“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.”  

How does an important artist become an artist we know and love? It often starts at an early age, from a relentless energy to create. That energy is the focus of Sam Nakahira’s forthcoming graphic novel Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape (due out in March from Getty Publications). This tenderly illustrated new book opens with a scene of a teenage Ruth Asawa playing with wire in a cabbage field in Norwalk, California, just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Already, she is transforming unexpected material into something new while maintaining its essence—a process core to her practice, as we later learn.

This idyllic scene, however, is paired with some foreboding text: “Sunday, December 7, 1941, 10:30 a.m. […] Before Everything Changed.” As we take in the scene around Asawa—known as Aiko to her parents but Ruth (her “American name”) to everyone else—her sister Chiyo comes out ringing a bell and yelling, “Come quick! Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.” Things quickly change for Asawa: when she goes to school the next day, Nakahira imagines her thinking to herself, “Suddenly I knew who my friends were. Not many.”

By March 1942, the family begins to burn anything and everything that might denote their Japanese heritage, from kimonos and family photos to books on flower arranging and even the addresses of relatives in Japan. It doesn’t help: her father is taken in by the FBI for questioning and the rest of family is soon forcibly removed from their home, first to the Santa Anita Park racetrack, about 20 miles north of their home, and then to an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, not far from the Mississippi River.

Nakahira poignantly illustrates this harrowing experience, which thousands of Japanese Americans faced during World War II. But she also balances the darkness with moments of joy that those who have faced such atrocities are lucky to find in order to keep going. At Santa Anita, where detainees are forced to sleep in horse stables and to make camouflage nets as part of the war effort, Asawa meets a few Japanese Americans who were animators at Walt Disney Studios. They teach her how to draw, notice her talents, and encourage her commitment to wanting to be an artist. “Everything was gray until I met the cartoonists,” Asawa says. “Truly, art has saved me.”

Asawa continues to face discrimination throughout her life. She can’t complete her art-teaching degree because she can’t get a teaching post in 1946 due to continued anti-Japanese racism. She recalls her mother saying, “Bend, don’t break.” That leads her to study at the iconic experimental art school Black Mountain College, with the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Nakahira goes on to detail the early stages of Asawa’s career, how she arrived upon her signature wire-bent sculptural style, and her relocation to San Francisco. The short graphic novel, just under 100 pages, ends while Asawa, whose star has only continued to rise in the decade since her death in 2013, is still young, with so much life left. Perhaps there will be a sequel. In any case, An Artist Takes Shape is a significant new publication—similar in a way to Faith Ringgold’s 1991 book Tar Beach—in that it allows children, especially Asian girls, to dream big about the power of art, even in the most ghastly of times.

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.” 

On October 14, 2022, nearly 50 years later, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland walked into the National Gallery in London, opened a can of tomato soup, and splattered it across glass protecting Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1889). The duo then smeared superglue on their palms before affixing them to the wall below the work. Plummer, whose voice was quivering with emotion, demanded: “What is worth more? Art or life?”

The gesture, planned by the activist group Just Stop Oil, was a call to arms against the fossil fuel industry. The action immediately went viral. News reports invariably called it—as well as similar subsequent interventions—an “attack.” Museums, one after another, have continually condemned the “endangerment” of artworks, while being careful not to denounce the activists’ politics. As climate protests in museums have proliferated, debates have focused on the “cost” of these actions, while ignoring the urgency of the activists’ appeals. Similarly, the Times called Shafrazi a “vandal,” but made no direct mention of Vietnam.

If these truly were attacks, the injuries sustained by the artworks were ephemeral. MoMA conservators scrubbed the spray paint from Guernica’s varnished surface by the end of the day. The National Gallery cleaned and rehung Sunflowers within six hours. The climate activists deliberately targeted the work’s protective glass and frame, not the painting itself. Materially, this doesn’t constitute an attack on the artwork at all; rather, both gestures are political performances that operate primarily within the symbolic sphere.

