Visual Arts

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Kehinde Wiley updates history painting in his works, including Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy - Carignano (2006).

FORT WORTH – Kehinde Wiley's large paintings of black men in Nikes and sweats heroically mounted on big-eyed dramatic horses bring 17th- and 18th-century history painting up to date with a wry play on privilege and perception. Mr. Wiley replaces white power brokers of yesteryear with young African-Americans, revealing the similarities between old and new structures of influence.

In Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy – Carignano (2006), a young black man holds a broomstick staff and sits atop a white horse, looking valiantly and unflinchingly at the viewer. The horse sways back and balances on hind legs and man sits erect with sword in sheath and a red cape blowing in the wind. As if to add a little bling to canonical history painting, a pattern of large gold crests floats atop the man on horse, whose stance the artist has copied from Jacques-Louis David's Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard (1801).

Though it consists of only three large paintings, the show in no way feels restrained. The works are robust while tense, powerful, if not a little tetchy. The power relations of the posse in The Chancellor Seguier on Horseback (2005) may be just as fraught and hierarchical as the entourage in Charles LeBrun's 17th-century version.

Charissa N. Terranova

Through May 25 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. $10; free each Wednesday and the first Sunday of every month. 817-738-9215 or 1-866-824-5566, www.themodern.org.

FORT WORTH – To make new art is to begin with stealing. Something never comes from nothing, and to be original is to mimic, sometimes even plagiarize, those who paved the path before.

Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim's multimedia Violations (1971-72)

"Lifting – Theft in Art," the second show at the new Fort Worth Contemporary Arts at Texas Christian University, focuses not so much on borrowing form and ideas from artists of the past but on the transgression of pilfering objects.

Dennis Oppenheim's Violations (1971-72) offers evidence of 153 misdemeanors in violation of Section 484 of the California Penal Code (Petty Theft). Shiny hubcaps from all kinds of cars lie on the floor while a monitor above shows hands stealthily removing them from cars. In Jon Routson's Bootlegs (1999-2004), the artist carried a handheld video camera into theaters to illegally copy movies, including Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. While other bootleggers sell these often degraded copies of movies, Mr. Routson's Bootlegs flickers on the wall to make a point about the relationship between fakes and originals, the valuable and valueless and art and lawlessness.

Artists in the 1980s such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine famously gave form to a new brand of art constituted by appropriation. The result of re-photographing ads or photographs by seminal artists, this work was all about the omnipresence of the picture, mass production and the end of authenticity.

By contrast, the work at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts emerges from an earlier movement, conceptualism. It exchanges classical formalism and beauty for humor and ideas expressed in words.

Curated by Gavin Morrison, a Scot who moved to Fort Worth from the South of France and one-half of the avant-garde curatorial team Atopia, the show is very tight, solid and professional. However, copious explanatory texts weigh it down a bit.

Charissa N. Terranova

Through May 31 at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, the Art Galleries at TCU, 2900 W. Berry St., Fort Worth. Hours: 1 to 6 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Free. 817-257-7643.

Strange bedfellows.

And/Or Gallery

Untitled collage books (above), 2008, by Brian Belott and Joseph and the Pharaoh's Dream (below), 2007, by Ed Blackburn are both at And/Or Gallery.

That phrase has always made me a little squeamish, but it might apply to the pairing of Ed Blackburn and Brian Belott currently at And/Or Gallery.

Mr. Blackburn has lived in North Texas and exhibited here for 30 years. Mr. Belott is a young New York artist who exhibits on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. You wouldn't expect them to wind up showing across the room from one another nor to have very much in common. Which they don't, but they prove to be surprisingly compatible.

In his Bible Paintings, which he first showed in the 1980s, Mr. Blackburn chooses stories popular from Sunday school and presents them in storybook fashion. A heavy black line defines both settings and characters, and his palette comes from that jumbo pack of Crayola crayons most of us had as kids. He "fills in the lines" as though he was working in a coloring book, using the wrong colors in a way that emphasizes his refined visual sense.

In Joseph and the Pharaoh's Dream (1997), one of the paintings at And/Or, faces can be either blue or the peachy tone Crayola used to call "flesh." A mauve sun floats in a pale yellow sky, and for one figure he has painted flesh and clothing all the same purple, just as though he didn't know any better.

Joseph told the Pharaoh to expect seven years of plenty followed by seven years of lean, and Mr. Blackburn's new black acrylic drawings depict the lean years. They keep the painting's title but add subtitles that describe their newspaper-like images. One is Pakistan Police and Demonstrators. The other shows two double portraits, Cheney/Rice and Putin/ Ahmadinejad.

Politics does not seem to be on Mr. Belott's mind when he creates his small collages from the torn and cut pages of books and magazines. Most of the works have a clearly defined horizon line that provides a setting for his fantastic scenes that take place under skies often splotched with drops of watercolor.

In these landscapes, hunters open fire at fantastic birds or a farmer stands in his field. But the farmer's hand is an enormous claw that holds a tiny yellow bird. The age of his source material mutes Mr. Belott's color so even his most dazzling effects seem to take place at twilight.

Mr. Belott also uses collage to remake low-end children's board books into sculpted objects where the narrative has been transformed into playful and sophisticated exercises in free association. The same mentality finds a grimier expression in the artist's repurposed photo albums filled with thematically linked found photographs.

Both Mr. Blackburn and Mr. Belott are storytellers that expect viewers to fill in some gaps and work with them to create a narrative. But perhaps what this exhibition really demonstrates is simply the fact that two sure-footed and nimble-minded artists will tend to look good together in the same room.

Charles Dee Mitchell

Through May 31 at And/Or Gallery, 4221 Bryan St., Suite B. Hours: 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays, noon to 6 Saturdays and by appointment. Free. 214-824-2442, www.andorgallery.com.