(Tag bylines with individual items.)

It’s the first time since the 1970s that black art, history and political life have come together in such a broad, profound and diverse way. That convergence was evident in the farce of “Chappelle’s Show”; on the pair of albums D’Angelo released 14 years apart. You can see the imprint of the Barack Obama presidency on “Black Panther”; Black Lives Matter on Beyoncé; the country’s prison crisis on Kendrick Lamar. You can sense that convergence haunting the fiction of Jesmyn Ward.

For eight years, all sorts of black artists sailed through the White House, and shaped the depiction of black America, by thinking transcendently, trenchantly, truthfully. They adjusted the way the entire country can look at itself.

So we asked 35 major African-American creators from different worlds (film, art, TV, music, books and more) to talk about the work that has inspired them the most over the past two decades: “Atlanta,” “Moonlight,” “Get Out,” “A Seat at the Table,” “Double America 2,” and on and on. (These are edited excerpts from the conversations.)

From the start, black people have been at the center of American popular culture — essentially because white people placed them there, through imitation and mockery and fascination. Ever since, the struggle for black artists has been to wrest control of their own culture, to present themselves, in all of their complexity, diversity, innovation and idiosyncrasy, and represent one another, as rebuke, as celebration, as advancement.

So while the power these artists have attained might be a breakthrough, the primacy energizing their art is centuries old. Maybe these two decades of fertility and surprise constitute new territory. But, as these artists are about to explain, they amount to what someone like Beyoncé knows well: homecoming.

“Lemonade” — album and film by Beyoncé (2016)

KERRY WASHINGTON (actress): I think “Lemonade” really was so culture-shifting in terms of gender roles, in terms of fidelity, in terms of how we think about marriage today, how we think about hip-hop today, how we think about feminism, how we think about power. Visually, musically, but also sociopolitically, anthropologically, “Lemonade” is a game changer. It’s just so big.

It really was like a new version of womanism: What it means for a black woman to take on this role, and what it means for a black woman whose husband cheats on her — and she stays with him — to call herself a feminist. How she walked that was just tremendous. And what she reveals about being a career woman and being a working mother in that piece is also so profound.

I watched it the night it came out. My husband and I were on the couch, and one of my cousins from the Bronx texted me, probably 10 minutes in, and was like, “There’s no way that Jay-Z signed off on this.” And then later, there’s Jay in the bed, reading the newspaper, fully co-signed. It was a real testament to the vulnerability that is possible in black love, and what partnership can really look like, what healing can look like, what courage in a marriage can look like. Trust is so important.

“good kid, m.A.A.d city” — album by Kendrick Lamar (2012)

TA-NEHISI COATES (author, journalist): So much of art is related to when you encounter it. I can never hear anything the way I heard “Illmatic” [Nas’ debut album from 1994]. That album spoke to the neighborhood that I came up in. I wasn’t the character on that album. I didn’t have the same envy or love or lust for the streets. “good kid, m.A.A.d city” — that sounds like me. Because, man, you got somebody that’s actually quite conflicted about the environment they’re born into. They don’t think the environment is that great. Maybe Nas didn’t either, but there was a braggadocio he had about it. The narrator in “good kid, m.A.A.d city” is a kid who is basically trying to cope with his environment. That just felt like me. If you strip the hood away, it’s not clear to me that this kid would be sad the hood was gone, or that he would have any longing to go back.

My son at that point was 12 years old. So he was only beginning to develop an aesthetic. That was the first album where he was like, “Man, this is great.” And I was like, “Yeah, it really is great” — not, “This is great and I’m just trying to be into what you’re into.” I didn’t have the same visceral feeling [as when I heard “Illmatic”] — that’s like falling in love. When I heard “good kid, m.A.A.d city,” it couldn’t hit me the same way, but goddamn, it did hit. It hit hard.

I think Kendrick makes the most emotionally mature rap I’ve ever heard. He has levels of vulnerability: Watching people get out of the hood and being jealous of them, because you think there’s only room for X number of people to make it out. I mean, who the hell confesses to that?

Sometimes you hear stuff that’s reminiscent of the ’90s and it doesn’t feel like it has advanced. It’s just redoing Wu-Tang or Nas. But Kendrick took what he was supposed to from all of that and did something totally different. I have a great admiration for him.

“Get Out” — movie written and directed by Jordan Peele (2017)

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL (artist): That was a phenomenal piece of work. It did everything that I thought a film like that was supposed to do because it seemed like real cinema. It wasn’t a movie; it was cinema. When you hear him talk about the film, you can see that he’s a student of cinema.

Having a good idea doesn’t mean that the good idea is successfully realized, and so people tend to fall back on whether the thing was worthwhile to do, much less if it was successful in that. And I thought this was a particularly successful film, because it was driven by great writing and great cinematography. Now, I didn’t feel that strongly about “Us”; I thought there were a lot of weaknesses in that. But you understand that this is somebody who knows exactly what needs to be done. And in “Get Out,” he knew exactly what needed to be done.

Oftentimes you see a trailer for a movie, and you say, “Oh, I don’t need to go see that. Because I see where they’re going with this and I don’t need to spend much more time [with it.]” But there was something about the imagery that was projected in the trailers for “Get Out” that mattered. And of course, Daniel Kaluuya is no small part of it. He is a powerful presence on the screen. It was a kind of edge-of-your-seat movie. You didn’t know exactly where it was going to go. But every time it went through another place, it made perfect sense within the context of that movie, in the story he was telling. And it was never telegraphed so far ahead that you felt like you could write the end of the script before it even got there.

Black social media

DESUS NICE (comedian): This rise of black social media is kind of overlooked. Before there was Black Twitter, message-board culture in 2000 was huge. That’s where we were just hanging.

When you go to a job, you have orientation and you talk to everyone and then you see the other black employee. And then y’all do the head nod, and figure out the little culture right there — that’s kind of what we were doing on the internet.

Okayplayer, the website, was one of the most influential — people are probably going to go back and look at that as one of the most influential websites on the internet for our culture.

Questlove made Okayplayer. We used to call him Poppa on it. There were so many rappers, so many poets. People were making graphics.

But Heben [Nigatu] and Trace [Tracy Clayton] and a lot of people who are really popping right now, on Black Twitter, we all started there. We were babies! Just writing little posts.

And it’s not so much that website, but I think the experience of black people niching out their own little section on social media, that definitely shifted [things]. I would even say it made black culture more singular; before everything was more regional. New Yorkers had their own slang. But now you can have a meme and every black person in the United States — or in the world — can understand it, because of social media.

