“El Playon” of the work’s title refers to a black scar that a volcanic eruption left in the earth more than a hundred years ago, just outside El Salvador’s capital city. The same area was used as a dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared during the country’s 1980–92 civil war. Matching the shape of El Playon, 601ft² comprises some 1,500 pounds of molten amber that mimics flowing lava as it’s poured over a collection of various objects: volcanic stones, specially fabricated ceramic bones, and various items found in MacArthur Park, a main hub for the Salvadorean community in LA. It also includes letters and newspaper clippings related to the civil war that are difficult to read through the amber shell. After the show opened, Aparicio learned that the body of his half-sister had been discovered in El Playon by their father, artist Juan Edgar Aparicio, who fled El Salvador shortly afterward.

Now, Aparicio is working on a new amber work for this year’s Whitney Biennial. He is drawn to amber that trees secrete as a healing mechanism. But he also plans eventually to reiterate 601ft². Each new version will be, literally, darker: the artist plans to add a new layer of poured amber, further obscuring the documents and objects. “This is the most visible it’ll ever be,” Aparicio said. “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”

This impulse to capture something before it’s gone also appears in another ongoing series, “Caucho (Rubber).” In 2016 Aparicio started casting the bottom portions of Ficus trees, a non-native genus ubiquitous across LA, where, for decades, it has been subject to removal efforts. He applies a layer of rubber made from the Indigenous Salvadorean Castilla elastica, or Panama rubber tree. Aparicio leaves the rubber on the tree for several weeks before slowly pulling it off, creating a realistic impression of the tree’s bark: the knots and whorls, man-made carvings and graffiti, the discoloration from car exhaust and other pollution. At first, the “Caucho” works were faithful reproductions of the trees that hung from the wall like unstretched paintings. More recently, they are becoming more sculptural, as he’s started to incorporate new elements in them, like shards of glass or ceramic thorns. Now, he’s painting on their surfaces and stuffing some with the cotton fibers from ceiba (kapok) tree seeds.

These works powerfully evoke the unique Los Angeles cityscape. Aparicio was “interested in levels of human interaction that are recorded on the surface,” he said. Most of the trees he cast have since been cut down, and these works now serve as the only record of their existence, their previous lives, the marks imprinted on them. Ficus trees still abound across Los Angeles. There’s a municipal waiting list for the trimming of Ficus trees; the wait is upward of 10 years. The wait for tree removal is much longer. Aparicio added, “All to say, they can’t get rid of us even if they wanted to.”  

There are seven versions of the installation, one for each star in the Big Dipper. This year, two versions premiered in biennials: one in Gwangju, the other in Liverpool. Both comprise a group of stones, with actual peppers, bananas, lemons, and other fruits laid on top.

In a unique agreement, Tate assumed the role of custodian rather than owner of one version, along with the Mayan ritual associated with it. The institution agreed to steward the work for 13 years, a number corresponding to that of the major joints in the human body, according to the Mayan cosmovision. Thereafter, Tate has the option to renew custodianship; Calel retains the right to choose whether to renew or to send it elsewhere. Calel also stipulated that he be allowed to have a Kaqchikel person perform the ritual of laying out the fruit. If none were available, the artist would personally choose someone to do it.

Calel, 36, sees the arrangement as a means of bringing his Maya Kaqchikel heritage to the rest of the world. “I want to invite the public to see what I see daily in my community, and to see how all the knowledge has been handed down by my ancestors,” Calel said, speaking by Zoom, with the help of a translator, from Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa), his Guatemalan hometown.

Calel’s studio, which includes an altar where members of his community make offerings, represents the merger of conceptualism and Indigenous tradition that undergirds his work. His father is a painter, his mother is a weaver, and Calel himself trained at the Rafael Rodríguez Padilla National School of Plastic Arts in Guatemala City.

His paintings contain plainspoken scenes that convey the sense of unity he has found in Chi Xot. Ru raxalh ri Rua Ch’ ulew (The Greenness of the Land), 2022, shows three men bent over the hood of a pickup truck as a child peers out a passenger window, and no fewer than 17 people stand in the truck bed, posing as if for a group picture. Yet on the biennial circuit—where Calel has emerged as a star in recent years at the Berlin Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Bienal de São Paulo—he is best known for sculpture.

