VVVIDE

Founded in 1972, Papunya Tula is a legendary Indigenous artist-run cooperative in Australia’s central desert and a paradigm for abstract painting. From its precarious beginnings to its international explosion, it has always generously aimed to share knowledge and elements from the Tjukurrpa (Dreaming stories) of the longest uninterrupted culture on Earth. In turn, the company’s economic successes have allowed generations to remain on their ancestral lands and provide opportunities for community growth.

At the Grey, the first US museum survey of Papunya Tula art is a well-curated treasure trove of nearly 120 vital and vibrant paintings spanning the last fifty years—though some of the designs hail from centuries before and were previously rendered in sand, wood carvings, and on bodies. Stunning visual and perspectival effects proliferate, and flow over into a smaller show at Foreign & Domestic of works made in 2025 by four artists in the survey. There, three standout acrylic on linen paintings by Angus Tjungurrayi continue the acclaimed minimal approach of his father Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and refer to ancestral stories associated with the large salt lake at Wilkinkarra, rendered via an all-over composition of seemingly endless shimmering trails of compact horizonal and vertical white dots tightly hugged by black lines. Nearby, a painting by his mother, Yalti Napangati, of rusty red-ochre strokes on a black background offer a different optical dance, also based on ceremony and spirit, genealogy and place.

  —Lauren O'Neill-Butler

If experimental theater earns some of its stars by bucking the notion of a classic—what revolution relishes the relevance of history?—it managed to produce one in Spider Rabbit. Written in 1971 by Beat poet Michael McClure, this one-hander was once a vehicle for Taylor Mead, Warhol superstar and ingenius goofball, whose performance reportedly ran for two hours, without audience complaint. Anyone watching the pitch-perfect production currently running at La Mama might beg for more than its 45 minutes, but when time’s running out on humanity, more of it would only dilute the potency of the show’s venom. In collaboration with Dan Safer, a deft choreographer of chaos, the sublime Tony Torn dons the mantle—or rather, the ears—delivering McClure’s anti-anti-hero unto the world once more. Absurdity rarely lends itself to a tidy synopsis, so let a few juicy details suffice: a whopper of a rabbit behind a long, unbending web, a couple of carrots, a fart take about as long as an aria, and a supply of hand grenades. Spider Rabbit‘s playing space is all white, as though he exists somewhere between the sanitized and the celestial, which begs the question: What kind of world begets something as yucky yet beguiling as this creature? The only way to answer that is to exit the theater.

—Jennifer Krasinski

Amid a calm, measured setting, myriad moments in close proximity—lyrical, poignant, unreal yet perfectly reasonable—as in dreaming—images and objects upended, reflecting our troubled times, no end in sight. Anyone who follows Robert Gober’s work won’t fail to register his recurring imagery, a persistence of vision, obsession as meditation? If you know his Slides of a Changing Painting, 1982-83, you sense, from one exhibition to the next, that this early durational experiment was the seed from which an unfolding body of work initially took root. The imagery that has followed plays out over and anew: A high barred window. A playpen, deformed. A door, backlit. A man’s dark shoe. Crackly fallen leaves. Trees, bare branches. A small glass heart, pulsing slowly, deep crimson, aglow. Life or something like it goes on.

The wall-mounted box works (descended from Cornell?), worlds within worlds, loss and longing, a subtle erotics. One recurrent motif, that barred window, despite a hopeful glow beyond, is a reminder that this is a time of cruel detention. The worn shoe tips pointed up from below … a body partially buried? Are we in a House of Melancholy? That’s the title of a painting by Harry Leith-Ross, ca. 1940, a wintry scene of a derelict cabin under a smudged sky, a ladder leaned up to the roof, a snow covered upholstered chair placed as if to take in the view. A black crow completes the scene. It’s part of a show within the show, pairing works by Leith-Ross and his lifelong friend John Folinsbee, painters associated with the Pennsylvania Impressionists.

