A good student and a profoundly intuitive practitioner, Asawa obsessively explored the paths of seeing through nature, craft, history, material matters (such as paper folding), and drawing styles, including the Greek meander (that is, the classical winding geometric pattern that can continue indefinitely), and performance and dance. As a result, she left behind a highly styled and tightly controlled body of work that soundly situates itself between compulsively wrought craft and delicately conceived fine art.
In a conversation between Smith and Whitney director Adam Weinberg, the pair describe a tenet of Smith’s art as the act of “changing nouns to verbs.” In other words, Smith’s art aims to shift the role of Indigenous people as subjects that are mapped, or are the target of imperialist abstractions like defined frontiers, to that of mapmakers themselves. Smith’s mixed-media War-Torn Dress (2002) most overtly highlights the distinctions between the mapped and the mapmakers.
The exhibition Project for a New American Century at the Whitney Museum installed on the fifth and eighth floors is a sampling of Josh Kline’s works done over the last fourteen years. The initial impression is that Kline’s work descends from the tradition of social realism and agit-prop in which art serves as a tool of social and political criticism and mobilization. However, what one soon realizes is how often it instead verges on melodrama.
Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, the exhibition marshals roughly thirty-six works of art in support of its thesis—that Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship to the United States is to blame for the devastating effects of that event.