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As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance Cathy Wilkes but potent exhibition, the source of the sculp-

to confirm engagements.
ART
Jessi Reaves
This New York artist, originally from Portland,
Oregon, continues to mine the rich gray area
between furniture design and sculpture, pre-
senting absurdist hybrid objects of debatable
utility in her new show, “At the Well.” The
seventeen sculptures on view—banquettes,
cabinets, a table—share a sutured, cobbled-to-
gether look; wood glue, sawdust, and poly-
urethane foam are among the materials used
to connect their disparate found elements.
Collectively, the works achieve an appealing
clamor. Regarded individually, however, their
artful garbling of (usually modernist) aes-
thetics suggests distinct comments on gender,
class, and taste. “An Unnatural Act (Slipper
Chair)” combines a cracked and taped faux-
leather seat—whose form recalls Mies van
der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chair—with the
dissonantly feminine curlicues of what look
like two headboards. Installed nearby is “Bad
Apartment Shelf,” a coolly monstrous, wall-
mounted amalgam of storage and display—at
once a problem and a solution. The work’s dark
jigsawed shapes and snaking wicker find Reaves
revelling in grotesque ornamentation and a
perversely inefficient use of space.—Johanna
Fateman (Bridget Donahue; through Nov. 19.)
In this Belfast-born, Glasgow-based artist’s
characteristically subtle new show—her
first in New York since a solo exhibition at
MOMA PS1, in 2017—a series of gracefully
evasive paintings hang on the walls at a tod-
dler’s eye level. The faint compositions, with
their scattered scribblings, evoke hazy recol-
lections of rooms and landscapes. Wilkes’s
gestural economy, her judicious use of horizon
lines, and her varying modes of abstraction
amplify the over-all poetic effect, as do found
objects (balled-up socks, a crystal dish filled
with water) placed on the floor beneath the
paintings. The displaced domestic items have
a votive quality, as if the artist were making
offerings to angels or ghosts—as embodied,
perhaps, by a fragmentary figure, made of
papier-mâché, fabric, and acrylic, standing
in the center of the room with arms out-
stretched. Like everything in this delicate
IN THE MUSEUMS
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ture’s strength is its precarity.—J.F. (Ortuzar
Projects; through Oct. 22.)
THE THEATRE
Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge
We are at a high-tide point for James Bald-
win’s voice in the theatre—this show is one
of two this season which use the exact lan-
guage of his 1965 debate with William F.
Buckley, Jr., at the Cambridge Union, as its
text. This elegant Elevator Repair Service
production sticks mostly to the record of
the event itself: two British undergraduate
debaters propose (and oppose) the resolution
“The American Dream is at the expense of the
American Negro”; Baldwin (Greig Sargeant)
defends it passionately; Buckley (Ben Jalosa

Wolfgang Tillmans
MOMA’s immense, flabbergastingly installed
retrospective of the German photographer
Wolfgang Tillmans, titled “To See Without
Fear,” persuades me that the man is a genius.
There’s a downside to the concession—it
dampens my quarrels of taste with certain
items, among the show’s predominantly
brilliant several hundred, that I do not like.
Geniuses alter the basic terms of their fields;
criteria that once applied no longer compel.
The ground zero at MOMA is “art photogra-
phy,” its former autonomy diluted in a tsunami
of images, in wildly varying sizes, mediums,
and formats, which are often mounted from
floor to ceiling, and may less risk than exalt
© 2022 ROBERT AND GAIL RENTZER FOR ESTATE OF MORRIS HIRSHFIELD / ARS

banality. Tillmans observes no distinction, in
the show’s arrangement, between self-gener-
ated and commissioned works, original and
appropriated images, framed fine prints and
taped- or pinned-up photocopies, deliberate
and accidental darkroom misadventures, and,
in matters of content, the politically commit-
ted and the purely aesthetic. The fifty-four-
year-old artist soared to fame, in the early
nineties, for his ostensibly scattershot but,
in truth, acutely selective documentation of
soulful youths whom he encountered on night-
life outings, in Berlin and London. His party
scenes are like panes of glass dropped through
the middle of symbioses: beholding them, you
are at once viewer and viewed. This body of
work put Tillmans on the art-world map, but
he has somewhat downplayed it in his choices
for the present show, perhaps from exaspera-
tion at being lazily identified with a fleeting
Zeitgeist that determined only the opening
gambit for a game that he has conducted in
no end of other directions.—Peter Schjeldahl
(Museum of Modern Art; through Jan. 1.)
In 1942, as part of a now legendary event that introduced New York to
Surrealism, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp installed a startling paint-
ing titled “Girl with Pigeons” (above) in a midtown mansion. The picture
was by a Polish American retiree named Morris Hirshfield, a former tailor
and slipper designer who had been painting for only five years—with such
success that the first two pieces he ever made hung at MOMA in 1939, just
a few months after they were completed. A headline-making figure in life
(as reviled by the press as he was admired by the avant-garde), Hirshfield
has languished in art’s lost and found since his death, in 1946. “Morris
Hirshfield Rediscovered,” on view at the American Folk Art Museum
through Jan. 27, rescues this master of pictorial patterning from obscurity,
as does a definitive new book, a labor of love by the show’s curator, Richard
Meyer (with vital research by Susan Davidson). Whether Hirshfield is
painting a nude woman, a family of zebras, or a parliamentary building,
realism is beside the point. His subjects are ornamental, so highly stylized—
static, hypnotic—that paint on canvas performs as beads, trim, and pom-
poms once did on his patented slippers, a delightful selection of which have
been re-created by the artist Liz Blahd for the exhibition.—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 17, 2022 5