Toni Morrison — author

OPRAH WINFREY (media executive): I have Toni on the heart right now, and I can’t think of anybody else who actually has had the cultural impact that she has in the past 20 years, because I believe that she’s the root spring from which all other influences that I might name flow, like Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi [Coates], Jacqueline Woodson. I think her work has resonated to other artists and nonartists alike for decades and I don’t think it can be measured or quantified, actually. Because as Maya [Angelou] taught me, your legacy isn’t one thing. It’s every life you touch. So, I think that from “Beloved” to her later works like “Love” and “A Mercy,” which weren’t as popular, up until her most recent essays, [“The Source of Self-Regard”], they stand as a really indefatigable testimony to the resilience of black life.

She spoke from a black woman’s voice that heretofore had been silenced and shamed; she was able to magnify and give voice to our stories about common folk whose stories would have otherwise stayed buried. She was on the front lines of the fight to make beauty and justice in a complicated world. I am so glad her work remains and the work continues.

“Love &amp;amp; Basketball” — movie written and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood (2000)

ANGIE THOMAS (author): It’s probably my favorite movie of all time. The fact that we got a coming-of-age story about a black girl and it didn’t include violence, trauma or anything like that, that was just — one, it was mind blowing. Two, it was eye-opening. Three, it was reassuring. I often say “Love &amp;amp; Basketball” kind of gave me the green light to tell stories.

The film told me that somebody like me could tell a story about somebody like me. There aren’t a whole lot of movies or books about black girls coming-of-age. Let’s just be real. I remember seeing “Love &amp;amp; Basketball” on the big screen, and saying to myself, “Wow, somebody was able to make a movie about a black girl like this.” This black family, they weren’t in the hood. As somebody who’s written those stories, there’s nothing wrong with that. But she has a fully formed family. Her parents are together. I was seeing a story about a black girl and she wasn’t the sassy best friend; she wasn’t the ghetto girl.

And to see that, it validated me and it validated the stories that I want to tell. So when I was writing “The Hate U Give,” I looked at “Love &amp;amp; Basketball” and I was like, you know what? I’m going to put bits and pieces of that into Starr, so you have her as a basketball player. And I wouldn’t have felt like I could’ve done that if it weren’t for “Love &amp;amp; Basketball.”

“12 Little Spells” — album by Esperanza Spalding (2018)

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH (actress, playwright, academic): I’ve been getting in on Esperanza Spalding and what she’s doing. When we look at real life we see profound divisions in our culture. We see our people, my brothers and sisters, struggling, not educated, in the grips of gun violence and so forth. We can celebrate an artistic explosion, but I’m also very aware of the desperate situation of folks.

I did pay a lot of attention to “12 Little Spells.” I was able to read the text and talk to her about it. To look at that text up close, it’s incredible. She’s just a very good writer. It was great to be able to dive into that, to prepare to interview her [at the Strand bookstore] and look really, really closely at that work; I was able to see it twice as well. She wants it to be a healing piece, and I have to say that is something I’m hearing from younger artists — this notion of searching for ways that their work can be healing.

“Flavor of Love” — reality show (2006-2008)

“Scandal” — television drama created by Shonda Rhimes (2012-2018)

ISSA RAE (writer, producer, actress): One television show that influenced me in a negative way but now I feel had a profound impact was “Flavor of Love” [on VH1]. I remember watching it with my friends in college and getting increasingly angry that it was one of the few portrayals of black women in [pop culture]. But then I look back on it fondly in terms of how it influenced black meme culture. It was really impactful for me in terms of feeling like, “I have to get up and create alternative images.” But I also recognize the impact that it had just in terms of pushing black women’s voices to the forefront — I always feel conflicted about that.

The [first episode of Season 2 showed] a woman defecating on the floor during the elimination session. I was just like, “Wow, a black woman really defecated on the floor just because she wanted to win Flavor Flav’s heart, but also just to have this opportunity to be on TV.” But also the control that producers had in shaping her narrative is something that stood out to me.

I never watched “Grey’s Anatomy” [on ABC]. I was introduced to Shonda Rhimes just because she’s a black woman with a popular show. And I didn’t know what a showrunner was or what that meant. And then when “Scandal” came along, to see that impact and those skills, it was like, “Wow, she has a dream job that I want. She’s sitting up here and putting black women at the forefront in a big, different way, in a way that I respect and a way that people admire.”

“Flavor of Love” influenced me to write the characters that I wanted to see. And Shonda and “Scandal” made me realize that this is bigger than that. I can create worlds, and there’s a business behind it that can ultimately be positive. It doesn’t have to be centered around negative tropes.

“Double America 2” — artwork by Glenn Ligon (2014)

KENYA BARRIS (writer, producer): It turns America on itself, abstracting it. That really struck me because I find that abstract art is something black people don’t really get to do. We’re not given the opportunity to do black art that way. And in this piece, Glenn turns that notion on its head. For me, the simplicity of it is radical and confrontational.

I had seen [an earlier version called “Double America”] represented in books and articles. But [this one] really stood out to me when I finally saw it in person at the Broad museum in 2014. There is something about seeing Glenn’s work in person that is essential to understanding it. The piece itself is active, and I think to experience it sparked something specific in me. I felt that it spoke directly to the black identity — the duality of the black experience and the access black people have to art itself.

“Moonlight” — movie adapted and directed by Barry Jenkins (2016)

JABOUKIE YOUNG-WHITE (comedian, writer): It was wild seeing that it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that you saw black people being properly lit in TV and film — and lit to the point where it elevates the aesthetic, to the point where these people look so picturesque and painting-like. “Moonlight” not only represents a huge change in narrative representation and storytelling, but also visually it changed the landscape.

I went by myself to watch it when I was back home in Chicago, and I remember toward the end, the scene where he [Chiron, played by Trevante Rhodes] is talking to his mom, I was weeping because as a gay man I was like, “Wow, this is what everyone has been experiencing when they have been watching movies: They have been just seeing themselves on the screen, seeing something that’s happened to them — not having to do mental gymnastics or an exercise in empathy to be able to put yourself in a character’s shoes.” That character, it was already me, so that sensation was overwhelming because it literally was like I was seeing a new color that I had never seen before. It had been there the entire time and I didn’t know it existed.

“Room for Improvement” — first mixtape by Drake (2006)

MISTY COPELAND (dancer): I grew up in a diverse area in Los Angeles, but then entering into the ballet world, which was so white, I felt so isolated so much of the time and music was always that one tangible thing I had. Drake had a couple of mixtapes that really spoke to me. I think that black people are often put in this box. Black women have to be the caretakers. We have to be strong. You can’t really show vulnerability — especially black men. I am biracial and my husband is also black and Jewish, so to see this biracial Jewish guy speaking his truth, being open, vulnerable and honest, and making a space for black men not to be in one emotional box was to me the next level of where music should be going.

