing of a tree with the names of environmentalists murdered outside of the U.S. The piece, Genealogy of Struggling (2021), has a small altar with candles and herbs placed before it. Unlike the artist’s “Cosmotarrayas” or abstract water portraits, the piece is unequivocal rather than engaging. Like the Torn Apart/Separados website and Collective Magpie’s infographic, the altar foregrounds the global issue rather than using artistic nuance. These works function more as tools in service of content rather than forms that challenge the viewer.
Other works are more allusive in intention such as the unassuming sculptures of ektor garcia. The self-described nomadic artist uses craft techniques like ceramics, fiber, and metalwork in works that accentuate the hand. His elongated form of cascading butterflies is crocheted in copper wire and tenderly constructed with detailed craftsmanship. Ideas about the essence of the butterfly’s migratory patterns, the fluidity of gender, and the perpetual movement in garcia’s practice and existence could all be considered in interpretations of the work.
Eddie Aparicio, City Bus Memorial (Fig. and Ave. 60, Los Angeles, California) (2016). Courtesy the artist.
The rubber casts of Los Angeles trees by the artist Eddie R. Aparicio also challenge traditional forms and use novel techniques to create meaning. Aparicio visits ficus trees around parks on the outskirts of L.A. in danger of being cut down. Each time he visits the tree, he applies layers of rubber until he can capture the exterior essence of the tree, human markings and all. The works hold fleeting cultural imprints of communities also on the verge of displacement and are visualizations of the human effects on the environment.
There’s a prevailing theme of resilience that runs throughout the galleries. La Trienal’s title “Estamos Bien” is also the name of Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny’s post-Hurricane Maria anthem, a tongue-in-cheek declaration that “we good” despite experiencing an extraordinary natural disaster and delayed aid from the U.S. That adaptive sentiment is explored in pieces like New York- and Peru-based artist xime izquierdo ugaz’s photo archive documenting a chosen queer family. Spilling from a gallery corner, the intimate portraits are reminiscent of a proud parent’s living room wall where the star qualities of loved ones are on display. The pictures document the radical act of recreating the supportive bonds of family that queer folks may be denied.
From Michael Menchaca, A Cage Without Borders (2020-21). Courtesy the artist.
Moving in the opposite direction of resilience toward compounding anxiety is Mexican-American artist Michael Menchaca’s critique of the surveillance state as related to Black and brown people. The chaotic 3-channel digital animation A Cage without Borders asks us: What if you could step inside the Latinx algorithm? Would it contain images of Selena, AOC in her ‘tax the rich’ sweatshirt, and ICE agents opening fire? The work subjects the viewer to these and a cacophonous overload of flashing graphics while a computerized narration drawls on about the state of technological surveillance over a techno beat.

