While he wants firmly to move this new exhibition beyond overt political readings, the curator allows that the President's divisive presence ripples through these artworks as well.
But this installation is also the most overt example of what the exhibition's curators see as Fontana's anticipation of the work of the Light and Space artists — like Doug Wheeler, James Turrell and Robert Irwin — of the 1970s.
Religious affiliation is rarely overt in the artwork in this exhibition, with the exception of Ms. Neshat's photograph, and a wall installation by Trenton Doyle Hancock, an African-American painter from Houston whose stepfather was a Baptist minister.
It is this intimacy that pulls many works back from the precipice of overt propaganda — a problem inherent in such an exhibition.
"Totems and Turquoise" is a complicated package of art and commerce, special pleading and the real thing -- just like any other art exhibition, only perhaps a little more overt.
Contrary to most of the other works in the exhibition, Mr. Small's subjects have an overt awareness of the photographer's presence.
Rather than focusing on Nazi or Vichy aggression and the overt violence of round-ups, internment and deportation, the exhibition illustrates state antisemitism as part of a much more public and conscious process.
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Old-time existentialism — the philosophical crisis of an earlier era — prevails in two prominent exhibitions devoted to modern masters of pictorial angst, overt and covert.
And what role, in the end, does overt eroticism play in these little-studied photographs and in the fascinating exhibition and book Mr. Deitcher has built around them? Again, the verdict is out.
Much of the work in that exhibition had an embedded provocation, but didn't necessarily make an overt political statement.