Amber Hasan — musician, author

Shea Cobb — poet, musician

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER (artist, academic): I’ve been on the ground here in Flint, Michigan, ever since I did my first photo essay about the water crisis, which was published in the September 2016 issue of Elle magazine. Amber Hasan, her rap song “No Filter” was a big hit here that helped people understand the intensity of the water crisis. Her song inspired my photo essay.

Shea Cobb also did a poem that ran online with the Elle piece, about her daily reckoning with lead-contaminated water and trying to protect her daughter. Cobb and Hasan formed an artist collective called the Sister Tour with artists, activists and entrepreneurs that advocate for other women, artists, activists and entrepreneurs. These have been the women on the ground, keeping the narrative out there and trying to get access to clean water. These are everyday folks that people are not thinking about because they don’t know they’re out here doing grassroots initiatives, and fighting for the quality and access to clean drinking water. As an artist, to stay with photographs and storytelling that lead to a solution, and to play a key role, and to be able to fund that solution, I couldn’t ask for more.

“Glory” — song by Common and John Legend (2014)

Bryan Stevenson, author

HARRY BELAFONTE (activist, singer, actor):

Q: What interested you about “Glory,” that collaboration between John Legend and Common?

A: There’s a consciousness that [John Legend and Common] brought to the material, which I think was a bit unusual among high-profile pop artists — to do things that were dealing with social recall and definition. “Glory” was a kind of contemporary black — not protest, but black anthem, I guess is the best word.

I grew up in a time when music that came from the black voice was filled with reflections that deeply represented the black sense of life in America. The [Harlem] Renaissance gave us people like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday — a host of artists that became huge sang to the plight of black people and the black experience. And I thought that was a rich gift to American culture.

Q: And you see “Glory” as a kind of harkening to that?

A: Yes. It’s a kind of black homage to the best that’s in us.

Q: What do you like about Bryan Stevenson’s memoir “Just Mercy,” the story of his fight to appeal the sentence of a man convicted of murder?

A: I would identify him as a notator of history. What appeals to me about “Just Mercy” is that it relates to the human condition. He and a lot of the young men and women I’ve dealt with [as an activist] are moved by the sense of social responsibility and consciousness.

I’m thinking [of people like] Isabel Wilkerson, [who wrote] “The Warmth of Other Suns” [2010, about the migration of blacks from the South]. And James McBride, who wrote “The Good Lord Bird” [2013], fiction about a young black kid traveling with [the abolitionist] John Brown. That to me was quite offbeat and unique and rewarding. [These three authors] are calling upon history to reflect on it.

Q: So they are picking up the baton from an earlier generation in terms of consciousness and activism.

A: Look, black culture has always reflected the hopes and the aspirations of black people. Take a great artist like my favorite of all, Huddie Ledbetter — Lead Belly. What I love about Lead Belly was his rawness, his directness. And I think that a lot of artists today are beginning to reflect social preoccupation. For a long time, we were just about the characters of pop culture. But now we’re coming back to looking at a deeper resonance.

“Coconut Oil” — song by Lizzo (2016)

AUDRA MCDONALD (actress, singer): I was introduced to Lizzo by my daughter playing that song. The more I started to understand Lizzo and her art, and her embracing all that she is — and empowering women — it impacted me. It has had a huge impact on the way that my daughter sees herself and the way she embraces all that she is — I think Lizzo is leading a revolution in that regard. It’s a genius song! She’s saying, I thought I needed this man, I thought I needed that, and all I needed was coconut oil — basically saying, “all I needed was self-care.” That’s a powerful and necessary thing in our world today, especially for young women and girls and POC.

“Atlanta” — television series created by Donald Glover (2016 to present)

LENA WAITHE (writer, producer, actress): “Atlanta” made me want to be better. Very few things that I watch fall into that [category]. I remember watching it in London on my computer, and being like, “Oh, OK, the game is no longer the same. The game has changed.”

The African-American Art Shaping the 21st Century

Over the past 20 years, a new vanguard of African-American creators has helped define the 21st century. Jordan Peele. Ta-Nehisi Coates. Kara Walker. Ava DuVernay.

Ethan Hawke as John Brown

Over the last decade, in movies like “Before Midnight,” “Born to Be Blue,” “Maudie,” “Juliet, Naked” and “First Reformed,” Ethan Hawke has quietly emerged as perhaps our boldest and most distinctive screen actor. That’s reason enough to be excited about the Showtime miniseries “The Good Lord Bird” (Feb. 16), based on James McBride’s irreverent National Book Award-winning novel, in which Hawke takes on his first major television role, starring as abolitionist John Brown. More reasons: Wyatt Russell of “Lodge 49” as the Army officer J.E.B. Stuart and Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass.

Pop That Crosses Borders

Angelica Garcia was born in California, though she now lives in Richmond, Virginia; her family came from Mexico and El Salvador. Her brashly determined second album, “Cha Cha Palace,” is due Feb. 28. Garcia’s 2016 debut album, “Medicine for Birds,” on Warner Bros., leaned toward guitar-centered roots-rock, but her new one, on the independent label Spacebomb, defies formats. Garcia flaunts her bicultural Latin-American heritage, singing about “wearing my roots and flying this flag.” She switches between English (mostly) and Spanish. She cites Latin cultural touchstones and favorite foods. She considers spirituality and practicality, and she recognizes the sweat and aspiration of immigrant strivers. But she’s a musician as much as an advocate. Her songs mingle Pan-American rhythms with pop exuberance, deploy electronics amid live instruments, and stack her confident vocals into overpowering virtual choirs. She proclaims the joy of crossing borders.

‘BoJack Horseman’ Bids Farewell

I’m absolutely dreading the end of “BoJack Horseman” on Netflix because it’s one of my all-time favorite shows, and when it ends, I’ll be sad forever. But more of me is looking forward to it because “BoJack” is its most spectacular self when it is echoing, satirizing and re-imagining well-known TV formats. It’s done it for hokey family sitcoms, for cable news, for weird game shows, for bleak antihero dramas — and now for the prestige finale rollout. Series finales are successful when they feel like the natural, inevitable consequences for the characters’ behaviors, and despite its appetite for the wildly strange and imaginative, “BoJack Horseman” is never random. It has the best memory of any show since “The Shield” — every small story line works its way back somehow, even when the space between causes and effects can be years. Eight episodes, coming Jan. 31, will never be enough, but I can’t wait.

