Please Wait by the Coatroom

April 24, 2023
In this revelatory volume, poet and critic Yau (Ruth Asawa) challenges the art world’s omission and misrepresentation of Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists. The author reflects on overlooked 20th-century sculptors, painters, and photographers, examining their works in conversation with artistic luminaries of their age: for example, Yau argues that Cuban biracial artist Wifredo Lam’s hallucinatory painting The Jungle belongs on the wall opposite Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, not in the hallway to the coatroom in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (Lam’s painting, says Yau, “restores” the African gods that Picasso “reductively” “appropriates” in his, by depicting them as alien, “somewhere between a multi-limbed ideogram and a haunting presence.”) Likewise, Yau asserts, Asian American artist Isamu Noguchi’s exquisite sculptures should be seen as an expansion beyond Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s minimalism, while Native American artist T.C. Cannon’s portraits directly engage the work of photographer Edward S. Curtis, whose “staged photographs ignore the sanctioned genocidal destruction” of Native peoples. Yau’s passion energizes these reappraisals, and his writing captures the artworks’ physicality via striking observations and reverent attention to detail, as with the “thick swathes of white paint evoke crème fraîche floating on vichyssoise” in Ed Clark’s abstract works. This is a necessary corrective.