Sanford Biggers makes us see how close yet how far apart the two Americas are in his split-screen home movie projection picturing his childhood birthday parties, picnics and field trips alongside those of a white friend. Two sculptors stand out. Eric Wesley's Kicking Ass is a full-scale, kickass model of a donkey who has knocked a hole in the museum wall. Adia Millett's Defining Absence is a tabletop rendition of one of those low-rent apartment complexes you're always seeing on Cops. Millett lovingly furnishes each of the apartments so that different levels of aspiration, apathy or abjectness are apparent.
Several painters look particularly good.
Laylah Ali's comic-book insanities are meticulously rendered nodules of narrative ambiguity, while Julie Mehretu continues to improve in drawings that show her injecting more figurative elements and thus more clarity into her work. Surprisingly, the very conventional biomorphic, color-field abstractions of Jerald Ieans are also engaging. Kori Newkirk's curtain-like paintings made of plastic pony beads and artificial hair are gimmicky, but his giant pomade silhouette of a police helicopter is effective. In addition to too many mediocre paintings involving hair products, geometric shapes on the floor or pictures of superheroes, fairy tale figures and teddy bears, there are too many undigested or otherwise unaltered photographic images on hand. There are photos of fire, black men, airports, empty rooms, subways, high schools and city streets that do nothing and take you nowhere.