It is about as easy to put the work of Fred Sandback into words as it is to capture it in a picture. Using acrylic yarn stretched taut to create various shapes and arrangements between the walls, floor, and ceiling of a given room, Sandback’s “sculptures,” as he terms them—despite their obviation of any physically quantifiable volume—become nearly indistinguishable from the spaces they occupy.

The portraits hung here, in Glenn Ligon’s exhibition Break it Down at the Aspen Art Museum, tell the story of a single man, and yet many men. Such is the nature, Ligon suggests, of being Black in America.

It feels apt that Mire Lee’s current exhibition, Faces, takes the most desiccated parts of our built environment and our bodies to create a presentation that seemingly prizes the last remnants of a tortured existence perennially under threat of annihilation.

This exhibition is premised largely on the question of what remains legible about identity when the cultural symbols and touchstones that define the presentation of self are stripped away or shuffled.

What resounds most clearly throughout Carl Cheng's current survey exhibition, Nature Never Loses, at the Contemporary Austin, is the unanticipated resilience of the natural world and our enduring obliviousness to its resolve.