BUT WHEREAS SHAFRAZI had intended to reactivate Guernica’s antiwar message, to make the painting feel as urgent as it had during the Spanish Civil War, climate activists like Plummer and Holland understand artworks as inseparable from a larger social world. Their action was less about Sunflowers as a painting and more about the value and function of art within economies of attention and exchange.

And yet, the art media quickly questioned: why Sunflowers? They asked the same in the many subsequent cases: Why Monet’s Haystacks? Why Degas’s Little Dancer? Why Laocoön and His Sons? Protesters offered various explanations, but the common denominator is clear: all these works benefit from a nearly consensual agreement that each is a masterpiece. Their hyper-visibility lends social drama and social meaning to the activists’ interventions. The works—often described as “priceless” by journalists—are focal points of cultural and monetary value. They are, therefore, the exact points where these values might be called into question.

The sense of endangerment that these actions elicit forces us to reckon with the matrix of values in which the works are suspended and upheld. Plummer asked onlookers at the National Gallery, “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?” As might be expected from any challenge to the status quo, many museumgoers reacted negatively. In the recordings from the National Gallery, you can hear hushed cries of “Oh, my gosh!” and an urgent call for security. Climate protesters acting outside the rarefied context of the museum tend to elicit even stronger reactions. In a video of a Just Stop Oil action at the Chelsea Flower Show, an indignant onlooker doused protesters with a sprinkler until restrained by a uniformed guard.

Some climate activists (or climate-aware non-activists) fear alienating the non-activist public with acts of civil disobedience. They prefer to maintain an institutionally sanctioned and law-abiding public face. But as an artist who engages climate change in my own work, I see value in these acts. By hijacking the attention we pay these artworks, the activists’ gestures have triggered public conversations around fossil fuels and climate that would not have happened otherwise, redirecting attention where it is badly needed.

DESPITE CRITICISM TO THE CONTRARY, Plummer and Holland have expressed reverence for Sunflowers. Holland showed up to their court appearance in a Sunflowers T-shirt, and the duo has described an imagined solidarity with Van Gogh. In a Frieze interview with Andrew Durbin, Plummer opined: “Van Gogh said, ‘What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?’ I’d like to think Van Gogh would be one of those people who knows we need to step up into civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action.” In the same conversation, Holland championed the series’ beauty and iconic standing. The activist duo’s unlikely pairing of symbolic violence and aesthetic beauty is what granted their gesture its potency.

Preservation is one of the museum’s chief functions, but it has also long served as a space for discourse, a public arena for democratic debate. In 2019 the International Council of Museums controversially proposed a new definition for museums that began: “Museums are democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures.” While this line was ultimately excised, the body agreed in 2022 that museums must “foster diversity and sustainability” and invite community participation. Actions like throwing soup on Sunflowers have succeeded in reasserting the museum as a political space. The dissensus that makes these events so uncomfortable to observe (the heckling, the disconnect between activist and onlooker) is part of what gives these encounters a strongly political dimension: antagonism must be part of democratic processes in a deeply divided world.

A Forbes opinion piece headlined “Will Hurling Tomato Soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers Advance Climate Policy?” by Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash takes a typical position of agreeing with the protesters’ message but questioning their methods. Then, they go on to delineate a list of policy changes that they see as truly actionable.

The very existence of the piece proves that museum actions opened the door to conversations around climate, creating a global audience that far exceeds those present when two activists glued themselves to a museum wall.

These are the questions the protesters want us to ask: should, and will, governments grant new licenses to extract fossil fuels? Will governments meet decarbonization targets? Will they set timelines that avoid, or mitigate, life-threatening environmental effects? All governmental actions taken to date have been far too modest. Immediate and radical change is necessary.

To unsympathetic observers, the anger embedded in activists’ gestures can seem like an excess of feeling. But that anger is rooted in real suffering and loss. As I write, tens of thousands have been killed by flooding in Libya, a disaster caused by a lethal combination of infrastructural failure and unprecedented storms. After a raging wildfire, Maui remains a scorched wasteland with close to 100 dead. Smoke still trails from Canada where millions of acres of boreal forest have burned over the course of a single summer.

