One of the most innovative and powerful artists of her generation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) has broken barriers and forged new paths for contemporary American art. This exhibition – the largest and most comprehensive showing of her work to date – brings together over five decades of Smith’s paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures in an immersive journey through her singular blend of modern art strategies and Indigenous cultural practices. Smith’s work engages the languages of abstraction, expressionism and Pop Art to interrogate American life and identity from a Native perspective. Through humor and satire, she inverts historical narratives to expose the absurdities in the formation of dominant discourses and question why certain visual languages are valued over others. Across decades and mediums, her approach blurs boundaries and activates images and ideas culled from history, mapping, environmentalism, popular culture and mass media. Her impact – visible not only in her artwork but also in her activism and her curatorial practice – has positioned contemporary Native American art at the centre of today’s critical dialogues around land, social justice, preservation and sustainability.

Since the late 1980s, Tony Cokes has appropriated and remixed text, music, and documentary images into videos and installations that investigate the interrelations of politics, popular culture, race, and identity. At Dia Bridgehampton, Cokes presents a new work in dialogue with the material histories of the site, a former firehouse–turned–First Baptist Church. The artist also responds to the permanent Dan Flavin installation on the second floor, which resonates with Cokes’s own conceptual and formal interests in radiant, monochromatic color and light, as well as his increasingly sculptural and context-specific approach to moving-image installations.

Through a wide selection of works, this exhibition regains a medieval mirror: the portrait of Jews and converts conceived by Christians in Spain between 1285 and 1492. During this time, images played a fundamental role in the complex relationship between these three groups. If, on the one hand, they were an important means of transferring rites and artistic models between Christians and Jews, while at the same time creating a space for collaboration between artists from both communities, on the other, as shadow reverses, they helped spread the growing anti-Judaism that nested in Christian society. In this area, the visual stigmatisation of Jews was a faithful reflection of the Christian mirror, of their beliefs and anxieties, and with it a powerful instrument of identifiable affirmation. After the massive conversion of Jews to Christianity following the pogroms of 1391, cult images were at the centre of the controversy, becoming the test for affirming the sincerity of the new Christians or, conversely, for accusing them of judaizing them. The extent of these unfounded suspicions of Jewish heresy lies at the foundation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478. Aware of the power of images, the new institution made intensive use of these, either to design powerful scenographs or to define formulae for the visual identification of converts. Images from this exhibition remind us that, while the difference exists, the alterity is built.

Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable is the first monographic presentation of the art of Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Lowy, 1882­–1966), one of the most inscrutable artists and poets of the twentieth century. Over 80 paintings, drawings, and constructions made by Loy through the course of her life, are united to reveal her omnivorous creativity as an image-maker, author, and cultural arbiter. These works, drawn from a dozen institutional and private lenders, are complemented by extensive, never-before assembled, archival materials that will contextualize her art within the arc of her life. Courageous enough to defy the conventions of her era, both socially and aesthetically, Loy developed a creative career that included the creation of poetry and prose, visual art, and design.