One Work, Many Voices

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.

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.

Created in 1982 by the Mexican conceptual artist Maris Bustamante, El pene como instrumento de trabajo/para quitarle a Freud lo macho (The Penis as a Work Instrument)/To Get Rid of the Macho in Freud) is an iconic work for the history of both performance art and feminist art in Mexico. By contextualizing the piece in relation to…

Following the opening event in which Xiao Lu’s shot at her own installation, Dialogue (1989), which caused the exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Beijing to close, the work has paradoxically become both iconic and obscured. Initially conceived to address gendered violence, the piece was later absorbed into the history of violence of Tiananmen…

Elizabeth Otto focuses on Brandt’s iconic table clock and unpacks the legendary design aesthetic that she pioneered.

Composed of multiple bodies and body parts, human and animal, Cecilia Vicuña’s Pantera Negra y Yo (Black Panther and Me) doubles a painting that was destroyed and then recreated from memory. It is intimately connected with text, hinting at close connections between past, present, and future.

Desde finales de los noventa, la obra de Regina José Galindo se ha caracterizado por denunciar distintas formas de opresión y violencia en la sociedad contemporánea. Uno de los temas recurrentes en su trayectoria artística ha sido el de las movilizaciones migratorias y el desplazamiento de centroamericanos como resultado de las guerras civiles que tuvieron lugar en Guatemala y otros países de la región en la década de los setenta.

Since the late nineties, the work of Regina José Galindo has been characterized for denouncing different forms of oppression and violence in contemporary society. One recurring theme in her artistic career has been the migratory mobilizations and displacement of Central Americans as a result of the civil wars that took place in Guatemala and other countries of the region in the 1970s.

Proun 19D (1920 or 1921), one of El Lissitzky’s best-known works, offers different frames of interpretations closely related to the historiographical record of where and how the work has been displayed since its inception.