Greta Gerwig Takes on Chekhov

It’s been three years since we last got to see Greta Gerwig act, in Mike Mills’ “20th Century Women.” (We got to hear her, at least, in Wes Anderson’s 2018 stop-motion film “Isle of Dogs.”) Since then, she’s been busy writing and directing “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” both of which star Saoirse Ronan as Gerwig’s muse and avatar. When I interviewed Gerwig in October, she told me that she wasn’t interested in directing herself as an actor — she loses herself too much in a role to also run a set — so fans of her performances and her films will always feel a little bereft. I’ll be happy to see her again soon, onstage in Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” acting opposite Oscar Isaac in a New York Theater Workshop production due in 2020.

Dance Performance Meets Protest

How can the voice and body be a site of resistance and transformation? That’s a key question behind “Utterances from the Chorus,” Danspace Project’s latest platform series. Beginning Feb. 22, Okwui Okpokwasili, a MacArthur recipient, and Judy Hussie-Taylor, Danspace’s executive director and chief curator, delve into ideas about performance and protest with programs featuring Algerian-French choreographer Nacera Belaza, Moroccan choreographer Meryem Jazouli and Bengali-American performer Samita Sinha. If contemporary dance holds a certain allure yet still seems intimidating, the platform series, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, is a way in. And, of course, you can count on the glittering presence of Okpokwasili, whose artistry will be visible throughout: Not only will she release an album and a collaborative book of songs and poems with writer Asiya Wadud, she offers a weekly performance installation with director, designer and filmmaker Peter Born, “Sitting On a Man’s Head.” With a rotating cast of 30, it is inspired by the act of Igbo women of Nigeria publicly shaming a man with dances and songs. Here, the artists aim for restoration.

Broadway Musicals, Revived

Two Broadway musical revivals have me (and the busy theater web) buzzing. “West Side Story,” opening on Feb. 20, is a classic that’s familiar enough to handle some aesthetic meddling, which is why I’m eager to see how Belgian avant-garde director Ivo van Hove cracks it open with video, violence and no preconceptions. “Caroline, or Change,” opening on April 7, is just the opposite: a not-yet-classic that deserves to be. As such, my hope is that the new production will be faithful enough to the 2003 original — about a black woman who works as a maid for a Jewish family in Louisiana in 1963 — to show everyone why.

Jack London on Film

“Martin Eden” is a somewhat autobiographical novel by Jack London, published in 1909 and less well known among American readers than London’s tales of adventure. The book is more popular in Europe, and it has inspired Italian filmmaker Pietro Marcello to cook up an adaptation that is both scrupulously faithful and wildly, almost insanely inventive. When I first saw the movie — with dialogue in Italian and décor that suggests a 20th-century run through a blender — I almost lost my mind. American literature and Italian cinema are two of my long-standing passions, but I never dreamed they would meet in such a frenzied, high-minded hookup. Kino Lorber is releasing it this spring.

Standup Gets Back to Basics

In 2012, Maria Bamford performed a stand-up special to an audience of two, her parents. Five years later, in her follow-up, she performed to an audience of one, her husband, before changing its stage and the audience several more times in a roving production. These shows were wonderfully innovative and hilarious, and it takes nothing away from them to conclude that I’m thrilled that her new special, “Weakness Is the Brand,” out on Jan. 28, gets back to basics, with her standing on a theater stage telling jokes. Bamford is one of the absolute masters of the craft, and while she has far too restless an imagination to stick to convention, just seeing her do stand-up (albeit with a little fourth-wall breaking, to be sure) is more than enough.

Dev Patel Plays David Copperfield

Sensibility is a crucial ingredient for turning books into movies. Why do it? Why are you doing it? We have to feel your feeling, especially when the book is about 170 years old. But something about Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” seems to want the irreverence of the man responsible for “In the Loop” and “Veep” and “The Death of Stalin.” Yes, Armando Iannucci is doing Dickens’ first truly great novel, and he’s made Dev Patel his David. The movie, called “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” is keeping things in the 19th century. So what will this satirist’s penchant for third-degree banter and sloshing social engagements locate in this giant book about maturing through misfortune? Will it address that Patel is of South Asian descent, that Davy’s benefactors and antagonists (Ben Whishaw is playing conniving Uriah Heep!) are white? Will it care? The real excitement is that Patel, who was also good as a duped assassin in last year’s “The Wedding Guest,” might get to do more in a movie than be a sidekick or symbol.

A Haunting Memory Play Returns

On a dank winter’s night in 1997, a block away from Union Square, I discovered my face was wet with tears I hadn’t even realized I had shed. I had just left a new play by Paula Vogel called “How I Learned to Drive” at the Vineyard Theater. And only as I started to walk home did the impact of its portrait of irreparably damaged lives fully register in my body. It was a memory play unlike any I had seen before, of delicate lyricism and awful truth, in which a grown woman recalls the young girl she was and the uncle who sexually abused her. Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse originated the roles of the girl and her uncle, and their gentle but harrowing performances have never entirely left my mind. Now, they are recreating those parts in the Broadway debut of this Pulitzer Prize winner in a Manhattan Theater Club production, which begins previews in March at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Mark Brokaw, the original director, returns as well. And a play that is partly about recapturing lost time — and the illumination, distortions and redemption that come with retrospect — seems guaranteed to achieve a whole new level of resonance.

Composers Celebrate the 19th Amendment

In February, the New York Philharmonic inaugurates Project 19, an ambitious, multiseason commissioning project of 19 female composers to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment. As part of the festivities, the Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Museum of Art will present the 1947 American opera “The Mother of Us All” by composer Virgil Thomson and librettist Gertrude Stein. The “mother” in the title is Susan B. Anthony, and the opera tells her story, though in the context of a fantastical musical and literary pageant of 19th-century America, in which historical and fictional characters from disparate eras meet, greet and grapple with issues of women’s rights. This site-specific staged production will be presented in the museum’s American Wing, with singers from the Juilliard School and musicians from the Philharmonic. If you don’t know the piece, don’t miss it. If you do, you won’t.

More Latino Art, Please

I’m looking forward to — hoping for — a year in which Latino artists, specifically artists of Latin descent living in the United States and the Caribbean, get their due. Latino art continues to be all but ignored by major museums. It has, for example, virtually no presence in the recent MoMA rehang (which gives significant space to abstraction from South America, a market favorite). There have been flashes of attention. In 2017, “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” sponsored by the Getty Foundation, demonstrated the rich history of Chicano art on the West Coast. The 2019 Whitney Biennial included work by five artists, including Daniel Lind-Ramos, living and working in Puerto Rico. But what’s needed is sustained institutional follow-up, meaning commitment. I’ll be on the lookout for that in the year, and the decade, ahead.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/arts/critics-look-forward-2020.html" id="27eec6d1-46b0-37af-a359-7fcf8d7dab1a"> The New York Times </a> .

