At Ocultismo y barro (“Occultism and Clay”) at Miriam gallery in Brooklyn, it’s not the vague notions of the supernatural or spiritual that connect the eight Latine artists on view, it’s their self-aware and sometimes critical allusions to ancient pre-Columbian ceramic objects.

In golden and grandiose paintings like cosmological topographies, Eamon Ore-Girón uses a geometric and mathematical language to reconsider the value and meaning of ancient aesthetic systems. Building upon medieval, colonial, and ancient Andean influences, Ore-Girón’s work allows multiple truths to exist in harmony and perhaps suggest new ways of thinking about how the past persists in the present.

The work in Home Body, curated by Nico Wheadon, reminds us that artists have been inquiring into the self, human relationships, and humanity’s ills long before the COVID-19 shutdown. Though the ideas in these artworks were conceived pre-pandemic, their contemplations into relationships between fellow humans seem more relevant during our present moment of isolation.

The three artists in Patchwork are Colombian, Chicano, and Oglala Lakota. This matters because they are being grouped here due to their confrontation of a history of fragmentation from the perspective of colonized people. But more widely, it matters because there is a gaping lack of representation for these perspectives in the art world.