What first attracted Gober to them was a photo from 1913. They’re posed with other students in a plein-air painting class. The two men smiling, Folinsbee piggybacked onto Leith-Ross, may appear as youthful clowning around. But a wall text informs us that Folinsbee contracted polio as a child. Confined to a wheelchair, his friend carried him outside to spots outdoors where they would paint. For Gober, the image endures, he writes, “in my mind as a counterbalance to the mean countenance of these times.” Close by, a lovely drawing of the two men by Kate Wignall, mirroring the old photo.

  —Bob Nickas

Deep house and Hindustani classical music are infrequently associated, yet they might be the two forms of music that most explicitly insist upon the specific time of day during which they are heard. Roger Sanchez’s classic 1991 After Hours EP features three mixes of “Waterfalls”—subtitled “3 a.m.,” “4 a.m.,” and “Daybreak”—each tailored to a progressive juncture in dancers’ states of consciousness and exhaustion. Likewise, for maximum effect, Hindustani ragas are intended to be performed during one of eight praharas, the Sanskrit term for the three-hour subdivisions of the day.

Both traditions inform the work of Max in the World & Kroba—the local duo of producer Maxwell Reid and saxophonist Zachary Koeber—who approach live performance with exceptional consideration for temporal set and setting. As part of a showcase for Reid’s Bliss Point label, they promise to draw from their excellent recent (and recently DJ Sprinkles-approved) Structures Of Feeling 1 EP for an improvised set running from 9 to 10 p.m. This falls at the beginning of the seventh prahara, often associated with deep, meditative devotion and inward reflection. Give in to the duo’s profound sub-bass grooves and patient modal reed phrasing and you just might forget you’re at Public Records.

  —Adrian Rew

Sascha Braunig’s paintings have an S&M meets mid-twentieth century design vibe; her seemingly infinite repetitions of sleek and slender shapes are like a kinked-out Olivetti ad featuring kick lines of dancing typewriter hammers, with the keys doing little staccato hip shimmies. Cauldron, her latest show at Magenta Plains, is itself motivated by a mise-en-abyme of reiterations. At least some of her forms are based on ones described in the 2004 book My Death by Lisa Tuttle, whose plot circles around an oddly sexualized landscape painting that the novel’s protagonist obsesses over.

The vulva at the center of My Death appears again and again in Braunig’s show, at the crossings of vertical rows of slim hybridized forms which combine elements of stockinged legs, begloved arms, toothy columns of bullets, and strings of neon-like tubing. Braunig’s palette is as garish as a Vegas nightclub’s facade—cobalt blues meeting lurid accents like bright orange and fuchsia—and the vagina dentatas depicted in these hues are often cinched with colorful caliper-like rods and cords. Waists as genitals, arms as legs, ammunition as tampons; in Braunigland, the endless mutability of form is yet another opportunity to untether representation from certainty, and desire from its satisfaction in the co-mingling of plausible sexual organs. And yet there is immense delight in the variability of this weird admixture. The ersatz showgirl parts Braunig paints offer viewers the fetish of ever so glamorous body fragments that multiply endlessly, parts that may in fact surpass the sexiness of any one whole body.

  —Eva Díaz

A little over thirty years ago, Mike Kelley confessed: “What I dislike about a lot of contemporary artists is that they want to be hipsters, they’re not willing to be fools.” Surely, he wasn’t thinking of Pat Oleszko. Like Kelley, Oleszko grew up in Motown-meets-punk-rock Detroit and attended the University of Michigan, where the Weathermen were her neighbors. Based in New York City since 1970, her singular, six-decade body of work encompasses costumes, sculptures, films, installations, and numerous large-scale, hand-sewn inflatables, which have appeared across parties, protests, parades, burlesque houses, and even the Vatican. Fool Disclosure, her overdue solo survey of serious play, includes a little bit of everything to showcase her razor-sharp humor, wordplay, and wit—from the flamboyant inflatables filling SculptureCenter’s cathedral-like ground floor, to the hats, garments, videos, posters, and vitrines of printed ephemera downstairs in the crypt. I recommend picking up the exhibition’s accompanying leaflet for which Oleszko has penned her own punningly and cunningly detailed artwork descriptions in—wait for it—“her own write.”

  —Lauren O'Neill-Butler