12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2020

As a new year begins, our critics highlight the movies, music, TV, comedy and other art they anticipate before summer.

This year, a fresh crop of dancers revived and reinterpreted classics, and presenting organizations finally realized that tap has room at the top for more than one performer.

New Bodies Feed and Revive Old Works

The ephemeral nature of dance can cause a lot of anxiety: How to maintain the integrity of a live artwork over time? Do new performances measure up to the original? While the fear is that dances will diminish with age, sometimes they get better or just change in illuminating ways. In a few of this year’s most memorable moments, older works bristled with the fresh energy and ideas of new dancers and collaborators.

Martha Graham’s 1936 “Chronicle” is a staple of the Graham company’s repertoire. A stark response to the rise of fascism in Europe, it embodies an anti-war message that has remained resonant. But when Leslie Andrea Williams made her New York debut in the heroic central role in April, she imbued it with newfound authority, sincerity and drive. And as the first black woman to dance this part, she expanded the work’s meanings and the possibilities of who might see themselves reflected in her power.

It was also refreshing to see a more heterogeneous cast in the early works of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who recently passed on her celebrated solo “Violin Phase,” a section of her 1982 “Fase,” to two women of color, Yuika Hashimoto and Soa Ratsifandrihana. (For most of its history, only De Keersmaeker, a white woman, danced the solo.) At New York Live Arts in September, Ratsifandrihana was especially riveting, navigating the work’s geometries with revelatory tenderness and concentration.

I didn’t see Yvonne Rainer’s long-dormant “Parts of Some Sextets” in 1965, so I can’t compare its vivid reconstruction, presented by Performa, with any previous iteration. But what she assembled with the dancer Emily Coates, who oversaw the reinvention of this dance for 11 people and 12 mattresses, deftly superimposed the present and past, while inviting us to contemplate the timeless themes embedded in a mattress: in Rainer’s words, “sex, death, illness, sleep and dreams.” It all was there.

A Breakout Year for Tap

This year, the great American art of tap dance enjoyed a sea change.

At the start of this century, it often appeared that in the eyes of presenters, only one tap dancer existed: Savion Glover. After the success of his 1996 Broadway show, “Bring In da Noise/Bring In da Funk,” his young genius was hard to ignore. Most of the few concert-dance slots allotted to tap went to him.

Then came Michelle Dorrance. After she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2013, she became the one. Rightly recognized as a charismatic performer and an imaginative choreographer, she was invited to just about every dance festival and even onto late-night TV. A little younger than Glover and inspired by him, she, in turn, immediately inspired and emboldened younger dancers, including Caleb Teicher.

Teicher, whose career is now taking off, might seem in line to take over. But Dorrance’s example has helped to change attitudes, and her penchant for spreading attention to others seems to be opening up more room. Both her company and Teicher’s appeared at City Center this year, separately, each delivering a performance that was crowd-pleasing in the best sense. More remarkably, dancers a bit older than Dorrance, 40, also got their day.

In September, Ayodele Casel, 44, led her first show at the Joyce Theater: a knockout joyfest. And just this past week, the hoofers Jason Samuels Smith, Derick K. Grant and Dormeshia, all veterans of “Bring in da Noise,” brought their extraordinary “And Still You Must Swing” to the same theater. When Dorrance returns there this month, it won’t just be a precedent-breaking number of tap acts in one season at a bellwether theater for the dance mainstream. It will be a sign that a truth long buried can finally be seen on New York stages: The top of tap is broader than any single dancer.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/25/arts/dance/08burke-seibert.html" id="64f73ac4-0e9f-39a4-a37f-836f17782a2e"> The New York Times </a> .

(Best of 2019: Dance)

Other Movements That Moved Us

Pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on notable new songs and videos.

Miranda Lambert, ‘It All Comes Out in the Wash’ and ‘Locomotive’

A pair of new songs from Miranda Lambert — her first new solo material since 2016 — show off the parts of her arsenal that have been absorbed by others and those that remain indelibly hers. Musically, “It All Comes Out in the Wash,” is genial verging on folksy. Lambert applies her curlicue twang while describing a variety of mishaps, some small and some just the other side of decent — dating a bridesmaid’s ex and bringing him to the wedding nonetheless, a dalliance with the boss. These are the small-town foibles that Kacey Musgraves has made her stock in trade. In a Nashville that has largely forsworn emotional complexity in favor of clunky earnestness, it stands out, but is not Lambert’s turf alone. “Locomotive,” however, captures something far more ineffable. Her voice is less melodic, more jagged at the rim, while the music is far rowdier, suggesting a bar band scrambling to finish up before closing time. And Lambert, unlike any of her peers, is just as elegant in this chaos — causing this chaos — as when she’s holding back.

— JON CARAMANICA

Sam Smith, ‘How Do You Sleep?’

In his earliest songs, Sam Smith was an oversinger, often a beautiful one. His voice was tightly controlled, full of a sinewy power, and when he allowed, lined with cracks of feeling. As he’s become more famous, though, his music has been streamlined, doing some of the heavy lifting. His new single “How Do You Sleep?” is breathable, deliberately paced, almost soothing, even if what he’s singing about is the sharp cut of betrayal. After using his voice to unleash anguish for years, Smith sounds untroubled now — maybe it’s restraint, maybe it’s fatigue.

Residente, iLe and Bad Bunny, ‘Afilando Los Cuchillos’

“Afilando Los Cuchillos” — “Sharpening the Knives” — was rush-released to amplify this week’s demonstrations demanding the resignation of the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo A. Roselló. It’s no surprise to hear political rage from Calle 13’s Residente, joined by his sister iLe singing a forthright chorus. But there’s also an equally furious rapped diatribe denouncing the governor — for incompetence, lies and corruption — from the Puerto Rican pop phenomenon Bad Bunny, who until now has presented himself as a lover, not a protester.

— JON PARELES

Ranky Tanky, ‘Good Time’

Hand-clapping, tambourine-shaking and call-and-response syncopations that reach back to West Africa via South Carolina’s Gullah culture drive “Good Time,” from the Charleston, South Carolina, band Ranky Tanky. The band aligns a jazz rhythm section with Gullah roots, and the momentum keeps building in this seven-minute track and its euphoric rent-party video — especially around the five-minute mark, when the soul shouter Quiana Parler takes over the vocals and carries the song toward primal jubilation.

Seratones, ‘Power’

A fast, urgent neo-1960s soul beat propels “Power,” a song about determination even against steep odds. “Brighter days coming but I can’t see where I’m going/In the dark morning I hit the ground running,” A.J. Haynes sings. “We take each step to lift us up higher.” Around her, minor chords and shivering, sliding strings suggest the high stakes and serious obstacles, but gospel voices join in to push ahead.

