This article probes the validity of the center-periphery relation as a model for studying postwar artistic exchange within the idiom of geometric abstraction. Focusing on Polish artist Henryk Stażewski’s later work, the essay reflects on the complex temporal relationship between the avant-garde and the neo avant-garde in the context of transnationalism, exploring the potential of viewing US art through the eyes of a non-American artist.

While Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger’s collaborations have garnered considerable scholarship and are reflected in recent exhibitions and publications on their respective practices, the wider collaborative structure of their work and artistic development has yet to be fully explored. This essay considers the fruitful relationships between Nengudi, Hassinger, Cheryl Banks, David Hammons, Franklin Parker, and Ulysses Jenkins, positing collaboration as a vital strategy for fostering a distinctly intermedia art. By probing archival material including the photographic documentation of group performances, individual statements, and correspondence, the analysis demonstrates how members of this Los Angeles-based artistic circle helped one another understand media categories in ways that defied the hegemony of Western modernism. It also seeks to establish the artists’ shared view of photographic documentation as a collaborative experience and a means of visualizing the process of pushing the limits of one medium with another.

When the hologram emerged as a medium in the late 1960s, it was met with an initial burst of enthusiasm before rapidly being marginalized from mainstream artistic practice. Despite a recent resurgence of important exhibitions featuring artists’ holograms, they remain neglected in art-historical scholarship. This article restores holograms to the narratives of art and technology circa 1970 by investigating one of the first exhibitions of holograms as art in the United States, N Dimensional Space, at the Contemporary Study Wing of the Finch College Museum of Art, New York. Relying on archival records to illuminate the elusive virtual aesthetics of artists’ early engagement with holograms, this article contends that the hologram evoked both a counterculture dream of expanding consciousness and a fear of attenuating freedom in advanced industrial societies. Ultimately, it suggests that these historical attitudes retrospectively offer an analogy through which to attend to the fantasies and anxieties circulating around recent digital culture.

This project is comprised of a suite of pen and graphite drawings derived from artworks that were included in the exhibition An Art Commentary on Lynching, which was held from February 15–March 2, 1935, at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries, New York. The exhibition was organized by Walter White, then secretary of the NAACP. Given my own work on the history of lynching in the United States, I was curious to learn more about how these artists’ work was received at the time.

In creating a series of drawings inspired by the content of this 1935 exhibition, which is documented in the Archives’ Jacques Seligmann & Co. Records, I made the decision to remove all the lynching victims and the ropes from the original images. I also removed the individuals in the lynch mobs as a way of drawing our attention to the natural and built world as rendered through the original artist’s hand. In refusing to re-draw, or re-represent, the lynching victims or mobs, I openly explore the physical process of creating images that must have been traumatic for the artists who produced them, particularly given the controversy surrounding the exhibition and the historical moment in which they were living. This project also meditates on our own time, when historical erasures and fake news threaten our very democracy.

In 2018, the Archives of American Art acquired the papers of Beverly Buchanan. The diverse collection includes personal notebooks, journals, scrapbooks, artist statements, clippings, documentation of artworks, correspondence with colleagues and friends (including Lucy R. Lippard and Lowery Stokes Sims), photographic materials, illustrations, zines, and quickly executed jokes on paper. For the debut installment of the journal’s new section “Out of the Box,” executive editor Tanya Sheehan and guest editor Amelia Groom invited seven contributors to each select and meditate on one object from the Buchanan Papers—a rich and varied collection that poses timely questions about environmental and racial justice.