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Menchaca’s collaged scenes of viral Latino imagery pop up phrases like “Carceral Technology Up to 100% Off!” and “Behavioral Gentrification,” presenting a constant state of pandemonium. The crowded screens are lined with emojis, corporate emblems from Google, Amazon, and Homeland Security, and Menchaca’s remixed Pre-Columbian cat glyphs. Not only is this an apt critique of how Latinos are mined as consumers, it physically reproduces the psychological anxiety of experiencing the landscape of online activism.
Another stunner in the show are from art darling Patrick Martinez whose impressive painting literally brings the outdoor aesthetics of Los Angeles—neon signs, stucco walls, and his signature clay rose adornments—into the gallery, playing on the appearance of quickly gentrifying neighborhoods. The artist told me this is the first public showing from this series, which is two years in the making, as his works are snatched up by institutions and collectors before being exhibited—a rare kind of market success for other artists in this survey.
Raelis Vasquez, The Other Side of Tourism.Courtesy the artist.
Representational painting also makes a few cameos here, notably with both the youngest and most senior artists in La Trienal. Born in 1995, New York-based painter Raelis Vasquez, renders exquisite domestic table scenes of his family in the Dominican Republic, while Chicano artist Joey Terrill from L.A., born in 1955, paints vivid vanitas with fruit-filled tables featuring oversized pills, alluding to his 40 year experience living with HIV.
Joey Terrill, Black Jack 8 (2008). Courtesy the artist.
The variance in mediums and subject continues throughout the show as performance, minimalist architectural interventions, and sculptural works substantiate the claim that Latinx art cannot be defined through format but maybe through a sense of urgency. Although fulfilling a curatorial aim was favored over a balance of formal experimentation, aesthetics, and content in a few works, La Trienal shows how much latent and under-recognized talent there is in the field.
Installation view of “Estamos Bien” at El Museo del Barrio. Photo by Martin Seck.
Though one could say the categorization of art through ethnic identifiers like “Latinx” becomes broad and obscures meaning, the exclusion of Latinx art from relevant art conversations—even in El Museo’s own recent history of prioritizing Latin-American art over Latinx artists—is a reality. That persistent exclusion in museum collections, gallery shows, etc., and a lack of contextualization that feeds misunderstandings about the work, is a running testament to the need for these surveys. Though the collected works are but a glimpse into the range of Latinx art, the curators have outlined a communal need for doing justice to its breadth. It’s up to the rest of the art world to respond—but if not, no worries. Estamos bien.
“Estamos Bien—La Trienal, 20/21” is on view at El Museo del Barrio, New York, through September 26, 2021.
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The Brooklyn Museum show, “KAWS: What Party,” does a good job taking KAWS seriously but not too seriously. They could have wasted a lot more time making overblown claims about the work’s profundity to try to justify its significance before the gaze of skeptics like myself. They don’t.
It’s a show for the fans—the many, many KAWS fans. It begins with a case of photos of KAWS’s ‘90s graffiti next to a few examples of his “subvertisements,” urban interventions for which he inserted his own cartoon graphics into ads displayed around the city.
Then there are his paintings, featuring images of ‘80s and ‘90s American cartoon characters like the Smurfs and the Simpsons with their eyes crossed out—his signature motif.
There are copious examples of his Companion character, his most familiar invention: a grey, skull-headed Mickey Mouse-ish creature, produced at scales ranging from collectible vinyl figurines to the brobdingnagian versions of the slouching creature, meticulously crafted in wood, that greet you in the museum lobby.
Entry to “KAWS: What Party” at the Brooklyn Museum. (Photo by Ben Davis)

Evidence of KAWS’s innumerable product collaborations is reverentially displayed: His skateboard decks, sneaker collabs, the trophy he made for the MTV Music Video Awards, some furniture he did with the Campana Brothers.
Display of KAWS-branded Vans. (Photo by Ben Davis)

Then there’s a gallery that shows a video of his recent exploits, from launching one of his Companion figures into low-earth orbit to floating a colossal inflatable version in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor.
Installation view of “KAWS: What Party” at the Brooklyn Museum. (Photo by Ben Davis)

The tale of KAWS, aka Brian Donnelly, has been told better elsewhere by William S. Smith and, most recently, Michael H. Miller. I won’t retrace his path from Jersey tagger to New York art student to opening his own boutique and selling his “art toys” in 2000s Tokyo—this last being the beachhead from which he infiltrated hip-hop, fashion, and celebrity circles, gaining the globe-spanning army of followers that allowed him to surround and then at last conquer the fine art world of galleries and museums.
I have to admit that trying to understand why KAWS’s Companion character has become such a beloved icon for so many people is, to me, a bit like encountering a cult worshipping the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I can understand the function of its rituals through sympathetic observation—but some part of me is always checking myself and saying, “You’re joking, right?”
KAWS, Along the Way (2013). (Photo by Ben Davis)

Yet the Flying Spaghetti Monster cult is just a metaphor for how strange the beliefs of any organized religion are to a non-believer, and, similar to the case of religion, part of the story has to be an understanding that my own skepticism might actually be the eccentric position when viewed from the POV of the wider public. The Cult of KAWS is closer to some general sense of what a very large and enthusiastic public wants from art.
So, why? What itch does it scratch?
We live in an era of reboots and remakes, of regurgitated intellectual property. The most mainstream layer of mainstream culture consists of things like comic book movies and Star Wars, reprocessing teenage affections in endlessly permuting ways. What, in visual art, hits this same nerve?
KAWS, Small K Landscape (2001), Small B Landscape (2001), Small B Landscape (2001), and Small H Landscape (2001). (Photo by Ben Davis)