Calel doesn’t seem interested in explaining Kaqchikel heritage and mythology to viewers. Instead, his primary audience appears to be his own community. If others find ways to relate to the work, perhaps through participation or contemplation, he accepts that, and, to some extent, even encourages it.

In the case of his recent SculptureCenter commission, B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone)—a gorgeous expansive installation of soil, rocks, wood, and fire that references a landmark stone in the Chi Xot foothills—Calel made sure to engage the New York institution’s staff in the work’s making: the workers themselves lit arrays of candles set near large rocks in the arrangement, just as worshippers in Chi Xot might do in rituals at the piece’s namesake stone. “I requested that when they light the candles, they be conscious of what they’re doing,” Calel said. “It’s knowing that there’s a sense of spirituality that’s involved in the process, not only in lighting the candles, but in being present in the installation.” 

When I visited Thomas’s Los Angeles studio this summer, I encountered the large metallic frame of a geodesic dome. Triangular, faintly iridescent mica plates dominated the space. Thomas built the dome to serve as a site for performances set to take place at the Aldrich. A sculptural human figure was fused to the structure, and its body appeared either crushed or subsumed by the dome, creating a strange human-architectural hybrid. The effect was both tender and sinister.

Thomas became fascinated by the relationship between the body and the built environment while completing his MFA at Yale, where he also made figurative embroideries, before moving west in 2020. For his earlier sculptures,he often reshaped wooden materials he reclaimed from the colonial architecture of New England—columns, decorative spindles, windows, and doorways—into assemblages that convey a sense of destruction or collapse. Reconfiguring these elements, Thomas parsed the material and social legacies of historical structures that colonialism and enslavement produced, emphasizing the haunted qualities of ornate architectural adornments. He developed a distinctive visual palette defined by neutral colors and pervasive patina, often torching fragments of debris to create a blackened and burnt finish. With a distinctive resourcefulness, he combines these components into structures all his own.

Now that he works in Southern California, Thomas is drawing on the influence of 20th-century design and the natural world around him. Specifically, Thomas is exploring the resemblance between Fuller’s geodesic domes and the shapes of tents that serve as shelter for many among the unhoused population of LA—a dark refraction of earlier hopes that the domes would provide much-needed housing.

Informed in part by memories of his religious upbringing in Chicago, Thomas has also begun experimenting with stained glass, bringing more color into his work. A new series premiering at the Aldrich features pyramidal forms atop rectangular metal columns. Stained glass panels form three sides of these pyramids, which will emit blue and red light when illuminated from within. The fourth side is stitched-up, skin-like silicone that lends bodily associations to these geometric sculptures.

In October, Thomas is also showing work in the latest edition of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum’s biennial showcase of Los Angeles–based artists, including the effigy-like sculpture Betrothal I (2021). Comprising a sofa cover encased in layers of resin, it is heavy but lacy. Hoisted almost violently by a mechanical apparatus, it approximates the size of a human body. Throughout his practice, Thomas suggests that, while the social and architectural structures we inhabit may provide comfort and shelter, they just as easily become tools of subjugation.  

This article first appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Art in America.

Sometimes, property owners add devices that look like medieval contraptions to them. I exhibit these spikes as sculptures, and usually place them at roughly the same level as the standpipe they were originally installed on. Each work in the series takes a different form according to the aesthetic decisions of the developer who commissioned it or the fabricator who made it. The sculptures make the removal visible, since they’re not meant to be noticed. But the work is also about the growing series of absences across the city, and the increased possibilities for loitering.

That means I make most of my works by walking around in the streets, then use my studio as a space to store objects or try out installations. I’m invested in highlighting the ways that forces like real estate development, or the ongoing privatization of the city, continuously encroach on different aspects of daily life. I try to find moments where those forces become visible.