Ironically, the enormous scale of these climate-fueled disasters makes them hard to see and easy to dismiss. At a recent Extinction Rebellion march, I overheard a woman, turning away a flyer, hit back with: “Save the bloody world? No thanks, not today. Maybe tomorrow.” I make art that confronts climate change because I believe art can make the invisible visible, the unheard heard, and the unsensed sensible. Similarly, museum climate protests harness art’s power to unveil.

WHILE I BELIEVE these actions have been successful, I don’t think they are replicable. The actions that have the most staying power are the ones that have appropriated particular artworks in peculiar ways. The orange tomato soup created an image, temporarily, that looked as if Van Gogh’s blossoms, or his oils, had melted in the heat of the Arles sun. This bit of visual play surely helped rocket the event through the algorithms. The activists’ youth (Plummer was 21, Holland, 20) was certainly another important factor. Other similar gestures (pea soup on Van Gogh’s The Sower, black oily drips on Klimt’s Life and Death) have not generated quite the same scale of response. The protest must go on, but it will take on new sites and new forms.

Among the dozens of museum interventions carried out over the past year, another stood out to me for the artwork it engaged. In August 2022, activists from the group Ultima Generazione carefully planned an action involving Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 Futurist icon Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Four group members glued their hands to the plinth supporting the bronze sculpture to avoid touching the work itself. They called not only for an end to new fossil fuel permits, but also for government-led expansion of renewable energies.

To me, the Futurists represent the very birth of fossil fuel modernism: they celebrated speeding automobiles and soot-cloaked cities, studded with smokestacks. But the Futurists were not ignorant of the dangers of the dawning machine age: their fiery fete was, also, a dance of death. The Futurists’ calls to tear down the old museums seem at first glance to presage recent museum eco-actions.

Climate activists meticulously stage events in ways that limit harm, suggesting a very different attitude toward artistic heritage. Environmental activists are, after all, making a plea to preserve the world. The Futurists’ radical program of historical extermination—and giddy embrace of the breakneck thrills of a machinic future—are precisely what environmental activists are countering. For them, what has become radical is to oppose a profit-driven ethos of endless appetites and infinite garbage heaps. The Futurist vision, with all its destructive drives attached, has become our world.

I recently visited Sunflowers in London and sensed a fresh energy among the crowds descending on the work. Following in the footsteps of Guernica in 1974—a year after Picasso’s death and a year before Franco’s—Sunflowers had just recently made headlines. Beneath it, I could make out two patches of fresh paint on the slate-blue walls, where Plummer and Holland had affixed their hands, and what may have been a tomato stain on the varnished floorboards. Amid an urgent global crisis, it’s easy to dismiss the role of art. But this unforeseen confluence of art and activism confirms that art has shaped and will continue to shape social and political responses to the climate emergency.  

This article appears under the title “Soup & Sunflowers” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 40–42.

This article appears under the title “Syllabus: Art and Fashion” in the Winter 2023 issue, p. 34.

When Schneemann made the film, she was making a bet that viewers would be so distracted by its content—the “genital heterosexuality”—that they would miss the artistry of it all: the form, the structure, the musicality. And that is just like what has happened to the history of feminist art: for so long, writers have fixated so wholly on the content of such work that, along the way, feminism’s many monumental formal innovations fell to the side.

That is the point of Schneemann’s film Fuses. A woman starring in her own artwork can have a hard time getting others to see more than her body: to move viewers beyond their animalistic impulses and perceive all the thought, the decisions, the commentary, the craft. Hannah Wilke once quipped that “people would rather look at women than … at art,” and Schneemann wanted her audience to reflect on that tendency.

Schneemann is one of the namesake subjects in Lauren Elkin’s new book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, which focuses on feminist artists such as Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker, and Eva Hesse as well as writers like Kathy Acker and Virginia Woolf. The title comes from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, in which she writes, “my plan was to never get married. I was going to become an art monster instead.” Elkin also quotes Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning: “A woman had to be a monster to be an artist.”