Wilco, ‘Love Is Everywhere (Beware)’

The chorus declares, “Right now, right now, love is everywhere,” but Jeff Tweedy’s hoarse whisper and the way the melody descends make clear that he’s not really so sure. There’s more self-doubt and ambivalence in the verses: “So many things I do, I can’t explain to you,” he notes. The song starts as a reassuring waltz, strummed on acoustic guitar, soon adding perpetual-motion lead-guitar triplets that are prettily ornamental, but nervous, too. “Love Is Everywhere (Beware)” is the first song from a Wilco album due in October: “Ode to Joy.”

Lafayette Gilchrist, ‘For the Go Go’

New Orleans barrelhouse piano, the impressionism of Ravel and Duke Ellington’s jaggy solo-piano sound form the bedrock of Lafayette Gilchrist’s style at the keyboard. But if there’s one big influence on the way he thinks about rhythm, it’s the deeply swinging “pocket” of a classic go-go beat. With its classic loping groove, built on heavy hand percussion and call-and-response flow, go-go is the unofficial musical idiom of Gilchrist’s native Washington. On “Dark Matter,” his newest release, Gilchrist is alone at the acoustic piano, playing his own roiling compositions. It’s a far cry from the setup of a go-go band, but the hypnosis of the pocket comes through.

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Prettymuch featuring Lil Tjay, ‘Lying’

On “Lying,” Prettymuch makes sweaty pop that lands somewhere between trap and new wave. It remains the most intriguing young American boy band, facile with pinpoint harmonies and consistently rich singing. “Lying” is full of vivid details, too, from a new California king bed bought in anguish to a phone call that was never meant to connect: “If it sound like my voice is shaking/it’s cause I’m way up in the hills, my signal’s breaking.”

Oumar Konate, ‘Koima Djine’

Oumar Konate, from Mali, was the lead guitarist for Khaira Arby (1959-2018), a galvanizing Malian songwriter who spearheaded a band that brought a broad streak of San Francisco psychedelia to Malian rock. It turns out that Konate can sing, too — and whoop and ululate — as he proves on “I Love You Inna,” his album released Friday. “Koima Djine” is a plea for rain from local deities (or, per the song title, genies); it rides a tumultuous, constantly morphing six-beat Malian rhythm with raw vocal incantations and plenty of wah-wah.

avery r. young, ‘Lead in De Wattah [a Re-visit(id) Negro Spiritual] fo(r) Flint’

On “Tubman.,” his latest album, avery r. young comes on like a preacher from the Afrofuture. Moving between peroration, poetry and explosive singing — whether he’s backed by a thumping house beat or by a small choir — this Chicago-based poet and vocalist seems most focused on stirring the congregation to action. On “Lead in de Wattah,” he turns a familiar black spiritual into an airing of grievances today, condemning the powers responsible for the Flint water crisis. His voice starts quivery and delicate, reminiscent of Aaron Neville’s, but it turns gritty and growling as he leads the choir in an outraged refrain: “Charlie playing god with the water.”

Iggy Pop, ‘Free’

Iggy Pop’s “Free” is brief, atmospheric and elusive. Amid sustained electronic tones from guitarist Noveller and ghostly overdubbed Miles Davis-tinged trumpet lines from Leron Thomas, Pop’s voice appears only a few times, intoning, “I wanna be free.” As the title song and opening track of an album due in September, it could lead anywhere.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/music/playlist-sam-smith-prettymuch-wilco.html" id="9b622da1-ccbe-3968-a0ad-0810d3830074">The New York Times</a>.

(Playlist)

Miranda Lambert Stomps Back, and 11 More New Songs

Augusta Savage

(New-York Historical Society, through July 28; 212-873-3400; nyhistory.org.)

This is not the retrospective that is due Augusta Savage (1892-1962), an important sculptor, teacher and activist prominent in the Harlem Renaissance. Yet, with only 19 examples of her roughly 90 known surviving works, “Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman” may be the exhibition that’s needed first. Its meticulous contextualization of Savage’s life and work is a moving, informative introduction to one of the most heroic careers in 20th-century American art.

Organized by art historian Jeffreen M. Hayes at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, the show is peppered with photographs, letters and works by other artists who were inspired or taught by Savage during her active years in Harlem. It vividly conveys the world that she determinedly created for herself, against the odds of poverty, sexism and racism, which it also makes apparent.

Read the contemptuous expressions on many of the white faces — along with Savage’s seeming alienation — in two photographs taken at the opening in 1939 of Savage’s short-lived gallery, the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art in Harlem. The salon followed by seven years the art school she had established in her studio in 1932, upon returning from study in Paris, where her teachers had included French sculptor Charles Despiau (1874-1946), best known for his portrait busts.

On view are early unfamiliar works by some of Savage’s students and friends including Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Selma Burke and Gwendolyn Knight and her husband, Jacob Lawrence. Knight sat for one of Savage’s spirited, resolute portrait busts. The photographs also reveal lost works in a tantalizing range of styles. Those here stick mostly to a realistic mode that is less conservative than first appears. (As with the American painters known as the Eight, her figures have an intensity and material looseness that undermines academicism.)

Part of Savage’s radicalness lies in her determination — one shared with many black artists today — to populate art with active representatives of black life. The show includes Savage’s “Reclining Nude” (1932), carved in a light brown marble, whose gracefully coiled pose, not at all horizontal, seems at once self-protective and assertive.

Savage, who would die in obscurity, was the only black female artist commissioned to make a sculpture for the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The result, “The Harp,” depicts a black choir in a swooping shape that conjures both the title and music itself. The original, in bronzed plaster, was nearly 16 feet tall and Savage could neither afford to cast it in bronze nor put it in storage — like many such works, it was destroyed. The exhibition opens with a blown-up image of Savage looking proudly at “Realization,” a powerful 1938 sculpture of a dispirited man and woman that conveys the weariness of being oppressed. It never made it beyond its forcefully modeled nearly life-size clay version. It’s heartbreaking to think the difference its survival might have made.

‘One: Egúngún’

(Brooklyn Museum, through Aug. 18; 718-638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.)

A sample of the Brooklyn Museum’s compact exhibitions built around a single work, “One: Egúngún” documents an impressive sleuthing exercise. It concerns an egúngún costume, of the kind that appears in Yoruba culture when the ancestors manifest as masked figures, also called egúngún, on special occasions.