I’m looking for objects that are physical forms of policing. Another example is planters that are strategically placed to prevent access to areas where there might be shelter or a covering, such as under awnings. Often, they’re not even filled with plants but, instead, bricks or cement, making them too heavy to move. I’ve been removing some of these structures and reconstituting them as actual planters, growing things inside them. For a 2022 show at Artists Space in New York called “Everything is Common,” I placed three of these planters in the windowsills and grew parsnips and carrots in them. Those reference this group of 17th-century radical Christians in England known as the Diggers. The Diggers would grow edible crops on other people’s property, since they believed that everything is communal under their god. —As told to Emily Watlington

Video Credits include:

Director/Editor/Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

Additional Footage by Tomas Abad, Karla Coté/NurPhoto, and Mastershot via Getty

Speaking on Zoom, I asked Critchlow how she feels about being part of the new wave of figurative painting that’s swept the art world over the last few years, and her response was telling: She doesn’t deny that her work is figurative—how could she?—but she says her deep interest is not there so much as in the materials and techniques of painting. Can she really be such a formalist, or is she being evasive? After all, her fantasy portraits of young, bare-breasted Black women are not exactly neutral subjects: imagine something like a collaboration between Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Lisa Yuskavage, but at a Giorgio Morandi scale. Drawn, in a far from literal way, from sources ranging from classical European painting and her own ongoing practice of life drawing to 1960s soft porn and contemporary music videos, and not-so-contemporary ones, too, like PJ Harvey’s “C’mon Billy” (1995), Critchlow’s works seem calculated to elicit strong reactions. They test viewers’ visceral feelings about female sexuality, Blackness, and what happens when they intersect. Things can get uneasy. She once told an interviewer that “with femininity you can’t get it right.” Her work reflects an equanimity with that conundrum.

For what it’s worth, I’m willing to believe the smiling, ingenuous-looking young woman I see on the screen really is unconcerned about how others might react to her provocative images. She’s so clearly absorbed in her own self-exploration by way of the language of painting—not formalism, but form as a metaphor for the self. The critic Johanna Fateman once put it beautifully: Critchlow’s figures, she said, “seem to fix their dispassionate gazes beyond the sexualized tropes that frame them.” The results are often poignant, sometimes ironic, always honest in their willingness to go where the inherent and undemonstrative sensuality of her paint seems to lead.

The paintings exude an unmistakable intimacy. That’s partly to do with the modest size of most of her works: When she mentioned she’d done some bigger paintings for the New York show, I asked how large, curious about what sounded like a significant shift in the work, and she admitted, “well, medium-scale.” The intimacy owes perhaps as well to her muted palette, dominated by the myriad browns she uses to describe, not only her characters’ flesh, but much of their surroundings; above all, it derives from the delicacy of touch that she brings to the canvas. And although there is a surprising strain of traditionalism in her approach to painting, perhaps a reflection of her postgraduate training at London’s Royal Drawing School, she is no more constrained by any sort of academicism than she is tempted by the overt sociopolitical messaging that engages many of the other figurative painters in the spotlight today. Her art is finding out who she is and what she can do through painting.

Lately, Lee has found herself less interested in keeping up with gadgetry. “Now my tastes are more—how would you say it—vanilla-ish,” she confessed. Still, her sculptures, which make prominent use of disused wiring, motors, and other technological innards, are very much entangled with the devices she knew and loved long ago, as well as with works of Japanese anime like Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion that she watched as a kid. Many of Lee’s sculptures resemble such films’ cyborgs, whose bodies are not unlike the machines that created them. In Vienna, where she remained after grad school, she realized her work had a lot in common with American sci-fi films like Blade Runner too.

Masterfully constructed from metal and found materials, Lee’s sculptures can be downright terrifying—figures with multiple faces and partly formed limbs, some appearing to drip with silicone, like aliens emerging from primordial ooze, others seeming to gaze at themselves in mirrors. She concedes some similarity between her work and body horror, but mostly speaks of it as beautiful visions of all that humans can be. Her figures are without gender, and intended to dispense with conventional notions about the constructs and confines of disability.

“Instead of forcing bodies to be stable and functioning, we have to give space for fragile bodies,” she said. “I would like the body to be an open system, one that is exposed and fragile.”

Lee initially studied painting at Hongik University in Seoul, where she learned her craft by copying images of nature. When she mastered that, she moved on to working in an Abstract Expressionist mode. But by the time she graduated, she was more interested in working in three dimensions, and that passion has persisted: she tends to dive right in to her labor-intensive sculptures, bypassing advance sketches.