By “monster,” they meant that women artists have long been considered in some way deviant, since, as women, they are expected to spend their time tending to other matters, like domestic and reproductive labor. Wilke offered one clever workaround in the ’70s when she created sculptures of vulvas out of lint that she sourced while doing laundry for her boyfriend, Claes Oldenburg. (As for me, I have dinner marinating as I type.)

Elkin’s aim involves “bringing touch and feeling back into our encounters with art, centering the body and its viscerality.” Think of those weighty knots Hesse tied, or the oozy pools of latex Lynda Benglis poured. Notice, however, that these works do not offer feminist narratives or depict women’s experiences, at least not in any direct way. The kind of feminist art Elkin advocates is “not always polemical but often provisional.” She champions art as “a way of exploring and not arguing … [since] epiphanies shift and change like the body itself.” To wonder what such work is about, she writes, is “like asking what the body means.”

ART MONSTERS shows the significant impact feminist art had on formal innovation, even as its burn was slow, wonky, and uneven. Many of the book’s key protagonists were active in the 1970s, but Elkin brings in plenty of other visionaries who, throughout history, offered ways of making that bring us back to the body, its enduring weirdness and vulnerabilities. Hesse’s materials, for example, decayed and discolored with time. Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron emphatically printed the fingerprints and stray hairs that found their way onto her negatives; as in Schneemann’s film, fleshy reality and the ocular image comingle.

Elkin briefly but importantly distinguishes such corporeal work from “textual and/or technological” feminist art that had its heyday in the 1980s, wherein content superseded form. Artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger turned to bold words to make their urgent messages unmistakable. Think of Holzer’s iconic Times Square billboard that read ^{ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE}, which makes the rounds on Instagram any time the art world witnesses another #MeToo scandal. These artists had urgent messages and were contending both with an increasingly saturated media landscape and rising Republican politics. They needed to speak loudly, clearly.

But while such clarity and urgency made for galvanizing rallying cries, art is unique for its capacity to engage contradictions and complexities that can’t be captured in words. Elkin writes about how good art helps us get past those binaries in which language gets trapped. She makes a case for the kind of feminist art that refused to cleave form from politics and saw them, instead, as bound together—art that refused the tidiness of an ’80s-style one-liner.

IT’S EASY TO SAY WHAT FEMINIST ART IS AGAINST—patriarchy, machismo, abuse—but harder to say what it is for. Critiquing misogyny does not free us from it, Elkin argues, but only binds us to it differently, in an antagonistic, rather than submissive relationship. Wanting to free feminist art from this trap of negation, which risks reinforcing the dominance of the patriarchal status quo, Elkin asks us to attend to art that doesn’t simply refute the male gaze but ignores it altogether. She privileges art that inhabits some separate sphere with feminism, not patriarchy, as its foundation. She describes the worlds that women artists have built more than the ones they have unbuilt, and the enduring impact of this constructive work.

The problem is, patriarchal values are so deeply instilled in all facets of society that ignoring them proves rather difficult.When Wilke set out to make liberated images of her own body—to try and see herself free from internalized misogyny—the task proved impossible: feminists Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewisfamously wrote that Wilke “ended up reinforcing what she intended to subvert,” and Lucy Lippard worried that the artist “hardly ever had the last laugh.” Later, Lippard recanted, and some 50 years on, critics and admirers are still grappling with the complexity of Wilke’s project.

Elkin’s writing on Wilke helped me see how, in the nudes the artist made in her youth, her attractive, white, nondisabled body was taken to signify “woman,” so other women weighed in as to whether she was depicting us fairly. Time and again, these pictures were not read to depict the fleshy existence of an individual, but as a symbol. Later, when Wilke documented her experience with lymphoma in photographs, audiences automatically saw her body as specific, as belonging uniquely to her. The only thing that changed, really, was how she looked. When she was a beautiful young woman, viewers felt a kind of ownership. When she was sick and old, they distanced themselves.

“IF HANNAH WILKE’S WORK IS THE PROBLEM this book poses,” Elkin writes, referring to attempts to liberate feminist narratives about the body from all their attendant baggage, “then Hesse’s is the answer.” Here, the author seems to suggest that clever Hesse found a way to make work that is nonrepresentational—coils, knots, tubes—but whose fleshy colors and vulnerable forms still evoke the body. The work doesn’t convey a legible feminist narrative, nor does it aim for something universal. Hesse’s sculptures are not polemical, but they are born of a specific point of view.

