Intent on proving himself to be as brilliant a curator as he is a writer, Hilton Als filled Zwirner’s galleries two years ago with Alice Neel’s portraits of friends and neighbors of color, an overlooked yet critical part of her work. Now, he mixes art and archival materials in a magisterially spare paean to the great American author James Baldwin (1924–1987).

The first part of the show centers on Baldwin’s relationships with artists, such as his high-school friend and longtime collaborator Richard Avedon, and Beauford Delaney, who daubed a 1941 Fauvist portrait of a nude Baldwin sitting in a garden in prismatic colors. Radiating the sacral power of one of Gauguin’s Tahitian figures, the painting attests to the intensity of even Baldwin’s teenage presence. Glenn Ligon’s huge 2013 black-on-black canvas with the opening lines of the essay “Stranger in the Village” disappearing in the artist’s signature stenciled coal dust makes the author’s words, about being a black man in a small Swiss hamlet, material and glittering, but also poignantly relevant.

The second half of the exhibition more glancingly suggests Baldwin’s experience as a black gay man, with Alvin Baltrop’s documentary photos of men cruising for sex on Hudson River piers, and Ja’Tovia Gary’s video An Ecstatic Experience (2015), a hallucinatory meditation on Civil Rights. Most dazzlingly, Als suggests that Kara Walker’s 2005 video of a shadow puppet show refracting the history of slavery through Disney’s Song of the South, might stand in for the film that Baldwin would have made, given the chance.

TimeOut New York, review by Joseph R. Wolin