This particular costume is an elaborate multilayered assemblage of fabrics in vertical strips on a wide frame, so as to produce a whirlwind effect when the wearer dances. It arrived at the museum as a gift in 1998, with little information about its provenance. Last year, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, the museum’s new curator of African art, traveled to Nigeria to investigate. Consulting with Nigerian art historians, she managed to locate the family, in the town of Ogbomosho, from whose shrine — she learned from the elders — the egúngún was stolen in 1948. A divination ceremony confirmed that the costume is no longer spiritually charged, and thus may be displayed.

It’s a measure of how impoverished the presentation of African objects remains that “One: Egúngún” feels so innovative; ideally, such effort would be standard. In one video, the elders, scholars, and Nigerian artists explain the egúngún practice and how it has changed. Vintage 1986 footage by art historian Henry Drewal shows a similar egúngún in action. Other displays address the fabrics that the egúngún contains. The wall text, in English and Yoruba, includes testimonial by a leader of Brooklyn’s Yoruba community.

The show may or may not satisfy critics who objected to Windmuller-Luna’s appointment because she is white. It contributes, however, to the crucial debate on African art repatriation. In their report to France’s president, the scholars Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr advocated not only the principle of restitution, but an ethos of “re-circulation” of works, in dynamic context, under African guidance. “One: Egúngún” offers an example in this spirit, well worth emulating.

Alexandria Smith

(Queens Museum, through Aug. 18; 718-592-9700; queensmuseum.org.)

Outside the entrance to Alexandria Smith’s “Monuments to an Effigy,” a Plexiglas panel has been painted to look like stained glass. The theme of worship continues inside the gallery with two antique wooden pews that hover off the floor. They’re echoed by two found African masks perched atop imitation Tuscan Doric columns, which have been set against black glitter fabric. On another wall, a triptych of drawings and paintings by Smith suggests an ascent from the underworld to heaven, with figures whose graphically rendered body parts are arranged to make them look like angels.

Layered over all this is an original aria with gospel tonality sung by Liz Gré. Her haunting, searching soprano helps hold together an installation that is a mélange but also a reverent whole.

The starting point for this work was the Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground, a few miles from the Queens Museum. In the mid-19th century, the small cemetery was a resting place for victims of epidemics; after that, local African-American and Native American residents were mostly buried there until 1898. Once the century turned, the graveyard met the same fate as many others in New York City: It became a park, then a playground. Only in the early 2000s was it again recognized as a burial ground, thanks largely to a member of the nearby Macedonia A.M.E. Church of Flushing, whose members had been interred there. (A 1996 archaeological study identified 97 people who had been entombed at the site, and recent research found more.)

A reference corner behind the gallery provides this information and more, including interviews and books that served as resources for the artists’ work. I recommend spending time there and then returning to the installation, where you may see Smith’s invocation of her ancestors, specifically black women, anew. She juxtaposes evocations of absence, such as the empty pews, with objects that assert their presence, like a sculpture of oversize, tentacle-like pigtails. In the balance, she’s found a way to honor a past that has been only partly exhumed.

______

Liz Johnson Artur

(Brooklyn Museum, through Aug. 18; 718-638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.)

Trying to guess the identity of a photographer by her images is a dubious game, as Liz Johnson Artur proves in her exhibition “Dusha” at the Brooklyn Museum. Born in Bulgaria of Russian and Ghanaian descent, Johnson Artur’s images focus on neighborhoods in London, Brooklyn and Russia, and they were made by an artist who is of mixed heritage: a brown-skinned Russian and a Russian-speaking African.

In 1991, Johnson Artur started what she calls the “Black Balloon Archive,” after the 1969 song, by soul singer Syl Johnson. (The exhibition title, “Dusha,” means “soul” in Russian.) Deeply saturated color portraits from that archive are presented as grids or in display cases. Videos like “Real ... Times” (2018) narrate the stories of London immigrant enclaves, and “AfroRussia” (2010-19) features Russians of African and Caribbean descent. (“I went to Russia to hear stories in Russian by Russians who look like me,” Johnson Artur says in a wall text here.)

Some of the best works, however, are street photographs of Brooklyn, with dancers in ecstatic poses and audiences urging them on. As a photographer for fashion and music magazines like i-D, The Face and Vibe, Johnson Artur has specialized in people for whom self-fashioning is a way of life. The portraits of people at the east London nightclub PDA (Public Display of Affection) argue for beads, hair and costumes as political statements in which gender and identity can be, in the words of philosopher Judith Butler, “performed.”

Coming from what were conceptually opposite poles — white Russia and black Africa — Johnson Artur has forged her own path within the realm of identity politics. She has something to teach New Yorkers, who often pride themselves on their diversity. Johnson Artur’s “Dusha” pushes the definition further, to encompass individuals who embrace less singular positions. Forget labels, she’s saying. You can be many things.

‘Eclipse of the Sun: Art of the Weimar Republic’

(Neue Galerie, through Sept. 2; 212-994-9493; neuegalerie.org.)

Just a few rooms of the Neue Galerie are open this summer (admission is consequently halved), yet this Fifth Avenue treasure house of German and Austrian art has bagged a significant loan that justifies a pilgrimage for lovers of 1920s Weltschmerz — which, to judge by the popularity of Netflix’s Weimar soap opera “Babylon Berlin,” is quite a lot of us.

George Grosz’s mordant, topsy-turvy “Eclipse of the Sun,” painted in 1926 and borrowed from the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, Long Island, caricatures the Weimar establishment as a rat’s nest of corruption, lorded over by a corpulent, clown-faced President Paul von Hindenburg in screamingly gaudy militaria. He’s heeding the demands of a top-hatted capitalist who susurrates in his ear, while a dopey donkey, its blinders emblazoned with the Weimar eagle, grazes atop the baize table next to Hindenburg’s bloody bayonet.

Grosz paints this scene from above, as steeply raked as a theater stage, but this is no cabaret amusement. Behind them a city burns to the ground, while a barely discernible prisoner languishes in one shadowy corner.

“Eclipse of the Sun” anchors a summer showcase that is much angstier than your average beach read — one of media-induced alienation, changing gender roles, rampant inequality and a democracy at the breaking point. (No points for guessing why Weimar is back in fashion!)

A half-dozen impassive portraits by Otto Dix exemplify the cold exactitude of the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity; so does another Grosz of a reader with a glass eye, skin waxy, veins bulging. The movement’s shrewdest painter remains Christian Schad, whose full-frontal “Two Girls” (1928), one of whom offers a master class in manual stimulation, makes sex appear as pleasurable as an autopsy. Not safe for work? Schad’s pitiless gaze on desire is hardly safe for the museum.

‘MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence’

(MoMA PS1, through Sept. 8; 718-784-2084; moma.org.)