Her most recent works look back to her early art education. This past November, her exhibition at Loggia gallery in Munich, “Devouring Chaos,” featured sculptures alongside abstract paintings made by airbrushing and then lacquering steel plates, so that the color is encased beneath a layer that looks like goo. While these paintings may not represent anything in particular, it’s easy to see in them the conjuring of bodies emerging from voids. If they happen to recall recent experiments with AI-generated art, it’s anything but intentional. “A lot of people said it looks like digital art, but it’s handmade,” Lee said. “I found that interesting—that certain languages just come in naturally.”  

For Phetogo, the inquiry is a step removed from figuration or portraiture in the way it asks what it means to participate in an ongoing conversation that has been growing in volume. A Portrait of the Subject Position at Onset (2020), a painting that depicts his own face smudged with beetle-like daubs of shoe polish, features in “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” a milestone exhibition currently on view at Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA. Among other things, the show aspires toward “an internal evaluation of collective self-representation.”

As a painter from Botswana operating within a Western-dominated discourse, Phetogo takes a bold approach to a style that might feel uncomfortable but serves, he says, as “an acknowledgment that all is not right.” But this is not all Phetogo’s paintings are about. He likes to travel through wormholes, such as in his “blackbody” series (2019–ongoing) that borrows its title from a physics term referring to a hypothetical perfect entity that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation.

The double entendre around blackbody helps establish Phetogo’s interest in subverting expectations—as he does with his figures, which are immediately striking but far from idealized—while slowly building his self-referential network of ideas.

Phetogo’s speculative approach continues in a new body of work titled “Propositions for the Origin of a blackbody,” in which he leans further into figurative abstractions. Proposition 5 – Zombie Figuration, Painting 2 (2022), which hangs beside his self-portrait in the Zeitz show, depicts a body turned inside-out with eyes on an otherwise featureless face, staring blankly ahead. Such work raises an intriguing question: Is it the subject of the portrait that classifies as the zombie, or the ghosts of figuration itself? 

For someone well-accustomed to actual grass, AstroTurf was especially unusual. Baker was born in North Dakota and grew up in the Midwest, where her father worked for the National Park Service. This took the artist, who is of Mandan and Hidatsa descent and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, to what she called “beautiful open spaces” and glorious parks that felt “like my backyard.” Her discovery of AstroTurf owes largely to circumstance. After living in New York and then San Francisco, she joined her husband in Beaumont, Texas, where art supply stores are scarce, around 2015. Wandering around Home Depot one day a couple years later, she “came across this bright blue AstroTurf and was blown away. It felt really alien—it’s not something I grew up with.” She took a piece home to experiment with, and quickly realized it was sturdy enough to hold the unconventional shapes she had been visualizing. She wanted to work against the boundaries that traditional canvases present, creating more fluidity in a process that invites slight imperfections.

Baker, whose work is currently on view in group shows at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas and the Ucross Art Gallery in Wyoming, now typically uses white AstroTurf, dividing it into color-blocked sections with acrylic and spray paint. She then arranges vibrantly colored yarn atop the AstroTurf, before gluing it down and hand-sewing each piece so the thread is barely visible. Though she works in mixed media, Baker sees her art as based not so much in textile or assemblage as in painting, each strand of yarn akin to a pencil mark. “Abstraction forms its own language that leaves questions and some open-endedness,” she said. At the same time, she relates her work to landscapes and “the feeling of being in the vast expanses of the Northern Plains. Land is a place where culture is.”

Since 2018, Baker has introduced a new kind of tension to her art by incorporating into the synthetic materials organic ones that are traditional to the Mandan and Hidatsa people, like buckskin, willow, buffalo hide, and parfleche. “I had to make sure I knew why and how I was using them, because they have a history of how they were used,” she said. “I was raised with a lot of pride in who I am. Caring for culture means carrying forward these traditions. One thing I’ve always thought about, and especially since having a son, is: How do I carry forward those traditions while living in urban environments?”

In place of sweeping landscapes or fussy interiors are buttery layers of muted monochrome colors. Her favorite hues are “sophisticated grays,” which provoke undefined yet specific feelings and permit a certain struggle with light. These backgrounds contribute tension— which Cheng calls a “guiding principle of creation”—to her paintings. “I search for the sexual nature of desire that holds a painting together and makes you feel immediate to it,” she says. In her encounters with both her own work and that of other artists, she seeks a physical response.

