Erik van lieshout untitled 2014 lips

What can “Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection,” the Museum of Modern Art’s show of recent acquisitions by 15 contemporary artists, tell us?

For one thing, MoMA wants to position itself, at least in part, as a political institution.

Erik van lieshout untitled 2014 lips of god

The issues the show addresses make up a litany of what many Americans are thinking about in 2017: racism, sexism, intersectionality, censorship, surveillance, and, of course, resistance. It’s a calculated move on the museum’s part, and a fairly successful one.

The exhibition, the latest in a series of hangs of the museum’s contemporary holdings, takes its name from John Akomfrah’s elegant video installation The Unfinished Conversation (2012).

This three-screen work is about the life of Stuart Hall, a theorist in the UK who pioneered the field of cultural studies with a M