Does curator Alberto Ortega Trejo intend to rub modernism’s face in the muck? To return to the bestial realm the capacity for designerly invention? Or, rather, to acknowledge that this capacity always existed, despite our inattentiveness? To disabuse architects of their fantasies of autonomy and inculcate an ethos of interspecies collaboration? The likely answer, as these things often go, is “all of the above.” The Last of Animal Builders features new work by Chicago-area artists and pieces borrowed from the Thoma Foundation. This small exhibition makes no attempt to conceal the origin of its evocative title (taken from an unpublished manuscript of the architecture critic Sibyl Moholy-Nagy), but what the citation means isn’t entirely clear. (Courtesy Edith Farnsworth House) The Last of Animal Builders If you can’t make it to Boston, try to catch the show at its future stops in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. No matter: Her brilliant bronze and porcelain works-monumental but also mournful, splendidly crafted yet tinged with despair-stand on their own. Perhaps because Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s museum building is less ripe for appropriation, Leigh avoided architectural statements here. The sculptures she exhibited are now featured in a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Leigh’s Gold Lion–winning intervention reveled in an “over-the-top Blackness,” as she described it. She concealed the boastful cornice under a bushy thatched roof, superimposed rustic wooden pilotis over all that redbrick, and installed a large bronze resembling a West African ritual mask in the forecourt. At last year’s art biennale, artist Simone Leigh called attention to this fact by proposing an outfit change of her own. The United States Pavilion at Venice’s Giardini della Biennale is a utilitarian building in Palladian-which is to say, Jeffersonian-drag. (Photo by Timothy Schenck © Simone Leigh) Simone Leigh

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