An artist like KAWS is the best avatar: His main artistic device is to appropriate a familiar cartoon, tweak it, then tweak that tweaked appropriation again, and on and on, developing his own freestanding world.
A genre of YouTube movie criticism you see a lot these days is centered around parsing the lore of the big pop nostalgia mythologies. “Criticism” is actually the wrong word—it’s more like the cataloging of Easter eggs, the spotting of background references and links to source material and fan theories. Vast empires of content are spun out of this breezy sort of exegesis. It’s probably the dominant kind of film commentary, an almost utterly hermetically sealed cross-referencing operation.
KAWS, The KAWS Album [detail]. (Photo by Ben Davis)

The pleasure inspired by KAWS’s corpus rides a similar vibe. You get an easy hit of feeling smart for knowing what a “KAWS” is, parsing his source materials and the artist’s telltale operations on it. You feel a sense of being a part of a fan community keeping up with the adventures of the Companion as it rambles through culture.
Thus, “KAWS: What Party” doesn’t lend itself to criticism so much a kind of spot-the-reference approach: This is KAWS doing Gumby; this is a KAWS Elmo combined with KAWS’s Michelin Man-inspired character, Chum; this version of the Companion is the large-sized version of that Companion figurine; and so on.
KAWS, Tide (2020). (Photo by Ben Davis)

Nestled reverentially in a blue-painted back gallery at the Brooklyn Museum is Tide (2020), a large canvas showing what appears to be the Companion in the ocean, its skull head and X eyes held above the water, arms akimbo.
I stood in the gallery and looked for a good long time at Tide. Usually, sustained attention unlocks a painting, as you become aware of the decisions the artist has made in constructing the image, percolating underneath the first impression.
In this case, I mainly became aware of how, when you look at the way the water meets the head and arm of the Companion, it seems to be rendered as flat, as if it were a cardboard cut-out.
Detail of KAWS, Tide (2020). (Photo by Ben Davis)

I also noticed how the hand floats free at bottom left. The more I look at it, the more it seems disconnected from the body, just sort of bobbing on the surface of the water.
Detail of KAWS, Tide (2020). (Photo by Ben Davis)

What to do with such trivial observations? Maybe the painting’s shallowness deliberately evokes the expedient simplicity of animation cells (Donnelly worked as an animator on the in the ‘90s, on Nickelodeon’s Doug among other shows). Maybe it’s just not meant to be looked at that closely and mined for detail-level pleasures in that way.
Is KAWS an artist for the ages? Any artist who works with appropriated pop culture is going to be compared to Andy Warhol. But put it this way: He’s probably less a new-model Andy Warhol than a new-model Peter Max.
Max was immensely popular in the 1960s, famous enough to appear on the Tonight Show and on the cover of Time magazine under the heading “Portrait of the Artist as a Very Rich Man.” He exploited developments in commercial color printing to become a king of dorm-room posters. His then-fresh florescent palette and riffs on pop culture hit the button of something that was going on in the culture, the hunger for intense and ecstatic experiences—but it didn’t much outlive that cultural moment.
Display of vinyl figures by KAWS. (Photo by Ben Davis)

If you take KAWS’s popularity as a verdict on Today’s Culture in a similar way, the main thing you notice about the work is that, despite its poppy veneer, it is not ecstatic, not intense. The overall air is of emotional constipation. Kanye West was perceptive in picking KAWS for the cover of 808s & Heartbreaks, an album whose autotuned aura was memorably about numbness and dissociation.
KAWS’s characters’ mouths go missing and eyeballs are either Xed out or replaced by Xs. The Companion is always covering its eyes or slumped or copping a pathetic pieta pose. Dismembered limbs float purposelessly, or the Companion’s body is sliced open like a medical model to show its guts, while the creature just stares, blankly.
KAWS, Companion (Original Fake) (2011). (Photo by Ben Davis)

