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In Xu Bing’s Cropland, part of the Series of Five Repetitions (1987-88), Chinese characters double as landscape depiction, creating a liminal work that resonates between word and image, representation and abstraction.

The 1916 album War by Olga Rozanova, made in collaboration with Aleksei Kruchenykh, draws upon the visual and linguistic vocabularies of Futurism and Suprematism to explore the trauma of war.

Hamaya Hiroshi’s Composition of December 1953 becomes a marker of US occupation and the climate of post-war Japan.

Made of 1200 cigarette packs, Jac Leirner’s Lung works both reflect the consumerism of which they are born but also transcend far beyond it while conjuring tropes from Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Pop Art as well as Neo-Concrete art of her native Brazil.

Responding with imagination to the brutality and violence of Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991-2002), Abu Bakarr Mansaray’s monumental drawing Sinister Project depicts a fictitious war machine with careful detail that reveals the artist’s background in science and engineering.

A look at the history of the modern house suggests that domestic living takes shape in the intermediate, and sometimes contentious, space between the aspirations of the dweller and architect.

A postcard of a lithograph by Farkas Molnár (1897–1945) is one of a series of twenty postcards printed and marketed to publicize the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar.

Addressing the history and impact of violence in Colombia, Juan Manuel Echavarría’s work does not represent violence as an abstraction but rather registers a tangible reality with a name and a face.

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s work does not easily fit any neat categories, whether “Post-Minimalism,” “Fiber art” or “craft.” Considering Yakshi (1984) in MoMA’s reinstalled galleries, the essay highlights the influence of her cultural background on her methods and materials.

Amanda Williams painted eight condemned houses in and around Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, selecting colors from the consumer products and companies marketed to the Black communities of the city’s South Side. The project highlights the ways we construct meaning from color, how these associations are inextricably linked to race and class, and how they connect to the long-standing history of public disinvestment in Black neighborhoods.

Chéri Samba likes to throw people off. The cartoon-like texts with direct messaging that frequently figure in Samba’s complex visual universes function to maintain authorial control. As the artist notes, they are “a way of not allowing freedom of interpretation to the person who looks at my painting.”

Liubov’ Popova’s practice involved an active engagement with multiple movements and -isms in a relatively short period of time. In this essay, very formally distinct and different works by Popova, on view in the reinstalled galleries in 2019, are put into historical relation.