Jacob Lawrence. Ordeal of Alice, 1963; egg tempera on hardboard; 24 x 20 in. Gift of Dr. Herbert J. Kayden and Family in memory of Dr. Gabrielle H. Reem, 2013.98. © 2015 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Cantor Arts Center, Palo Alto.

Jacob Lawrence’s contribution to the history of American art is invaluable, and Promised Land, on view now at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, is a fine introduction to his work. The Kayden family’s gift of fifty-six works—including paintings, silkscreen prints, and a commissioned artist’s book—constitutes one of the largest collections of Lawrence’s work in a single museum, and it is the largest on the West Coast, exhibited here in its entirety for the first time. The taut and brightly colored works span Lawrence’s creative life from the 1940s to the 1990s. Concurrent Lawrence exhibitions are on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Another large retrospective is planned for the Phillips in 2016.

As a young man in the 1930s in New York, Lawrence studied with Charles Alston, a prominent painter with the Harlem Art Workshop. The pulsing cultural scene in Harlem included writers and musicians such as Langston Hughes and Duke Ellington, and fellow artists Romare Bearden and Augusta Savage (Bearden and Lawrence played pool together). Alston introduced Lawrence to Arthur Wesley Dow’s precepts of color harmony, simplicity of line and shape, and abstract pattern. But the young artist’s frequent trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art were his real education, and his attentive study of the Old Masters of the Italian Renaissance is evident in his work.

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Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Desdoblada, 2014; mixed-media narrative collage. Courtesy of the Artist and Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts.

Excellent shows with remarkably similar themes, (Im)materiel at Headlands Center for the Arts and Lo Real Maravilloso/The Marvelous Real at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts each feature art that alludes to the duality between the physical and spiritual worlds and points to what cannot be seen. Seen in tandem, they echo and enrich each other, deepening a viewer’s appreciation for the ways art excels at making the invisible visible.

“I have always been struck by the power of that which is not present, that which has disappeared or is absent,” writes Marshall Elliott, one of eighteen artists featured in the Headlands exhibition, curated by Kevin B. Chen. “Whether activating a missing part of a story, resurrecting a forgotten history, or simply suggesting a new way to look at the world through inversion or removal, I probe into murky spaces that don’t have clear visual analogies,” he writes. Elliott’s sculpture Ghost Bike (2013), a riderless bicycle that has been painted white, turns endlessly in a tight circle around a mechanical pivot. In Dust to Dust to Dust (2015), the sculptor has overturned three chairs and drawn their lengthening shadows on the floor with sawdust ground from the furniture’s sides and legs. A visually analogous sculpture appears in the Mission Cultural Center exhibition. Curated by Sanaz Mazinani, the exhibition includes work by husband-and-wife collaborators Jeremiah Barber and Ingrid Rojas Contreras, an artist and writer, respectively. Barber’s Bring to Mind (2014) features an upended wooden chair that has been painted gloss yellow. Balanced on a point, it is rigged with twine to a head formed from the same twine, which unravels on a wall nearby. With anthropomorphically named component parts (arms, legs, backs, and seats), the chair becomes an inevitable stand-in for the human form.

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Sarah Oppenheimer, 2014; installation view, Mills College Art Museum. Courtesy of the Artist and Mills College Art Museum.

Do your homework before you see this show. Sarah Oppenheimer is a much-heralded artist whose scrupulous work crosses the borders between architecture and sculpture and is grounded in theories of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences, particularly perception. To create her mind-bending work, she has pierced and reconfigured walls, corners, floors, and entryways in galleries, universities, and art museums. Like periscopes and kaleidoscopes, her interventions probe the bodies of buildings and employ transparent and mirrored surfaces to create new and disorienting ways of experiencing familiar spaces.

But none of these aspects are in the current exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum. What is there are Oppenheimer’s sketches, studies, ideas for interventions, and maquettes: carefully milled, drilled, and fabricated samples of glass and aluminum that play a part in recent commissions in New York, Switzerland, and in other locations in the United States and Europe—studio shots, so to speak.

The assembled array of white-painted steel tables with sketches and drawings under glass is tantalizing but not revealing. It offers the initiate only hints of Oppenheimer’s process, her extreme concern with perfection; pieces are milled to within 1/32 inch of her requirements. The titles of her works (33-D, D-33, OE-15) provide few clues except the inclusion of her fabricators’ names and their locations, suggesting she considers them artistic collaborators in this work.

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In Stockpile (2011), Allison Smith treats the vast hall as a warehouse, creating an eerie stillness. Smith has stacked unpainted replicas of colonial American furniture—chairs, chests, muskets and tables—into a giant tower. Fresh ghosts, they come complete with packing crates, labels, and lengths of authentic period weaving. Despite her best efforts, the silent, monochromatic heap is dwarfed by the space. Crafted to human scale, the diminished pile references the inaccessible nature of human history, and perhaps also implies that “human scale” is increasingly irrelevant.

