The Phases collection is the one we were most afraid to make. Not because the work was difficult — though it was — but because the iconography is so old, so familiar, so endlessly photographed, that we worried we had nothing to add.
The artists pushed back. "The moon is not a cliché," one of them said. "You are." Fair enough.
What follows is a partial guide to the symbols in the collection: what they meant when they were first drawn, what they have come to mean, and what they mean to us now, after a year of arguing about them in this room.
