VVVIDE

Angels, dragons, and unicorns, of course, but also: peanut-men, potato-men, snake-women, lima-bean warriors, puffer fish–chickens, lion-eagles, plumed serpents, monk faces growing out of curling vines. In the gasp-eliciting Creatures of Myth and Imagination at the Cloisters, ivory, gold, silver, feathers, stone, paint, glass, and ceramics are among the materials transubstantiated into the most fantastical hybrid forms in completely different historical traditions (the show includes objects, from the larger-than-life to the tiny, made in Europe and the Americas almost entirely pre-contact, from about 500 to 1500 CE). But on both sides of the ocean, they tended to serve similar purposes: of metaphor and mythmaking, of proving devotion and illustrating power, of powerfully demonstrating the extraordinary capacities of their makers.

These wildly inventive creatures could often cross between human and spiritual realms in a way plain old humans could only dream of. See, in an upstairs gallery, the incredible and fabulous Tzinacantecuhtli, or bat lord, from central Mexico, dating about 800–900, a ceramic-and-slip humanoid figure taller than an NBA player with a bat head and leafy nose who could travel from the underworld to the heavens. Or, downstairs, the graphic stone depiction of the Aztec earth deity Tlatecuhtli, who could swallow the sun.

Wandering in and out of the exhibition, pausing to visit the Cloisters’ lovely terrace gardens, and then having a smoke perched on a stone wall outside, where I saw a greedy woodpecker and a curious rabbit, reinforced what these objects had most in common, perhaps: their expression of the universal human longing for the plants and the animals, to magically transcend our own limited human consciousness through them, to feel less alone among our own stupid boring species. —Ania Szremski

Peter Hujar’s work has never looked more cinematic or attentive to everyday life than it does in this show. The roughly one hundred contact sheets on view feel like silent filmstrips ready for reanimation. In one from 1955, Daisy Aldan, the poet and Hujar’s high school teacher, reads from a book and extends her arms, as if attempting to illustrate the text. Another from 1972, a nude identified in Hujar’s notebook only as “Andrew, an English boy,” shows a soft-shouldered young man seated, then standing contrapposto, then scratching his back—attention given to his shifting gestures, value achieved in the sum of the parts rather than in a definitive image. These contact sheets are not quite artworks. They’re not exactly tools either. Akin to most programming at the Morgan, they’re more like manuscripts or drafts of screenplays. What Hujar bracketed, circled, or check-marked on the contact sheets isn’t always better than the alternatives; often, it just indicates a particular direction. In 1974, for instance, trees in a forest took precedence over images of Andy Warhol reading the newspaper.

Hujar’s cityscapes and pastures, which critics have struggled to situate within his oeuvre, appear here as establishing shots for the episodic narratives unfolding elsewhere—John Waters in the crowd hanging out at Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1973; Fran Lebowitz waking up in New Jersey in 1974. What is typically onstage or off, on camera or off, or edited out, remains connected, intact, and satisfyingly in frame. —Marcus Civin

As the almost overwhelming array of ephemera in this show demonstrates, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) empowered more than 30,000 artists from 1974-81 and helped to employ them in nearly 200 cities. It represented “the most significant, if unintended, federal investment in cultural labor since the New Deal,” according to curators Molly Garfinkel and Jodi Waynberg. Though the act did not include provisions for artists specifically, local government and arts workers wisely used the funds for culture. An astounding number of projects devoted to public work and experimentation were funded by CETA—from Senga Nengudi’s Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978) in LA to the community film initiative Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, to the Baltimore Neighborhood Arts Circus, which employed dozens of performers in the city. And that’s just a small selection from the nine cities featured in this sprawling and jam-packed show. One wall is dedicated to Benjamin Wigfall’s Communications Village, where established artists and printmakers mentored local youth thanks to CETA funds. In the San Francisco section, one learns that in 1976 Ruth Asawa cofounded SCRAP and hired CETA-employed staff to reclaim materials in a decommissioned military pier. Like Appalshop, SCRAP still is thriving—a testament of CETA’s reach and its relevance. —Lauren O'Neill-Butler