Sarah Crowner. Beetle in the Leaves, 2016; installation view.

Visual artist Sarah Crowner’s work has been described as many things: lyrical, hard-edge painting, primary abstraction, non-painterly. Curator Gary Carrion-Murayari coined it “Personal Modernism.” She has been declared a painter, a sculptor, and an installation artist during her career, but none of these terms feel comprehensive enough, nor do they do the artist, or her work, justice. Standing in front of Crowner’s abstract sewn paintings or her large-scale tile installations, one is filled with a sense of modernism’s profound influence on her work as well as with her deft ability to harness the energies of the natural world.

This spring, Crowner’s work will appear in two major shows; Beetle in the Leaves, which runs from April 16 through February 2017 at MASS MoCA (Crower’s first museum show in the U.S.) and Plastic Memory, which opened May 13th at Simon Lee gallery in London. Both exhibitions feature the artist’s sewn paintings—cut-up pieces of raw and painted canvas, reconfigured and re-stitched to form a new surface—as well as new tile works, installed both on the floor and hanging from the walls.

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On view until January 3, 2010 the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents its most ambitious group show since its grand opening six years ago. Curated by Anthony Huberman, For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there starts with the premise that art is not a code that needs cracking. Celebrating the experience of not-knowing and unlearning, the artists in this exhibition understand the world in speculative terms, eager to keep art separate from explanation. Embracing a spirit of curiosity, this show is dedicated to the playfulness of being in the dark.

Among the works included are Sarah Crowner’s re-insertion into circulation of the two issues of the 1917 journal The Blind Man (edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood), offering copies on sale at the museum’s front desk at the publication’s original cover price of 10 and 15 cents. Additionally, In search of an explanation of a painting, Marcel Broodthaers interviews his cat in a recording from 1970 in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Nashashibi/Skaer (Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer) contribute their 16mm film Flash in the Metropolitan (2006),  whereby the artists wander through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the lights off, using a strobe light to briefly illuminate portions of small sculptural statues and vessels, as if the long story of the Metropolitan was reduced to a series of short poetic haikus.