Cheng derives her subject matter from an eclectic range of sources. One painting, Old Stories Retold (2022), depicts the bodies of three men trapped in water with disturbingly vacant facial expressions. Recently exhibited in a solo show at Matthew Marks, the work draws on 20th-century Chinese writer Lu Xun’s short story “Forging the Swords.” That haunting and surreal parable concludes with three severed heads bobbing around in boiling water. Incroyable (En route), 2021, portrays three long-faced men staring out at the viewer from a convertible, a sunset blazing behind them. The painting’s composition is based on a ’90s Saturday Night Live sketch, a silly segment in which Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, and Chris Kattan nod their heads in sync to the Haddaway song “What Is Love” while driving from one place to the next, crashing a high school prom, a wedding, and bedtime at a senior home along the way. Cheng’s painting transfigures the campiness of the music video into a searching portrayal of a midlife journey to recapture something of the past. In Smoked Turkey Leg (2021), a shirtless man gnaws at a long, barren bone with primal exasperation and a ferocity reminiscent of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

In our conversation, Cheng emphasized her interest in the inexhaustible questions that paintings can pose, listing examples with simultaneous urgency and reverence. Can she paint the abstract idea of somebody disappearing? How about the specific physical experience of falling through space and getting caught in a net? Can she use unnatural colors to render a face, and make those colors seem utterly natural? “The studio has always been my space for solving the formal issues these questions produce,” Cheng says.

Right now, Cheng is focused on creating a new body of work to answer her latest set of questions, which include how to represent a head with feathers and how to create her own composition inspired by Edvard Munch’s “Jealousy” series. She is enjoying her new studio in Charonne, where, she says, she finally feels she has enough physical and mental space to work.

Kramer Garfias was born Chile in 1988 and moved to Germany at the age of seven. At university, she arrived upon art, and specifically textiles, by chance when she saw Textile Studies and Conceptual Textiles on offer at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany. “I had a gut feeling to try it,” she remembers, “and it was a huge surprise when it kept me fascinated all the time.” She discovered that many of her female ancestors in Chile had worked with textiles, and felt that working in such a lineage not only connected her to her past but also helped her understand social, cultural, and historical differences between Latin America and Europe.

Over the past 10 years, Kramer Garfias has developed various working methods: She weaves by hand on a loom in her studio; she writes and tests her own computer programs to generate Jacquard fabrics (a Jacquard loom, considered a precursor to modern computers, is a programmable device fitted to a loom to ease the traditionally laborious process of manufacturing textiles with intricate patterns) that are then produced at a workshop in Como, Italy. Most recently, she acquired a tufting machine, a handheld gun-like device that pushes a threaded needle through a backing material and pulls it out again, forming loops. “Weaving and Jacquard need planning and organization,” Kramer Garfias said, “but tufting is the opposite. It can be very intuitive, and it’s nice to experience something so immediate.”

Her current body of work, titled “Infernooooo” and inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, is produced entirely with the tufting machine. “Because tufting can create a high pile, works can also look three-dimensional and become more like objects than images,” she explained. “It is immediately clear that this is about a fantasy world and not a replica of reality. Jacquard, on the other hand, is much more about images—the image is often in the foreground.”

Before taking the tufting gun to a base fabric stretched like canvas on a wooden frame, she researched the significance of the afterworld in pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles and in Mexican culture. She then investigated geographic features of different types of caves and applied them abstractly to craft her own tufted portals, not into a familiar world with prescribed forms but into fantasy realms into which viewers can project their own ideas. Xibalba Level 2 combines geometric pre-Columbian aesthetics with organic forms. It also builds on Xibalba Level 1 in a way that invites viewers to enter the next stage of whatever afterworld they’ve conjured, not dissimilar, Kramer Garfias notes, to leveling up in a video game.

Despite centuries-old textile traditions, the technologies for creating them are constantly evolving. “The techniques can be so fresh that you have to rethink the entire process,” she said. While Kramer Garfias’s art explores deeply researched social and cultural subjects, it equally concerns rethinking, redefining, and recontextualizing the traditions of textiles as comprehensively as possible. Thus, in her work, the medium is a message in and of itself.