Maybe these goofy-dark flourishes are just meant to balance the fat of cutesy cartoons with a little acid. They register an emotion without really making you feel that emotion. The work’s very vacantness seems to suggest a low-level depression running through society, so pervasive that it serves as a neutral sign of the art’s nowness, rather than reading as a personal feeling expressed by the artist.
How does this observation fit, though, with the genial riffs on the Simpsons, the Smurfs, Peanuts, SpongeBob, Star Wars, and Astroboy that the KAWS universe emerged from in the ’00s, now frozen into a crystal of Gen X nostalgia? Pretty neatly, actually. As one psychologist told the Today Show, returning to the cultural pleasures of a perceived simpler earlier time is a coping mechanism: “When people are stressed, or anxious, or feeling out of control, nostalgia helps calm them down.”
KAWS, Kawsbob 3 (2007). (Photo by Ben Davis)

Of course, another way people cope with stress and anxiety or bad thoughts is “retail therapy,” shopping to take your mind off whatever’s eating you, to feel in charge.
The fact that KAWS shows no interest in marking any difference between his painting and sculptures, on the one hand, and his collectible toys and branded collabs, on the other, doesn’t just open him up to a wider audience of fans. It has a meaning in terms of what kinds of psychic energies are invested in it. It means, quite literally, that it is accessible. It’s not trying to teach you anything. It’s only weird enough to make you feel as if you are in on something for liking it; not weird enough to make you feel alienated.
Figurines for sale in the gift shop for “KAWS: What Party” at Brooklyn Museum, already sold out. (Photo by Ben Davis)

What I finally realized, standing there and staring at Tide, is how ambiguous its meaning is.
I don’t know, finally, what’s going on in this painting. Is the Companion drowning, at night, in the middle of the ocean, far away from land? Or is it chillin’ in the shallows, blissed out, in suspended animation in the moonlight?
Are we happily immersed in the accessible fun of KAWS’s self-contained product universe? Or are we drowning in its void, desperate for any scrap of meaning to hold onto? Maybe the two are sides of the same, flat image.
“KAWS: What Party” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art through September 5, 2021.
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“When do we go away from here?” wrote a young girl named Johanna in a note that’s framed and hanging as the opening artwork of Flo Kasearu’s recently opened exhibition at Estonia’s Tallinn Art Hall.
It’s not a work of fiction. Johanna is real, and the anxiety packed into her brief question is one of the many true emotional stories woven into Kasearu’s first major institutional show, “Cut Out of Life.” Children are both the start and end points of the poignant exhibition, which focuses on an extremely tough subject: domestic violence.
As it happens, Kasearu is better versed than most. Her mother has been running a women’s shelter since 2009 in the Estonian city of Pärn.
Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

“The story of Mila has, so far, a good ending,” the artist tells me as she takes me through a virtual tour of the show. Mila and her mother managed to escape their abusive household, thanks, in part, to the women’s shelter. But the problem remains chronic: Estonia has high rates of violence against women— affecting one in three women. And the shuttering of public life due to lockdowns has been even more detrimental, causing domestic abuse to rise worldwide.
The exhibition chronicles stories from scores of women, all of which were collected with consent from residents at the shelter. There’s a wall full of some of the excuses the artist’s mother commonly heard from perpetrators—everything from financial problems to being an underweight twin—which Kasearu then reinterpreted as sarcastic doodles, showing the ridiculous fallibility of any justification for abuse.
Although the subject has been given renewed urgency in the West due to the onset of the #metoo movement in 2017, Kasearu has long been preoccupied by women’s issues. In a video work from 2016, Kasearu created a symbolic parliament where women read their court statements out loud. At the Tallinn Art Hall, a viewer can also take a seat on a similar bleacher and watch a recorded video of the event. Empathy, but not sensationalism, is Kasearu’s goal.
A still from Child Welfare (2020). Courtesy of Flo Kasearu.

