Welcome to The Big Picture, where CULTURED’s critics zoom out for a wider view of the art world. While the main focus of The Critics’ Table will be reviews, this space is reserved for longer reflections—treatises, prognostications, diaries, and meanderings. Really, anything goes. For the inaugural installment, Co-Chief Art Critic Johanna Fateman waded into the back-to-school furor of early September in New York, when the galleries open for the fall, and emerged with this report.

The season began, for me, in Times Square, outside Olive Garden, where a 27-foot box truck was parked. I was there for the unveiling of “BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY),” an ambitious undertaking, organized by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol of Project for Empty Space, that feels—with its earnest, anarchic energy and community-minded bent—made to order for these jittery pre-election weeks.

The truck serves as a mobile exhibition space for a rotating group show and event series, with stops planned for 11 U.S. cities. Inside the narrow cargo compartment, a salon-style arrangement of mostly small pieces works as a repudiation of the right’s legal and legislative triumphs of recent years—and its grand plans for the future. Or perhaps that’s not exactly—or everything—it hopes to do.

More immediately, the presentation feels like a kind of huddle, a gathering of vulnerable and flamboyant statements celebrating, per the press release, “Reproductive Rights, Queer Liberation, and Trans Joy.” Boasting contributions by an impressive, multigenerational group of well-known artists, including photographic works by Ana Mendieta, Ryan McGinley, and Marilyn Minter, the presentation also included (during its Sept. 4 iteration, at least) fantastic, hand-rendered figurative scenes by younger contributors, such as Terrell Villiers (who also curated the launch party performances, bringing a taste of Bushwick’s queer nightlife scene to Midtown) and Naudline Pierre (who just opened her intriguing, etheric show “The Mythic Age” at James Cohan in Tribeca).

It’s the truck’s exterior that is more confrontational; its message will be legible from afar, on the open road. Barbara Kruger’s greatest hit, the evergreen and ubiquitous composition Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)—originally made for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington—rises again to meet the moment, this time to traverse battleground states. Updated with additional text and reconfigured to span the vehicle’s sides, it forms a tough, historical exoskeleton for a show that seems less about staging public clashes than conspiratorial convenings of freedom seekers.

The shifting modes and registers of “socially engaged” art, for lack of a better, newer term, were on my mind as I left the press preview, walking through the former redlight district now home to the desexed wonders of the M&M’S Store. I suppose I always think of Jenny Holzer when I find myself in the storied armpit of Times Square (specifically, I recall an indelible photo of her 1982 commission, showing the dark entreaty “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” on a glowing sign like a levitating Lite-Brite). There are still a few days left to bathe yourself in her ocean of mixed messages, at her career survey “Light Line” at the Guggenheim, where authoritarian doublespeak and the tics of advertising copy swarm together in a massive, spiraling LED work.

"I’ve become inured, perhaps, to commentary on how we have become inured." 

Just a few blocks away, there’s another, denser solo presentation, perfect for Holzer heads who found the museum a sub-optimal foil to her work, who frowned at the rotunda’s empty bays, or who, like me, felt surprisingly indifferent to her exacting onslaught. (I credit my glazed reaction to 11 months of instant-playback devastation and atrocity; I’ve become inured, perhaps, to commentary on how we have become inured.) In the more intimate space of Sprüth Magers, carbon-on-tracing paper drawings have a humble and preparatory, more zeitgeisty feel—as though you could toss one in the back of the “BODY FREEDOM” truck. And above the fireplace in the Upper East Side townhouse gallery is an especially piquant, appropriately twisted place for a Holzer.

If you want candy, though, as I do, go to Tribeca—maybe first to Hasani Sahlehe’s debut solo exhibition at Canada. The painter, who was born in St. Thomas and lives in Atlanta, makes no rash departures from the formal investigations of his most obvious precursors. As a colorist he lands squarely between abstractionists Mary Heilmann and Stanley Whitney, and he echoes—with his bold stripes and messed-up lattices—the loose geometries of those two and many others. Yet, he manages to do something that feels fresh.