Or at least, I suspect this is what Elkin means. That problem-and-answer line, though evocative, begs for elaboration, especially as it stands alone in its own paragraph. In any case, Elkin does herself a disservice by so neatly dividing her monsters into problems and answers. Hesse’s work is certainly moving but seems no more resolved than Wilke’s, which is so successful because it captures complexities that continue to puzzle.

I sense that Elkin meant to privilege more intuitive encounters than intellectualized ones, but abstraction feels like too easy a solution. In fact, I’m skeptical of setting answers as a goal.

In Art Monsters, Elkin tries to evade the trap of the Kruger-esque one-liner or the art historical grand narrative by experimenting, like her subjects, with form. In her prose, she favors use of the slash, devoting the first chapter to the way it “creates a space of simultaneity, a zone of ambiguity.” Then, she endeavors to make an argument/leave space for unresolvable tension. The result is a book born from both body and mind: the author movingly describes how it evolved alongside her pregnancy, and how her own changing body impacted its final form.

But in experimenting with form, the book falls into a new trap altogether. Here again, it’s clearer what the book’s form is against than what it is for, and as a result, intriguing lines of argument get dropped before they are fleshed out. Where the book meanders instead of building momentum, it seems intentional: Elkin memorably quotes Kathy Acker who, writing on Goya, once said that “the only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.” But overly neat narratives still creep in, and it is not clear that the method she advocates in Art Monsters is as useful for the genre of nonfiction, or art criticism, as it might be for artists or poets.

The book does fill an essential gap by providing an outlet to continue processing feminist rage and trauma. But it avoids presenting yet another inspiring or retraumatizing feminist narrative, which is probably the last thing we need from art or art criticism. Though versions of such stories have made their way into popular music and onto the big screen, they have not eliminated unequal pay or rampant sexual harassment. We’ve heard so many by now that their repetition can be downright demoralizing.

Art Monsters succeeds in bringing up important issues without beating readers over the head with what they already know, in part by insisting that the “art monster” is not a “rhetorical flourish, or figurehead” but, rather, “a (once) living, breathing person.” Elkin embraces artists whose stories are too specific and complex to be affixed to feminist formulas—a lesson, I think, in the art that lives and lasts.  

This article appears under the title “Magnificent Monstrosity” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 48–52.

Your paintings lack dimension, your photos aren’t in focus, and your sculptures can’t stand up on their own. A kind teacher with funny glasses suggests that you might be your own best material. After watching a couple Ron Athey and Linda Montano videos, you wonder: should I make performance art? Before risking it all in public, test your readiness by taking this survey.

1. How comfortable are you with constantly challenging and reinventing your artistic identity?

a) I don’t know who I am, so what does it matter?
b) If that means wearing wigs, count me in
c) Sorry, I can only be me

2. How important is it to have a direct impact on your audience’s emotions?

a) I want everyone to throw up
b) I want everyone to cry
c) I want everyone to regret coming to my show

3. You see someone half-naked and convulsing in an irregular trancelike manner. You know that they are:

a) Deep in a K-hole at a Bushwick rave
b) Swatting away murder hornets
c) Practicing “movement research”

4. How well do you handle criticism and rejection?

a) Criticism helps me grow
b) Criticism is valid
c) Critics are all failed artists and I reject everything they say

5. How ready are you to push boundaries and challenge societal norms?

a) Society did this to me—now I’m doing it back to society
b) I transcended using deodorant, so I am above it all
c) I believe in family values and chastity

6. How important is it to make a statement or provoke a reaction through your art?

a) Art makes people feel better about bad things
b) I want people to question their own culpability while I desecrate a Hello Kitty doll
c) Your protests won’t stop me from shaving off my eyebrows 

