Charles Gaines (born 1944 in Charleston, SC) is an American conceptual artist widely recognized for his explorations of systems and structures through drawing, photography, and video. Since the 1970s, he has been a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, employing mathematical formulas and algorithmic methods to create wide-ranging artworks that interrogate relationships between the objective and subjective realms. Through his work and teaching, Gaines has been influential to a younger generation of artists, especially those invested in interrogating social issues through modes of abstraction. 

    The image of the tree has been at the heart of Gaines’s practice since the 1970s. Numbers and Trees: Charleston Series 1, Tree #5, Tranquil Drive pictures 150-year-old pecan trees photographed on the Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston County, SC, near where the artist was born and lived until he was five years old. In this series, Gaines makes an important formal innovation by reversing the painted layers of image and grid that have defined his work. Rather than the colorful grid overlaying the photographic image, Gaines suspends an acrylic sheet with the black-and-white image of the rugged trees draped in Spanish moss over a grid of “leaves” painted in blues, reds, and purples. This approach brings the tree’s many details to the foreground, producing a dramatic effect that lends the work a more gothic and solemn mood. Given the site of these pecan trees on a former plantation, and the association of trees with lynching, this work subtly consolidates and presents information to great emotional effect. While Gaines’s engagement with systems may not appear overtly political, it has been the means through which the artist has analyzed and made visible structures of power, including racial categorization, patterns of political speech, and ideology. As Gaines explains: “I use systems in order to provoke the issues around representation.”

    Liliana Porter (born 1941 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) is known globally for her expansive conceptual practice across media. Porter’s recent photographs, videos, installations, and public art projects depict whimsical yet philosophical scenes that feature miniature objects found by chance at flea markets and airports. Initially trained as a printmaker, Porter cofounded the New York Graphic Workshop, an influential collective of Latin American artists who collaborated on experimental prints throughout the 1960s in New York, where she has been based since 1964. Porter’s role in the workshop cemented her reputation as an early champion of conceptual art and her influence on the history of contemporary art. 

    Reflecting Porter’s long history of experimentation and conceptual play, Man Drawing is a signature work from her series Men Drawing (2003–ongoing), which comprises figurines of men dressed for artistic labor sitting or standing on pedestals, and facing wall drawings of variable scale. In this work, the artist has positioned a one-inch-tall figure in painter’s overalls atop a wall-mounted, white pedestal. He faces the wall with his left hand raised, appearing ready to paint or draw. What happens next varies by installation as the artist’s only written instruction is that a wall-based drawing accompanies the piece. While one iteration of the work might result in an impossibly large drawing across the wall, another could feature a miniature drawing, mimicking the scale of the figure. Treated as characters, these playthings begin to take on an inner life and generate complex questions about artistic labor and gender roles.

    Olga de Amaral (born 1932 in Bogotá, Colombia) is a pioneering fiber artist best known for her large-scale, abstract, fiber-based works, which evoke her local heritage through weaving techniques that are in dialogue with contemporary makers from across the globe. Amaral was one of the few South American fiber artists to receive international acclaim for her work in the 1960s and ’70s, due in great part to her reconciliation of local traditions with global developments in the art world. Amaral is among the first artists to incorporate spiral-wrapping and plaiting techniques in fiber art. She has explored these innovations across numerous, distinctive bodies of work. Bruma W is a continuation of Amaral’s groundbreaking textiles. Groupings of these works have been the centerpieces of recent major retrospectives at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, and the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI. 

    Bruma W is an exemplary piece from Amaral’s most recent body of work, the Brumas series, which she began in 2013. The Brumas series revisits many of the artist’s early experiments with materiality, scale, and space, demonstrating her formal inventiveness and signature gestures. Here, diaphanous black linen threads cascade from a wooden panel overhead, creating an optical effect that recalls the work’s title, Bruma, the Spanish word for mist. Amaral’s delicate, acrylic- and gesso-painted threads form a geometric shape that, depending on the angle from which the piece is viewed, fluctuates between a triangle or a diagonal swath of color. Where many of Amaral’s earlier works emphasize their strong, physical presence, Bruma W is a light, dynamic installation that invites viewers to circulate around and look through its thousands of component threads.