“My aim is to make art that is beneficial to these women, and empowering to them,” she says. “We are doing something together here… The women from my mother’s support group often say that if they can convince one woman to get out of this violence, it is already worth it to do this work.”
Other works speak to the vulnerability of the domestic space more generally, such as the decaying house plants in the main hall of “Cut Out of Life.” Kasearu keeps a collection of similar plants at home, which she calls the Flo Kasearu House Museum, where she lives with her child, running the place as a total work of art (there are viewing hours, and part of the house accommodates tours, while other areas are roped off for privacy).
The story of the House Museum is fascinating: The wooden slat heritage home once belonged to her great-grandparents before they were dispossessed of it during the Soviet Union’s communizing project. Kasearu, who is 35, and her mother finally got it back some years ago. Naturally, the artist is its director.
Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

“Kasearu belongs to the generation of young Estonian artists who witnessed a change of power after the collapse of the bipolar world order,” says Cathrin Mayer, who curated the exhibition. The artist’s unique perspective on power can be felt in her tongue-in-cheek critiques of domesticity and traditional female roles, both in her personal museum and the exhibition in Tallinn.
Playfulness, almost incredibly, shines through the somber subject matter. Many works are colorful and almost game-like. Bits of green linger on tropical plants in various states of entropy. “It is a sign that there is always hope,” Kasearu tells me.
But its aesthetic value isn’t the only reason the show is victorious. Art, when it is successful, sparks a conversation while simultaneously giving space for poetry and play in a way that court proceedings, government programs, and therapy sessions can’t.
It seems to already be working: On its opening weekend, Kasearu toured the exhibition with her mother and the women from the shelter who had offered their experiences for it. Another woman was visiting the show at the same time and, after watching Kasearu’s tour for a while, approached the artist’s mother. The support group began speaking with her, and Kasearu’s functional chair sculptures were right there for all of them to take seats on.
Flo Kasearu’s “Cut out of Life,” curated by Cathrin Mayer, is on view at Tallinn Art Hall until Mach 28. Take a virtual tour of the show here.
Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

Still from Flo Kasearu’s Festival of the Shelter (2018). Courtesy Tallinn Art Hall and the artist.

Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

Exhibition view of Flo Kasearu, “Cut Out of Life,” at Tallinn Art Hall. Photos by Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall 2020.

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Carlos Rosales-Silva’s first solo show in New York City, “Sunland Park,” is a collection of paintings on custom shaped wood panels inlaid with plastics, paint-sand mixtures, and dyed stones. These charged works blend geometric abstraction and Tex-Mex architectural flair, channelling this artist’s impressions of the bordertown neighborhood in El Paso, Texas where he grew up absorbing the psychedelic skies.
These works are saturated with rich, brilliant hues of the murals, hand-painted business signs, and mountainous landscapes of the Chihuahuan desert. The body of work at Ruiz-Healy Art is also self-consciously an ode to the home Rosales-Silva shares with the Tiwa, Manso, and Piro peoples and an acknowledgement of American modernism’s indebtedness to Indigenous art forms.
“All this stuff existed here in North America before colonization and it had this perilous journey where it was ripped off, recreated without citation, and filtered into these new forms that were revolutionary,” Rosales-Silva told me. “There’s never been an honest art history.”
Installation view of Carlos Rosales-Silva’s “Sunland Park” at Ruiz-Healy Art. (Photo courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.)

Though it is well-documented that early North and South American modernists were influenced by Indigenous designs, rituals, and philosophies, art historical writing has a notable insistence on citing European antecedents over all else for modernist movements in the Americas. Navajo sand paintings, Pueblo dance ceremonies, and techniques of collapsed space on tapestries, paintings, and sculptures were avowedly among the inspirations for many of the most famous US Abstract Expressionist painters, including Rothko, Pollock, and Newman. Besides being dishonest, the persistent Eurocentrism in American art history is boring and has stifled nuanced readings of modern art in America.
Like many of his pieces, Rosales-Silva’s Biblioteca (2020) uses a mixture of paint and sand to create a textured surface like stucco, a popular material in the southwest U.S. for coating building exteriors. The overwhelmingly saturated colors create vibrational effects that nod to a color language associated generally with Latino culture and more specifically with Mexican architecture.
Carlos Rosales-Silva, Biblioteca (2020). (Photo courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.)

