The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, closed and then reopened an exhibition that unpacked the concept of the cowboy, critiquing it through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

That exhibition, formally titled “Cowboy,” aspired to “disrupt the homogenous ideal of the cowboy as a White, cisgender American male,” per its release. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which first mounted it last September, the exhibition features a range of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and queer artists.

Among those artists are Ana Segovia, a current participant in the Venice Biennale whose work in this show queers the charro archetype; Deana Lawson, a photographer who is here presenting images of Black cowboys; and Mel Chin, who is showing a saddle formed of barbed wire as a statement on “the Catholic colonization of Texas,” per a description on his website.

Many of these works stand in stark opposition to what is housed in the museum’s permanent collection, which is rich in 19th-century paintings of the American West by artists such as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. These artists frequently portrayed cowboys as white males who triumph over the nature and Native American people of the region.

According to the Fort Worth Report, which first reported the news, “Cowboy” opened as planned at the Amon Carter Museum on September 28 and had closed by October 11. It is now open again, with one addition: a label that warns of “mature content.” Viewers are now invited to preview works in the show before entering by accessing them via a QR code.

In his 1967 article “Notes for Guerrilla Warfare,” the art critic Germano Celant (1940–2020) coined the term “Arte Povera,” describing the movement as full of revolutionary potential. Championing artists like Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, he showed how their work rejected the capitalist system of production and consumption. By embracing unconventional ephemeral forms and materials—cardboard, wood, newspaper, and cubes of earth—these artists broke free from the confines of the art market, along the way critiquing the consumerism that had taken hold of postwar Italy.

In contrast, the exhibition “Arte Povera” at the Bourse de Commerce | Pinault Collection in Paris, assembling more than 250 works, one-third of them drawn from the collection of François-Henri Pinault—France’s third-richest man—argues, in both the exhibition literature in a tour for the press, that the Italian post-minimal movement was concerned with energy flows and with the connection between humanity and nature, that it focused on material and experiential practices for their own sake. To be sure, these are key aspects of Arte Povera. Still, this exhibition omits much of the political and social context that defined the movement and postwar Italy more broadly.

Arte Povera responded directly to Italy’s postwar economic boom, aided by the US Marshall Plan. During that time, northern cities like Turin and Milan industrialized rapidly, leading to mass migration from the south. By the late 1960s, Cold War tensions were escalating, and the Italian Communist Party was gaining significant political influence, earning 12.6 million votes in the 1976 general election. During these “Years of Lead” (late 1960s–late ’80s), terrorist paramilitary groups—some covertly supported by the NATO project Gladio—battled police, bombed train stations, and even murdered the Christian Democrat President Aldo Moro.

Meanwhile, the United States’ economic and cultural postwar dominance grew. In 1964 Robert Rauschenberg won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, the world’s most prestigious art award, granted on Italy’s home turf. Arte Povera was in this context a grassroots reaction to art imported, along with Marshall Plan aid and the American way of life, and actively promoted by the CIA. None of this is mentioned in the Parisian show. Arte Povera artists sought not only to create an art of primordial energies, they were also critiquing the crude gestures of Abstract Expressionism, the slick consumerism of Pop, and the stodgy rigidity of Minimalism and Socialist Realism.

This double character of Arte Povera—artistic innovation intertwined with political critique—is visible in the artworks, even if the curators underplay it. In the vestibule, Marisa Merz’s untitled fountain from 1997 spews water from a wax violin placed at the center of a lead basin. To the Pinault Collection’s credit, Marisa occupies space equal to her male counterparts here, after long being overshadowed in the history of Arte Povera by her husband, Mario.

“I’m always interested in an antagonistic female,” said Samantha Joy Groff, whose paintings are situated in and inspired by the rural southeastern Pennsylvania landscape in which she grew up. “The rural woman has been historically used as a caricature in popular culture, as hypersexualized, domineering, roaming.”

Recalling her early exposure to classic American landscape painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Grant Wood, Groff always questioned the lack of leisurely women and the bleak, muted hues of the environments they rendered. For her part, Groff offers a more vibrant look at everything, including what contemporary women can be in the pastoral setting she calls home.

Placing women in the role of the hunter, Groff reimagined the classic mythology of the goddess Diana who, according to legend, turned a man into a deer for having seen her naked. Adorned in ribbons and fur, Groff’s women pose together with animals in nature, often in sexually suggestive scenarios. With a playful touch and a light choke, her work turns traditional notions of hunter and prey on their head.

Groff’s elaborately constructed scenes offer compelling melodrama that is perhaps best understood through her sense of staging. With a background in costume design and film, she photographs friends and family as subjects for her paintings. For her elaborate shoots, Groff makes costumes, scouts locations, and choreographs poses.