    Sue Williams (Born 1954 in Chicago) came to prominence in the early 1980s for her densely composed, figurative paintings that explore the body and violence against women. Painted directly onto unprimed canvas, Future Angst with Capybara Lower Left is representative of Williams’s more recent work. Since 2017, she has been painting colorful, loose compositions where figurative elements intermingle with swaths of pure color. Williams is a skilled draftsperson whose early work was strongly influenced by cartoons and comic strips. In her recent, less crowded canvases, the quality of drawing is especially able to come through. While some figurative elements are identifiable—from naked bodies in ambivalent repose, to the titular capybara (a South and Central American species of rodent) at the canvas’s lower left—many elements are left unfinished or dissolve into meandering lines or patchy blocks of pale pinks, yellows, blues, and greens. Future Angst with Capybara Lower Left continues many of the themes and bodily motifs that characterized Williams’s early work, such as gaping bodily orifices and the omnipresent threats of violence and violation, while introducing Williams’s recent interest in open space and sketched renderings of figures.

    One of the most influential artists working today, Carrie Mae Weems (Born 1953 in Portland, OR) draws on photography, installation, text, and video, among other mediums, to investigate history, identity, and power. Through her work, Weems offers incisive critiques with a keen attention to the archive and observational methods, and she has produced numerous series addressing structural injustices and histories that have defined American culture.

    Weems’s Blues and Pinks works are components of the larger installation The Push, The Call, The Scream, The Dream (2020), which pairs the artist’s own photographs with archival images from the 1960s. In Blues and Pinks 3, Weems appropriates photographs by American photojournalist Charles Moore depicting violence against protestors at the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama. She selects portions of Moore’s photographs, highlighting the violence against peaceful Black protestors from the law enforcement sent to suppress them, and arranges the grouped images diagonally. Through both her selection and arrangement, Weems emphasizes the use of force—both anticipated and felt—as dogs bark and bare their teeth, officers swing batons, and concentrated jets of water pummel protestors recoiling in anticipation and experience of pain. She colors the black-and-white photographs blue and pink, colors that have multiple resonances for Weems, from her care for the protestors to the evocation of bruised skin. This work reflects long-running concerns in Weems’s practice, such as the media’s representation of African Americans, mining the archive, and innovative forms of photographic installation.

    Boston-born and New York–based artist Sarah Sze (Born 1969 in Boston) explores the peripheries of the built environment and our increasingly image saturated world through everyday materials in her ambitious paintings, sculptures, and installations. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze continues to build upon her longstanding interest in merging art with built space through a personal investigation of the artist’s studio. In 2019, Sze presented a room-size installation that replicated her studio through layered cardboard, folding chairs, a ladder, and blue-taped images on standard printer paper. Surround Sound (After Studio) was presented within this installation, connecting the artist’s painting practice to the expansive and mediated space of the studio. “After” is often used in titles of copies that reference another artist’s work, but, here, Sze “copies” her own studio in a two-dimensional painting that considers the ways in which the studio space shapes paintings. Sze layers images of speakers, Post-it notes, and mirrored surfaces to construct the complex pictorial space that defines Surround Sound (After Studio), which stands over eight feet high and combines a vast array of media. As in her sculptures and installations, Sze resists a singular perspective and conveys a sense of ongoing construction before the viewer’s eyes. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze evokes the layered, sensorial, and reflective space of the artist’s studio and the contemporary world writ large through a refracted surface that captures the unique sonic, physical, and aesthetic space of the artist’s studio.

    In her series titled Lost in My Life, Rachel Perry (Born 1962 in Tokyo) “pirates” her own bodies of work and redeploys them in the context of performative self-portraits. For Perry, these works pay homage to “the endless organizing, cleaning, and shopping that form the business of living.” Invested in a rigorous yet playful conceptualism across her practice, Perry uses what she calls the “detritus of everyday life” as both material and inspiration. Between 2014 and 2016, Perry embarked on a series of Chiral Drawings as an attempt to make a drawing using every single pen, pencil, crayon, colored pencil, and marker she owned. Chirality refers to the phenomenon of an image or object being different from its mirror image. Perry used her right and left hands respectively to attempt draw the same line, resulting in an imperfect mirror image. In Lost in My Life (Chiral Lines 3), Perry uses one of her Chiral Drawings as a backdrop for large-scale photographic self-portrait and obscures her face with another drawing on paper. Other works from the series feature self-portraits with key materials from previous projects, including receipts, twist ties, and tinfoil.