Suzanne Husky, "Sleeper Cell," 2011. BacKground, "Degrowth Quilt," 2011. Images by the artist.

Suzanne Husky and Brion Nuda Rosch each claim a mini-gallery space within YBCA’s main space. Like an anthropologist, Husky profiles practitioners of “Modernes Vies Sauvages”—rustic, off-grid lifestylers—and frames her investigations as her art practice.  In Sleeper Cell Hotel (2011), Husky installs several small huts, a reading area where one can research eco-activism, and a monitor with a looping eco-infomercial.  The huts, diminutive and pristine on the concrete floor, are bunkers-for-one, complete with woven quilts advertising “Degrowth.” Constructed of wood shakes and shingles with a hedgehog-like appearance, they are advertisements for a Thoreau-inspired lifestyle and a return to simplicity, and would be equally at home in the dirt and disorder at the Hayes Valley eco-activist farm and encampment that Husky researched.

Another of the mini-galleries houses a stunning collection of sculptures and collages by Brion Nuda Rosch. Carefully proportioned and constructed, the dozen totemic pieces covered with brown paint evoke both Joseph Beuys’s Braunkreuz sculptures and Brancusi’s studio installations. They are jammed together and positioned below eye level, so it is difficult to get a clear line of sight of any one sculpture, or of any of the elliptical photocollages on the walls. In the doorways of the tiny studio space, Rosch has also installed slender, L-shaped forms, like false lintels, so that a viewer must bow on entering, and bend to examine the works. If Rosch is recreating the claustrophobic crowding of his own studio against the background of the giant space, he has achieved a tour de force.

Upstairs from the main space, in a darkened gallery all his own, complete with motion detection sensors, Mauricio Ancalmo has installed Dualing Pianos: Agapé Agape in D Minor (2011). A giant rectangular loop of lace-like computer paper shapes the air, and passes through two Duo-Art player pianos, face å face, and a vintage word processer located midway between them. A cobbled-together affair with wooden rolling pins replacing its original rollers, the processor/typewriter is the heart of the triad. One piano is in tune, one out of tune.  The score moves through one piano and plays in reverse as it passes through the second. Occasionally, the pianos strike chords together, both dissonant and beautiful. The piece has a quiet, unpredictable meter and an aural spaciousness, which varies as viewers move around the space. Ancalmo collects and repurposes outmoded technological devices to create subversive and nostalgic narratives; this one feels like a conversation between old lovers—or a “dual,” not a “duel.” Lyrical and elegant, it is the star of the show.

Richard T. Walker, "the speed and eagerness of meaning," 2011, 3-channel video installation. Image courtesty Richard T. Walker and Christopher Grimes Gallery.

As a British artist currently working in the Bay Area, Richard T. Walker takes an enraptured look at the California landscape in his three-channel video, the speed and eagerness of meaning (2011).  Walker imports the great sweep of Joshua Tree National Park into his Yerba Buena space.  Uncannily evoking Glenn Gould’s video, “The Idea of North,” Walker’s is his “Idea of West.” A rambling philosophical voice-over seems off-kilter and pretentious as the artist stands in place with his back to the audience, facing the landscape à la Caspar David Friedrich. Unable, despite his rhetoric, to make sense of the beauty and vastness with himself in it, he builds a song instead, playing all instruments himself, overlaying one line of sound—drum, guitar, sticks, voice—over another, like the sedimentary layers of the stones in his landscape. It is his inchoate response to the grandeur and his own insignificance. A Brit, with fresh eyes, may see it all best.

Sean McFarland’s moody, dark photographs of foliage in Golden Gate Park, reminiscent of 19^th-century paintings and photographs of the forest of Fontainebleau, suffer from reflective framing and poor location. No glass at all and a quiet room might have helped make them more visible. And Chris Fraser’s camera obscura, Developing a mutable horizon (2011), located at one end of the upstairs balcony, is so remote that this reviewer and a gallery guide interrupted a couple in flagrante delicto.

Chris Fraser, "One line drawing the view from my studio window, 2009-10," 2009, Light installation. Image courtesy Chris Fraser.

In the exhibition prior to BAN6, Song Dong spread the entire contents of his mother’s lifetime home on the floor of the great hall at Yerba Buena, arranged according to category. Both the vastness of the project and the scale of the minutiae served the space well, with the best viewing place being a little balcony that overlooked the whole. This aerial view would also serve work like Christian Boltanski’s great piles of clothing memorializing the Holocaust, or the historic airplanes from the National Air and Space Museum. But there is no easy bird’s eye view for the breadth of work being done around the Bay, nor any inner coherence. The hard-working viewer has to put it together. There are substantial rewards.