Every year, this column offers commentary on dozens of museum shows globally. Though some are best forgotten, others continue to stimulate and inspire long after works have been boxed and shipped off. As the year comes to a close, here are eight 2022 exhibits that still resonate. Read excerpts from my Forbes write-ups below, or click on the show titles to read my original essays in full.

Dakota Modern: A Spectacular Smithsonian Exhibit Shows How Oscar Howe Decimated ‘Indian’ Stereotypes

The National Museum of the American Indian

“Before earning an advanced degree at the University of Oklahoma, Howe studied studio art at the Santa Fe Indian School, learning an ethnographic style…. Howe rejected this aesthetic in the interest of challenging ethnographic assumptions that Indigenous culture belonged to the past, recognizing that the ethnographic viewpoint was inappropriately objective for someone living within the culture he was depicting. The extraordinary dynamism of Howe’s paintings originates in his understanding that his culture was vibrant, and his belief that the culture would continue to thrive by setting traditional knowledge in the present and exposing the world to its splendor….”

A Blockbuster Met Exhibit Shows How Bernd And Hilla Becher Turned Industrial Blight Into High Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“… Soon after the Bechers began showing their work, they drew comparisons to Conceptualism, which shared with their work a quality of unsentimental rigidity. The parallel was problematic because the primary response to their art has always been visual. Whereas Conceptualists tended to use monotony to awaken the mind by anesthetizing the eye, the Bechers enlisted neutrality to show what couldn’t be seen by the eyes alone….”

A Stunning New Drawing Center Exhibit Shows That Architectural Ornamentation Was The Original Open-Source Software

The Drawing Center

“… Ever since the beginning of the 20th century, high culture has not had high esteem for ornamentation. Modernist architects and designers were particularly scornful, presenting ornamentation of all kinds as degenerate because it does not appear to serve a purpose. Seeing so much ornamentation in one place, as one can at the Drawing Center, one might simply balk at Modernist strictures in the name of aesthetic enjoyment. However there is a more significant discovery to be made in the jungle of foliate and efflorescent forms on Wooster Street. Ornamentation is a creative commons for cultural interaction. In a time of separatism and xenophobia, what higher purpose could there be than cultural connection?”

See The Mind-Bending Mid-Career Survey Of Cornelia Parker, An Artist Who’s Worked With Marie Antoinette’s Guillotine And A Church Struck By Lightning

Tate Britain

“… Parker has persistently sought meaning in the infinitesimal and evanescent. She has exhibited the slivers of silver left over from engraving with a burin and the pile of rust remaining after a firearm has been oxidized in a corrosion chamber. She has also tried to capture the origins of things, for instance exhibiting unstruck coins as ‘Embryo Money’. What is the essence of language or lucre? When does a gun cease to threaten? In each of these cases, Parker has effectively magnified the invisible, paradoxically revealing the substance of the insubstantial….”

MoMA Showcases An Ingenious African Alphabet Poised To Help Avert Environmental Crisis

The Museum of Modern Art

“… Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s characters are distinct from the alphabets that have alienated us from our environment – and that arguably inaugurated the Anthropocene – because each Bété icon is a mnemonic. Whenever a character is inscribed on the page, it evokes an aspect of the West African landscape or the Bété way of life. The world underlies every word…. Literacy in Bouabré’s syllabary is contingent on ecological and cultural literacy because the animals and implements represented in each rebus must be known in order for the rebus to be intelligible. The act of writing mentally and physically reinforces traditional knowledge, which is reinscribed in memory with every flourish….”

Meet The Female Artist Who Programmed A Computer To Make A House In The 1960s

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“From the Guggenheim Museum to the Seagram Building, Manhattan had a longstanding reputation as an island of avant-garde architecture when Alison Knowles first built the House of Dust in Chelsea. Erected in 1967 and standing for less than a year, her structure is almost unknown today, yet it was more radical than anything ever conceived by Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Technically the house was not designed by Knowles. Rather it was generated by a computer, using the Fortran programming language to describe hypothetical architecture….”

In An Epic V&A Exhibit Of Fashion From Africa, The Sartorial Is Political

The Victoria & Albert Museum

“… Africa Fashion features spectacular garments by forty-five of the continent’s leading designers – from Shade Thomas-Fahm to Chris Seydou to Thebe Magugu – but it’s more than a mere showcase of their acumen because African garments hold more than just spectacle in their folds. Although clothing everywhere functions as a form of communication, Africa is especially notable for the depth of significance, and for a lengthy history of being misunderstood by outsiders….”

Decades Before The Metaverse, Ray Johnson Transmuted Social Networking Into Art Using The U.S. Postal Service

The Art Institute of Chicago

“… Mail art was not Johnson’s exclusive invention, nor did it die with his suicide in 1995. In addition to the postal service, the internet has been explored by many subsequent artists as a creative commons, an idea that Mark Zuckerberg hopes to port into the metaverse. What makes Johnson’s contribution distinctive is the ambiguity of authorship, not only as a conceptual conceit but also as a creative act. This is not equivalent to the joint authorship of a collective work such as a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, but rather comes into being through the fact that the artist Ray Johnson dwelled within each of his correspondents as much as inside his own body. Ray Johnson was his own metaverse. Zuckerberg and his Metamates can only hope to be as imaginative.”