    Multidisciplinary artist Hew Locke (Born 1959 in Edinburgh, UK) explores individual and collective relationships to power, cultural memory, and migration. Much of his richly detailed work across media has addressed histories of British imperialism and its afterlives. Composed of toy magic wands and tiaras, plastic flowers and butterflies, and dripping plastic beads, Europa is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and highly representative of Locke’s practice, which often deconstructs iconographies of British imperial power through lush compositions. 

    The artist spent his formative years in the then newly independent country of Guyana, a former British colony, where images of Queen Elizabeth II were frequently reproduced in schoolbooks. He recalls being scolded by teachers for defacing images of the Queen when caught doodling mustaches or spectacles on her image. This playful spirit of critique endures in his practice through his ongoing series of collaged object portraits, such as Europa. In this raucous and colorful composition that is both celebratory and disquieting, Locke offers a grotesque and captivating portrait of the former Queen as what critic and curator Kris Kuramitsu has described as a “fragmentary postcolonial subject.” Indeed, Locke has emphasized that these object portraits would not have been possible before globalization—the ubiquity and cheapness of the plastic toys and tchotchkes that compose the Queen’s visage, are made possible by the same global flows of capital that European colonialism inaugurated.

    In her monumental paintings, sculptures, and installations, Firelei Báez (Born 1981 in Santiago De Los Caballeros, Dominican Republic) creates fictional worlds that explore legacies of colonial rule across the Americas, the African diaspora, the Caribbean, and far beyond. Her exuberant artworks contain complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and abstract gestures alongside symbols rooted in Afro-Caribbean cultures. Báez painted Tone tonal time (or an economy of care) on the occasion of her first North American survey, organized by the ICA/Boston in 2024. 

    The artist’s quintessential paintings overlay paint onto reproductions of colonial-era maps, architectural plans, and other archival documents. These layered works challenge our understanding of acknowledged power, suggest alternative histories, and create expansive narratives of renewal and recalibration. In Tone tonal time…, a figure rendered in energetically layered paint merges with a finely detailed tableau of flora and glass. Drawing from her extensive art historical training, Báez engages with the traditions of still life vanitas paintings from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age of painting, and often contain animals, flowers, insects, rotting food, and skulls to convey the moral message that earthly life is transient and finite. While vanitas paintings consider death as their primary subject, Báez’s Dutch flowers and Murano glass—both symbols of global trade—center beauty and enduring life. A reproduction of a seventeenth-century Dutch maritime map provides the ground of Báez’s painting. While charming at first glance with its cherublike figures, such maps were frequently used by colonizers to expand into Africa and the Americas. Báez acknowledges this history while her painting imagines an alternative rendering focusing on an expansive femme subject who contains an entire galaxy of color. Ultimately, Báez’s intervention is not one of obliteration, but rather one of reimagining a past, present, and future that foregrounds beauty and belonging.

    Diedrick Brackens (Born 1989 in Mexia, TX) is an American textile artist known for his large-scale figurative weavings that pair a deep attention to the technical aspects of craft and an interest in African diasporic storytelling and myths, as well as narratives from literary fiction and the artist’s personal biography. Attentive to the techniques and innovations of diverse craft traditions, Brackens infuses his works with trademark characteristics of traditional West African textiles, including Kente cloth and Asafo flags, and quilting traditions from the American South, such as those of the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The artist depicts histories of labor, migration, and domestic scenes, especially intimate moments of love and care. 

    Brackens’s mind of my mind consists of three panels created using a floor loom and varied weaving techniques, including double-weave, double-weave pickup, and strip weaving. The composition centers a figure with raised arms—a gesture that suggests a form of ecstatic, even divine, inspiration. The hands appear to be generating a red circular field from which the two flanking figures recoil in ambiguous positions of awe or fear. Brackens subverts traditional European tapestry techniques through his meticulous placement of imperfections, such as the swapped red and green along the top left border or the extended tassels along the piece’s bottom edges. Deep hues of red, black, and green display Brackens’s laborious hand dyeing technique while evoking the Pan-African flag designed by the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Marcus Garvey in 1920. The title mind of my mind is drawn from Octavia E. Butler’s 1977 novel of the same name, and which narrates the rise of a society of telepathic humans. In this work, Brackens renders an iconic scene with layered symbolism, inviting the viewer to enter a visual world that synthesizes faith and fiction through innovative craft technique.