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

Most people refer to her as “Emily,” but Emily Kam Kngwarray (c. 1910–1996), a senior Anmatyerr woman born on Alhalker Country in the Northern Territory of Australia, was known to her kin by her bush, or personal, name, Kam—the Anmatyerr word for the seeds and pods of the long, thin pencil yam. Perhaps Australia’s most eminent artist, Kngwarray only began to make art in her late 60s, while living in the remote, arid, and austere Utopia community. She was as a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group in 1977—she called herself “the Boss of Batik”—but eleven years later, she transitioned to working with acrylic paint on canvas, a more immediate medium. This inaugurated a deluge of dots and twisting lines, in a looser, more expressive style than the Indigenous men working south of her at the Papunya settlement, whose work had been gaining attention. In the eight years before her death, Kngwarray made nearly 3,000 paintings of Alhalker Country, approximately one per day—as if to show how it was an inalienable part of her identity. One room of this gem-like exhibition, organized in collaboration with D Lan Galleries, offers luminous canvases from the 1990s evoking the roots, flowers, and seeds of the pencil yam seen up close at various times of day, and of the year, or from an aerial view. Another room features batiks by Kngwarray and her community, and her works on paper that refer to spiritual practices of the Anmatyerr—the upholding of their Dreamings for future generations, the highest form of art. —Lauren O'Neill-Butler

This exhibition of Elaine Reichek’s early work from 1971 to 1979, the majority of which hasn’t been seen in fifty years, provides a chapter in feminist art history that simultaneously feels fresh. This is surely because some of the pieces have been revisited and altered. But it also has everything to do with Reichek’s intimate, process-oriented, and labor-intensive approach. A sixteen-foot-long vitrine with archival material dating from 1962 to 1980, including spirited letters from her mentor Ad Reinhardt, underscores a sense of dialogue and relationality in her practice.

Along with artists such as with Howardena Pindell, Mary Heilmann, and Louise Fishman, Reichek began challenging the rigidity of the grid in the 1970s by sewing onto canvases. This piercing of the picture plane was (and still is) a form of troublemaking, and a snub to Clement Greenberg, among others. She continued her formal explorations of line-as-thread in the “Parallelograms,” 1977, an experiment in the possibilities of layering four gray pieces of organdy that she would eventually stitch together. She noticed that within her various self-made systems there were endless possibilities of arranging the series, and that so-called “women’s work” could be geometric and generative, too. In 2024, she updated the “Parallelograms” and added bright new colors—turquoise, pink, and yellow—as if picking back up on a conversation that could seemingly go on forever. —Lauren O'Neill-Butler

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

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