As with MoMA’s earlier shows of African and folk art, American Indian art merited inclusion in a museum of modernism not because it was modern, but because it offered inspiration to a Euro-American avant-garde. Somehow, modernist aping of Indigenous models got told as a story of increasing originality, while Indigenous adaptation of Western models was seen in terms of decreasing authenticity. The logic was clear enough: The proper job of Western art was forever to point to the future; that of Indigenous art was forever to repeat the past. It has taken a century for the art world to realize its mistake, but contemporary Indigenous art is now having a moment.

There is no useful name for Dunham’s baggy knot or the echidna-prickly-pear thingummy. (This essay would be much shorter if there were.) One can slap similes and adjectives all over them and still most of their essence escapes. The point of them is to be looked at, rather than recognized and classified. For decades it had been important to Dunham that when you saw his pictures “you couldn’t say what they were.” But then, at a certain point, you could.

If the history proposed here were mainstream art history, museumgoers today would be as familiar with Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks as they are with Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt. But the dominant art rhetoric (if not art objects) of the late Sixties and Seventies had eyes trained elsewhere: minimalism, conceptualism, land art. The grid appeared everywhere, but like a tradesman elevated to the gentry it was cleansed of its warp-and-weft associations. In her 1979 essay “Grids,” Rosalind Krauss pronounced it “emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts” not for its connection to the everyday but for its refutation of it.

The paralyzing wee-hours panic that haunts the art professions is the thought that maybe, after all, art is just stuff, like shoes or placemats. The mantra repeated to ease that dread has for centuries been “meaning”: art is different from stuff because, like great literature, it has something to say about what it means to be human, how we live our lives, what we believe. The catch, of course, is that “meaning” is so vague and malleable a concept, it borders on meaningless.

Western museums have often used the poverty, political instability, or corruption of plundered places as an argument against repatriation. But no imbalances are permanent. Ancient Greeks could not have imagined that the glories of Pergamon—one of the Seven Wonders of the World, depending on who was doing the counting—would end up in the bogs of some primitive, outlandish peoples in the distant north. Maybe we should think of repatriation—of spreading the wealth around a bit—as a form of insurance. After all, even the wealthiest and most storied of democracies can devolve into shameless kleptocracies with astonishing rapidity.

“Sanctuary” is a reminder of just how singular an artist Puryear is. It’s a serious work of contemporary art that seems to have fallen out of a fairy tale—not the monophonic Disney kind but the capricious, found-object kind collected by the Brothers Grimm, in which the moral is oblique, anything can come to life, and nobody leaves unscathed. Born in 1941, Puryear came of age at a time when sculpture was flexing its muscle through intimidating scale, conceptual rigor, and protractor-perfect geometries. (Think Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, and Mark di Suvero.) For a moment, Puryear almost seemed to fit.

The biographical facts are improbably cinematic. On his mother’s side, he traced his ancestry back to the Borgias; the family tree included a pope, a saint, the viceroy of Peru, and his grandmother, the rabble-rousing feminist Flora Tristan. (Karl Marx was a fan.) Gauguin’s childhood might have been dreamed up, tag team, by Gabriel García Márquez and Émile Zola. When he was an infant, his family set sail for Peru, where his journalist father planned to establish a left-wing newspaper and his mother hoped to reclaim an inheritance. His father dropped dead en route in Tierra del Fuego, but his mother continued on to Lima with her two small children, joining the palatial household of a great-uncle. She never got the money, but as one of the rare Europeans to take a serious interest in pre-Columbian art, she acquired a substantial collection of ancient Moche ceramics. Those animated dogs and portrait heads would burrow deep into her son’s imagination.

Both the right-wing empire and the left-wing Commune had ended in pointless, bloody, self-inflicted tragedies. The survivors, at least some of them, had learned to mistrust big ideas. An art about nothing might seem a strange defense, but the act of paying attention to what is rather than what should be—to the particular and ephemeral rather than the abstract and eternal—could be a bulwark against the seductions of ideology.

In its idealized self-vision, the discipline of ethnology aimed to document the cultural variety and evolution of our species. But “evolution” could be—and often was—twisted to suggest a hierarchy of Homo sapiens, from primitive to advanced. The inventors of this hierarchy naturally placed themselves at the top, and the Venn diagram overlap between the subjects of ethnology and the subjects of colonial occupation speaks for itself. This history is now the cause of embarrassment and public apology on the part of museums. But the collections are still with us.

Visitors to Huyghe and Parreno exhibitions are faced with a similar task: working to form a coherent picture from scattered inputs. There is no way for a viewer to really understand how weather data might be affecting the Tabernas video feed or whether the sounds that emerge from “Liminal” or the A.I. newscaster are, as the artists claimed, embryonic language. You can believe the proffered explanations or not. Either way, you’ll know you’ve made a choice, which is undoubtedly the point.

f all the ways that today’s plutocrats spend their billions, founding an art museum is one of the more benign, somewhere behind eradicating malaria but ahead of eradicating democracy. The art in these museums is almost always contemporary, reflecting the dearth of available old masters along with a global chattering-classes consensus that avant-garde art is socially, intellectually, and culturally important. Few of these tycoons, though, are likely to find the stakes as agonizingly high as Albert C. Barnes did.

Strangeness is overused as a selling point in contemporary art. There’s no real reason that “strange” should equate with “good,” and anyway most of what gets called strange trades on century-old surrealist tricks (jarring juxtaposition, biomorphic distortion, sexual kink) that are no longer strange at all. Every once in a while, though, something comes along for which no other word really suffices—something whose strangeness is not a strategy or a goal but the by-product of following a certain line of thought. Something whose strangeness creeps up on you, as it must have done on the artist as she worked, and changes the way you look at things.