Mostly, though, I kept thinking of paintbrushes. I thought of a stop-action photograph of a single bell, ringing out in the dark silence of indefinite space. I thought of bells, in time for the holidays and far too decorative for male dominance. Two white shapes lean away from each other, just off the vertical.

Yet it has little to do with stale mockery of black men and macho artists. In the first full room at the Studio Museum, a wall-sized work floored me. Ghost busterĪ decade after the Whitney annoyed practically everyone with an exhibition on 'The Black Male,' and half a century after Jackson Pollock, size still matters. In the end, however, the associations of the medium or of history speak up for themselves. He lets a viewer of any race share a return to the old movies, more rides from a World's Fair, and a moment of emergence for black history. Three years later in Chelsea, Gary Simmons again erases blackness, and he again offers some wild rides, but this time in living color. In a solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, one can see him refusing to embrace black stereotypes and refusing, too, to forget America's past. Much of the time, he has himself effaced them. Chalk clouds, cartoon explosions, a liquor store, a roller coaster truly named Ghoster-the images have in common moments of joy and release dimly recalled. Gary Simmons has become the ghost of painting's Great White Hope.

Gary Simmons by Thelma Golden