When asked about color, Alexander Calder said, “Well, it’s really secondary. I want things to be differentiated. Black and white are first—then red is next—and then I get sort of vague.” Tara Donovan has taken that logic and run with it for a show built around Calder’s Mountains (1976)—one of his last works, characteristically black. Donovan’s own installations are made from mass-produced industrial materials: tar paper, straws, and sheets of mylar. In her hands, monochrome reflects not an absence of color but a relationship with light, one in which the sheen of a surface or the subtle glimmer of metal does the work that pigment might otherwise do. —Elena Clavarino