#abstraction

#abstraction

Wary of being labelled, many Asian Americans once believed that the safest way to enter the art world was by making their identities invisible. But invisibility is fragile. After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965-which abolished the discriminatory national quotas that had defined US immigration policy since the 1920s-many Asian artists arrived in New York and entered an art world already defined by hierarchy. For decades thereafter, downplaying identity could feel like survival. But what we try to sidestep is never separate from us.

Pat Steir was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938 to cash-strapped parents who'd tried and failed to become artists-yet encouraged her pursuits.

Bob Krasner has spent years training his eye to resist the obvious. While the city screams for attention, his photography work insists on quiet. The result is a photographic practice rooted in restraint, patience, and a near-radical commitment to looking slowly. His latest body of work, unveiled last week and now on view through Feb. 22 at Ki Smith Gallery on the Lower East Side, feels like a controlled exhale inside one of the most visually aggressive environments on earth.

Lam's impact lies in his refusal of singular origin. Born in 1902 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba, to a Chinese immigrant father and an Afro-Cuban mother, he inherited a plural visual and spiritual vocabulary from the start. From his father came an understanding of objects as vessels, of line as philosophy, of restraint as power. From Afro-Cuban cosmology came ritual, invocation, and the inseparability of body and spirit.

He has spent the last decade or so thinking about the land as a witness to history and politics. Boundaries shift, places are named and renamed, and maps are redrawn. Land is bought, sold, worked, exhausted, and fought over. It remembers everything and the events that unfold at a particular site become part of its permanent record, even if that record is unseen and mute.

Outside, it was cold and dark. Inside, brightly colored forms seemed to swirl and spread. It was February, 2013, the evening of the opening of "Hilma af Klint-A Pioneer of Abstraction" at Moderna Museet, in Stockholm. Among the attendees was Kurt Almqvist, a white-haired man in his mid-fifties. Though Almqvist considered himself something of an expert on fin-de-siècle intellectual history-he had written a book on Carl Jung-he was seeing af Klint's paintings for the first time.

revealing the structure of its underground architecture. It is so sophisticated and looks like something out of a sci-fi film. We call that nature just doing its thing. How come our skyscrapers and cities are seen differently? In my opinion, the answer is that it is a very effective way to morally separate ourselves from problems we inflict on our environment or on other species.

Nemo's latest task was to add a toggle to the dashboard. He delivered an abstracted, modular event-handling engine with algebraic constraints and a recursive effect system that reifies toggle intentions into a monadic signal flow.