The title and subject of Biblioteca (2020) may refer to the San Antonio Central Library that was built by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta. He and his peers Pedro Ramírez Vásquez and Teodoro González de León insisted they were borrowing from Indigenous forms of Mexico—even as critics have tended to overstate Le Corbusier as their fundamental inspiration.
The idea of multiplicity within identity and influence is essential to understanding the contexts in which Mexican-American, Chicanx, or brown artists live and work (Rosales-Silva identifies as all three). In his works at Ruiz-Healy, you see this in the way that Rosales-Silva pushes his forms beyond traditional renditions while using unconventional materials and layering his references.
Diablo en el Jardín (2020), for example, is a devilish red blob, graphic and fluid in shape like a musical note or calligraphic character. It contains a wavy piece of shiny acrylic plastic ending in a droplet. On its bottom right leg forms a circular pool of crushed stone applied with teal, baby pink, grass green, and yellow.
Carlos Rosales-Silva, Diablo en el Jardin (2019). (Photo courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.)

Another piece, La Pulga (2019), is shaped like a vague thumbs up, framed by a thin border of turquoise inlaid with a yellow acrylic plastic, like the shiny laminate of inexpensive furniture. From the center, red droplets seem to ricochet from a skewed bed of turquoise rocks. There’s an animated and even amusing character to the expressive shape of the panels combined with the energy from their color and competing textures.
Carlos Rosales-Silva, La Pulga . (Photo courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.)

For Rosales-Silva, abstraction didn’t always seem like a relevant way to make work considering how important history was to his practice. The works of Black abstractionists showed him that there can be a poetic way to blend the personal and political into the abstract. As inspirations, he lists artists such as Howardena Pindell, Stanley Whitney, and Jack Whitten. (In his recently released journals, Whitten began a list of painting objectives with, “Remove the European significance of touch in painting.”)
Rosales-Silva is considered a first-generation American because during the Great Depression, his grandfather was repatriated to Mexico despite being born in South Texas. The sensibility that comes from inheriting these troubled histories are what he alludes to when he speaks of the “tense state of brownness” as a force in his work: cultural assimilation as a means of survival, a complicated relationship with indigeneity, and the sense of being a brown person in an art world where there aren’t many.
Carlos Rosales-Silva, Nopalitos, Tuna, y Xoconostle (2020). (Photo courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.)

Yet Rosales-Silva has found his way through an abstract art form that infuses a cultural perspective while making a space for critical conversations about history. Nopalitos Tuna, y Xoconostle (2020) is the artist’s painting of cactus fruits, rendered on a circular panel. “You are not a Xicano artist, if you don’t have a nopal painting,” I teased him.
“I’d feel like I was dishonoring my culture without one,” he replied, laughing.
Rosales-Silva and I have an ongoing discussion about “nopal art”: the over-reliance on cultural symbols like nopales, plátanos, or Virgen de Guadalupes that make a piece legibly “Latinx.” Such overt symbols often overpower any criticality in the work, making it fall prey to stereotypical, celebratory clichés that institutions often use as a stand-in for “Latinx art.”
Installation view of Carlos Rosales-Silva’s “Sunland Park” at Ruiz-Healy Art. (Photo courtesy Ruiz-Healy Art.)

But although this particular piece is indeed an image of a cactus with a title combining Spanish and Nahuatl words, it’s also an abstraction. Though the fear of losing ownership over cultural symbols is not imagined, there are many manners in which brownness can exist. Rosales-Silva chooses instead to provoke uncertainty, disassemble and reorganize the visible, and through that process he captures a much-sought-after magic.
“Carlos Rosales-Silva: Sunland Park” is on view at Ruiz-Healy Art, New York, through March 27, 2021.
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