Let this show be Brat green’s swan song, as the color has never looked better than it does here, in the exhibition’s title work Song Ideas, 2024, abutting areas that recall puddles of Easter-egg dye or Bubblicious-hued Elmer’s glue. It’s the tiny air bubbles and motes of debris trapped in Sahlehe’s thick lines of acrylic gel that make the canvases more than glossy himbos—the fossilized effervescence grants them a sassy, process-driven rigor.

At PPOW, Robin F. Williams’s paintings, which balance camp horror with art-historical gravitas, and old-school scopophilia with notes of rape revenge, provide a darker variety of visual confection. The larger, meticulously rendered oil works here recall Tamara de Lempicka’s moody Art Deco treatments of the female form, especially in Good Mourning, 2024 (whose figure borrows its pose from Angelica Huston in Annie Leibovitz’s 1985 portrait of the actor).

In a wall of faster, gouache-on-paper pieces for which Williams’s lifts imagery from films as varied as When Harry Met Sally and Suspiria, you see the artist’s range. My favorite here is I Spit on Your Grave 2, 2022: The foregrounded black rotary phone that the stringy-haired protagonist stares into is both lifeline and stygian void.

I’ll mention just one more painting show to make this a trio, and to shout-out one unlocalized and heterogenous “trend” that is not new, but neither has it peaked: I like to think of it as a welcome knock-on effect of recent canon-expanding initiatives, including the interest of Modernist innovations rooted in Spiritualist thought and arcane practices (with new scholarship on the work of Hilma af Klint's circle being the most prominent example) as well as the emergence of a more sophisticated, international understanding of Surrealism. (Last year’s Remedios Varo survey at the Art Institute of Chicago was a landmark show in this regard.)

"Mary Stephenson’s lovely, mysterious paintings suggest whorling entities in the tradition of Agnes Pelton’s desert visitations."

The London painter Mary Stephenson’s stunning U.S. debut at Chapter NY, shares Varo’s sense of architecture and metaphysical space, though Stephenson’s vaporous world is spare, unpeopled, more abstract, and mostly monochromatic. There’s an exhilarating desolation at work in her mirage-like Blue Stage, 2024, whose central staircase leads to a forbidding blue nowhere, an amphitheater or spaceship in the distance. Other lovely, mysterious paintings suggest whorling entities in the tradition of Agnes Pelton’s desert visitations.

All summer I’ve looked forward to the sustained focus of such solo shows, but “Flags” at Paula Cooper, which takes Old Glory as its subject, might be my top pick for this moment. Organized by Steve Henry, it gets as close to the Platonic ideal of a thematic group exhibition as I can imagine—while also serving as a mini course on American postwar art and a visual sidebar to the national hot topics of “freedom” and “democracy.” Kaleidoscopic yet uncrowded, it’s as though, across time and space, artists from Jasper Johns to Josh Kline, Diane Arbus to Eric N. Mack, were given the same prompt and brilliantly hit the brief.

Claes Oldenburg’s drippily painted plaster version of a July 4th decoration, Bunting, 1961, takes pride of place at the gallery’s entrance, its goofy pathos effortlessly recasting the swag as both sad symbol of empire and artifact of kitsch Americana; in Ming Smith’s breathtaking, large-scale, black-and-white photograph, America Seen Through Stars and Stripes (New York), 1976, a glass storefront displaying vertical flags appears to put the pedestrians of a reflected street scene behind bars; Jaune Quick-to-See Smith speaks volumes with a simple color tweak in her very Johnsian canvas Red, White, and Brown, 2018—and that’s not the half of it. As we come up on Oct. 7, and then Nov. 5, “Flags” offers examples of clear-eyed critique, as well as inspiring models of absurdism and refusal, which I’ll take to heart this fraught fall.

“BODY FREEDOM FOR EVERY(BODY)" tour dates can be found here. 
"WORDS” by Jenny Holzer is on view through November 2, 2024 at Sprüth Magers's 22 East 80th Street location.
"Song Ideas" by Hasani Sahlehe is on view through through October 5, 2024 at Canada's 60 Lispenard St location.
"Good Mourning" by Robin F. Williams is on view through October 26, 2024 at PPOW's 390 Broadway location.
"Heart Throbs" by Mary Stephenson is on view through October 12, 2024 at Chapter NY's 60 Walker Street location.
"Flags" is on view through October 26, 2024 at Paula Cooper Gallery's 521 W 21st Street location.