In a talk this afternoon at Cornish, art dealer Scott Lawrimore mentioned that the Henry Art Gallery has been steadily, but subtly, exploring political issues in its exhibitions over the last two years.

He’s right. The Henry has been doing a great job at this, peppering every rotation of exhibitions with at least one trenchant show. The war- and international-politics-related works of Walid Raad, Kader Attia, Kim Jones, An-My Le, and Dawn Cerny coalesce into a group show in the mind when you think back on them—Raad’s technically degraded photographs from a violently degraded Beirut, Le’s portraits of battle rehearsals and re-creations, Attia’s thin but insistent boundaries and borderlines, Jones’s aggressive vulnerability, and Cerny’s paper soldiers and waiting rooms stocked with tissues.

^{Walid Raad}

^{Kim Jones}

Coming in June, a topical cherry on top?: Curator Sara Krajewski’s show The Violet Hour opens June 21, and it comes with this description, taken from the Henry’s website:

Artists Matthew Day Jackson, Jen Liu, and David Maljkovic imagine alternative realities that could emerge from the sociopolitical strife and environmental degradation now accumulating on the global stage. The Violet Hour features video, sculpture, and two-dimensional works that address the physical and emotional weariness of our time in an attempt to overcome the cultural amnesia preventing us from learning the lessons of history.

^{A still from Jen Liu’s 2006 video The Brethren of the Stone: Comfortably Numb}