Her latest paintings follow an equally performative process in the service of exploring modern-day exorcisms. Having grown up both Pennsylvania Dutch and Mennonite, Groff depicts one of the oldest folk magic practices in America: Braucherei, as it is called by the Pennsylvania Dutch, is a prayer and healing ritual intended to banish demons. Paintings such as Dark Pasture Encounter: Conduit (2023) and Night Prey, or (The Prey of the Terrible shall be Delivered), 2024, evoke the ecstatic, almost erotic experience of the divine.

It seemed to me, as I walked through the three-part “The Camera Never Lies,” an exhibition of photographs at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, UK, that each generation of viewers ought to come to photographs of the past on their own terms. As photographic technology changes, so does our understanding of history—what might have seemed radical in its intrepidness might now seem tame given the relative ease of taking pictures.

I was looking, as I entered the mezzanine gallery, at a survey of unrelated images that were “Icons of Photography,” or so that first section of the show was titled. These photographs, by the likes of Stephen Carter, Stephen McCurry and Dorothea Lange, were recognizable, the curators argued, because of the ways they have come to signify grand historical events as they circulated in newspapers, in magazines, and online. In almost every case—save for portraits of known individuals, including Winston Churchill, Che Guevara, and Greta Thunberg—these were photographs in which I regarded the pain of others.

It was necessary, given that the affinities in these images extended across decades and geography, to establish how exactly they spoke, in the present, about the intractable, vicious patterns of human suffering. That is, to what degree am I moved when I see a photograph by Eddie Adams of a Vietnamese police chief as he points a gun at a wincing man, or a photograph by Richard Drew of a man falling from the Twin Towers, or another by Lyndsey Addario of a Ukrainian family, now a cluster of dead bodies? What chasm separates me and those who saw these images when the terrors seemed real and insurmountable?

The curatorial statement emphasizes the ethical dilemmas the photographers faced as they worked—whether the picturing, for instance, of a starving, near-death man in a camp violated his dignity or helped bring attention to his plight. But they also hint at what seemed to me of far greater consequence than the ethical contract between photographed and photographer. “The balance of judgment,” they write, “is for each individual to decide as you look into the extremes of the human condition.”

Trying to decide for myself, I found some clarity in the next section of the exhibition, “Staging Truth.” Where the previous constellation of images had tended toward the fragmentary, these emphasized a serial, more comprehensive approach. The pictured scenes were hardly dramatic—say, for instance, Controversy, (2017) Max Pinckers and Sam Weerdmeester’s photograph of the location were Robert Capa’s infamous 1936 image of a falling Spanish Republican soldier was taken—focusing instead on the intrinsic potential of photographs to tell the truth unhurried.

The Mellon Foundation, the US’s largest philanthropic supporter of arts and humanities, has launched a $25 million fund that will support arts organizations based in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Called the Frontera Culture Fund, this program will support nonprofits on both sides of the border, marking the first large-scale instance of binational support for the arts along the frontera. The initial cohort of grantees consists of 32 organizations, eight of which are based on the Mexico side of the border.

The fund is part of the Mellon’s larger effort to focus on areas of the US that have historically not received arts funding, like the borderlands or Puerto Rico. That goal has been a core component of the Mellon Foundation’s work since the appointment of poet Elizabeth Alexander as president in 2018.

“Our long-term support for the artists, culture-builders, and stewards of creative expression among these communities will help amplify and sustain the profoundly varied arts and histories taking place in the borderlands,” Alexander said in a statement.

The receiving organizations range from local nonprofits like the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in San Diego, the Carrizo Comecrudo Nation of Texas in Floresville, Fandango Fronterizo in Tijuana, and the Paso del Norte Community Foundation in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to more conventional arts organizations like the El Paso Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, the Mexicali Biennial, and the Ciudad Juarez–based gallery and project space Azul Arena. Two universities, New Mexico State University and the University of Texas at El Paso, have also received funds to support curatorial work at those institutions.

Explanations and analysis, from the pursuit of happiness to the economy

Outrageous artist Leigh Bowery and the subculture that shocked 1980s London

Why Gang of Four's 1979 LP still speaks powerfully to young people

Doris Day on how the risqué romcom Pillow Talk defined a genre

The comic book sequel has been a huge bomb – worsened by its astronomical budget

September 27 – 29, 2024

Director Mathieu Kassovitz on why his story remains relevant today

The TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper's bonkbuster is full of 'terrible people'

Steve McQueen's new film has 'many of the clichés of a traditional period piece'

September 13 – October 12, 2024

September 17 – October 25, 2024

September 6 – October 19, 2024

Apple TV+ series Disclaimer is an intelligent, beautifully shot tale of revenge

With her new video podcast, Bella Freud is exploring what we wear and why

September 13 – October 12, 2024