The Studio Museum in Harlem is a movable feast these days. With a new David Adjaye-designed headquarters under construction on West 125th Street, the museum is distributing its exhibitions among various locations around town. Its annual artists-in-residence show has found a berth at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens.

Now 50 years old, the residence program has long had a reputation for being a career clincher, though it could be argued that this year’s three participants — Allison Janae Hamilton, Tschabalala Self and Sable Elyse Smith — were already en route to stardom. It’s also worth noting that, strategically and tonally, this year’s edition, with its formally experimental, slow-release explorations into the politics of African-American life, is very much of a piece with the excellent, and overlapping, 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Hamilton attracted attention two years ago in the Studio Museum’s new-artist survey “Fictions” with an installation evoking the uncanny atmosphere of the pine forests of northern Florida where she grew up, terrain with distinctive flora and fauna (now threatened by climate change) and a hard history of African-American labor. With an expanded use of sculpture, and video in her new work, she pushes the atmosphere of her earlier work from merely dreamy to mystical in a suspenseful narrative that takes us deep into woods, far under water, to a realm where the force of nature is both baptismal and diluvial.

The mood — to use the show’s title — turns rowdily ebullient in Self’s “Street Series,” textile-collage paintings of large-scale figures inspired by the black population of the artist’s native turf, Harlem. Self — whose work recently produced sensational auction results at Christie’s — draws on the formal example of artists past (Benny Andrews, Faith Ringgold, Bill Traylor) to conjure an urban scene that feels both archetypal and closely observed, and physically immediate in a wraparound installation.

The world evoked by Smith’s mixed-media work is America’s prison industrial complex, where hoarded food is a form of currency; every design decision is shaped by surveillance; and promotional material — coloring books made for the visiting children of inmates — promotes a promise of social harmony precisely the opposite of what incarceration creates. The title of her 2017 solo exhibition at the Queens Museum, “Ordinary Violence,” captures the low-volume, high-intensity nature of an art that gets sharper and subtler show by the show, and looks particularly strong in this one.

T.C. Cannon

(National Museum of the American Indian, through Sept. 16; 212-514-3705; americanindian.si.edu.)

In 31 years, T.C. Cannon made more stunning artworks than some artists make in much longer lifetimes. The retrospective “T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America” brings together his polychromatic paintings of Native Americans, intimate drawings commenting on the country’s violent history and original poetry, folk songs and letters to emphasize the full breadth of his singularly hybrid vision. That he made so much mature work in so many mediums before dying in a car accident in 1978 is all the more remarkable.

The artist was born in 1946 — and given the name Tommy Wayne Cannon — to a Caddo mother and Kiowa father in Oklahoma. His brief life blended aspects of Native and white American cultures: He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico and, briefly, the San Francisco Art Institute; he enrolled in the Kiowa Tribe and the U.S. Army, serving in Vietnam. He idolized Bob Dylan and celebrated the rebellious resurgence of traditional Native American religious ceremonies. (The national ban on them was lifted shortly after he died.)

All these elements made their way into his art, both subtly and overtly. The painting “Soldiers” (1970) merges a Native American and a colonial fighter, suggesting not only this country’s foundational genocide but also the internalized conflict of being an oppressed person who fought in the oppressor’s Army.

In Cannon’s most powerful works, he brings Modernist styles — most notably Post-Impressionism and Fauvism — to bear on portraits of Native Americans. There are echoes of Matisse in his ambush of colors and patterns, and shades of van Gogh in his animation of the landscape. (You can also sense a more contemporary influence, Pop art.) But paintings like “Two Guns Arikara” (1974-77) and “Indian With Beaded Headdress” (1978) demonstrate his irrefutable originality. He treats his subjects with artistic reverence, while allowing them to remain at an emotional remove. Their austere expressions read like a quiet challenge to a society that refuses to accept them.

Marta Minujín

(New Museum, through Sept. 29; 212-219-1222; newmuseum.org.)

In its way, “Marta Minujín: Menesunda Reloaded,” which fills the New Museum’s third floor, is one of the best shows of the summer. It replicates a legendary moment in the history of midcentury avant-gardism that you may not have known existed, and it does so with a vividness and immediacy that amounts to time travel.

It returns to Buenos Aires in 1965 when young Argentine artist Marta Minujín, aided by artist Ruben Santantonin, built a multi-chamber labyrinth named “La Menesunda,” slang for “a confusing situation.” This immersive combination of happening, performance and installation was concocted out of whatever cheap colorful materials the artists could find. Brilliant use was made of foam rubber and police tape. Shown at the city’s Instituto Di Tella, it caused a sensation, dominating television news for days and causing lines around the block.

The “reloaded” version of “La Menesunda” here — its D.I.Y. character intact — has also inspired lines, since only a few people can enter at once. Its funky, visceral combinations of the tactile and the visual alternate disorientingly between subjective experience and social commentary.

I entered the work through a gaudy arbor of vine-like neon. Stairways led to a progression of rooms, corridors, dark corners and stairways. These include (spoiler alert) a comfortably middle-class couple reading in bed, and a fully equipped makeup artist in a pink room ready to work on me or any other willing victim. One room felt like an icebox, the next contained a forest of contrasting textures that I found briefly claustrophobic. There are teasing glimpses of the huge painted papier-mâché head of a beautiful brunette — perhaps a comment on the ubiquity of the female face in advertising — and, at midpoint, a lettuce-spinner-like room that you must negotiate in order to proceed. The finale is an exercise in self-glorification: an eight-sided room that lights up when one person steps into a phone-booth size box at its center, revealing an infinity of self-reflections. Narcissism, anyone?

As seen here, “La Menesunda” is in its iconoclastic energy and raw materiality very much of its counterculture era, in step with environmental and social works by Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Hélio Oiticica and Yayoi Kusama. But its refusal of a single viewpoint, a dominant material or centralized narrative gives a fractured quality that makes it very much of the moment.

Simone Leigh

(Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, through Oct. 27; 212-423-3500; guggenheim.org.)

Simone Leigh’s sensuous, majestic sculptures of black female figures fuse the language of African village architecture and African-American folk art, and sometimes racial stereotypes, like the “mammy” figurines produced and collected in earlier eras in America. Sculpture is only one part of the practice that earned Leigh the Hugo Boss Prize 2018, but it is the one that inspired the show “Loophole of Retreat,” at the Guggenheim.

The fine arts season may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean the art-going options are drying up. After fanning out across the city, the art critics for The New York Times have 10 first-rate museum exhibitions to recommend, including “Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman” at the New-York Historical Society and “T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America” at the National Museum of the American Indian. Many of these shows are closing soon, so don’t let them pass you by.

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