7. You have no problem stapling a handwritten manifesto inked in your own blood to your scrotum. You are inspired by:

a) Chris Burden
b) Johnny Knoxville
c) Tucker Carlson

8. How do you feel about the possibility of performing in unusual or unexpected locations?

a) #keepitweird
b) Performing in Alabama would be strange, but I suppose it can be done
c) I’m developing a series of monologues to be staged in public restrooms along Interstate 95

9. How do you plan to make a career from your performance art?

a) I will sell my soiled undies on OnlyFans
b) I will sporadically adjunct before becoming an astrologist
c) I will ask “cup or cone?” in a fake Danish accent while scooping at Häagen-Dazs

10. Which of these insiders can advance your performance art career?

a) Rube Goldberg
b) Whoopi Goldberg
c) RoseLee Goldberg

SCORES

10–16: 

The only person you should perform for is your psychiatrist. Keep off the stage if you want to stay in touch with your quick-to-shame family.

17–23: 

Karaoke is a fun way to loosen up, but for most it takes a couple drinks to hit the high notes. How drunk do you think you have to be to get a show at The Kitchen? Be careful or you’ll find out.

24–30: 

Chances are we’ll be seeing more of you soon, by which we mean your glitter-and-cashew-butter-covered naked body. You might not be able to paint, but you sure can muck around.

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.

I made a realization the other day that has left me quivering: after years of study and toiling in all sorts of art world roles, I’m finally the director of a nonprofit art space. This is what I wanted all along: an established venue to present uncompromising programs that other institutions would never support. We’re a small organization, and I find myself managing deliveries, cleaning the bathroom, and, worse yet, gallery-sitting on Saturdays when I should be curating shows and fundraising. I’m beginning to think I might be moonlighting as a janitor for the rest of my days. Am I the only one in such a bind, or am I just bad at delegating?

True, you would never catch Glenn Lowry or Lisa Phillips pushing a rickety dolly or restocking toilet paper in the crapper. But guess what? You work at a nonprofit! There will never be enough staff, protocols, time, money, or hand soap to properly do your job. They conveniently don’t mention this in arts administration and curatorial studies programs, but never forget that the same person who ingloriously unclogs a toilet with a broken plunger uses those very same hands to write a press release for the upcoming exhibition. In your case, it isn’t a matter of learning to delegate or rising above the fray as an ascendant director. You must truly accept and savor the madcap energy of being both a master plumber and a master of arts.

I’ve noticed that my art elicits a fairly predictable reaction from viewers. People ask questions about my techniques and materials, but no one is interested in addressing the content. I acknowledge that my art is complex and that how I make it contributes to the work’s value, but for me it isn’t just about labor. The end result matters as much as the process, if not more. I want to connect with my audience about ideas and all the things that go into my art. Should I try dumbing it down a bit to boost engagement? I’m not thinking about completely changing paths, but should I lean toward making work that might grab people in a different way?

Recent writings on “research art” have prompted us to do our own investigating, and what we’ve discovered is that many artists are basically doing the same thing. Whether that means rearranging items in dusty archives or churning out drippy, drabby, talky stuff that people who do too many residencies make, there’s a lot of similarity out there. What this reveals about the culture of contemporary art is hard to say, but what’s even more difficult to say is anything at all when faced with art that’s barely “interesting” enough to insult it with that coded word.

As a committed art viewer, you surely know that work that looks, acts, and behaves like art rarely leads to aha moments or gotta-know questions. Great art may leave you speechless, but humdrum art makes you swallow your tongue. People resort to asking about technique and process because they are either genuinely curious or, more likely, grasping to come up with a polite response. Your art might indeed be very smart and well-made, but you shouldn’t confuse complexity or intricacy with value. Even bad art can take a long time to create. The challenge facing you is less about spoon-feeding dummies and more about being a better communicator.

Your note is very direct in the way it conveys your central problem. Would you say the same is true of the ideas embedded in your art? Can viewers look at your work and deduce meaning without reading a dense handout or, worse yet, having to get it explained by the artist? If the answer is no, think about what you are attempting to convey and consider how it might be received by someone who isn’t you. If anything, you should try to communicate more clearly so that others notice the message. Your audience isn’t stupid, but your work will be if you dumb it down. 

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com