Well placed

Some more satisfying discoveries at the Brooklyn Museum, which has again restructured its art of the Americas floor in fascinating and urgent ways, including reflecting on past collecting and showing practices and weaving works by living artists into the historical rooms For instance, African American, Cherokee and Shinnecock heritages inspire Richard Mayhew's gauzy landscape "Pastoral" (1962) provides an obscurely dreamy horizon in the dimly lit room of precolumbian sculptures. This early 18th century traveling desk, from Bolivia or

Peru, includes on its front (hard to photograph because of reflections on the glass case) images of enslaved African and an indigenous figure being trampled by a bull. Inside is Eden itself, complete with unicorns... but I noticed that this Adam got fruit from the Tree of the 

Knowledge of Good and Evil before Eve did! And this gorgeous 2016 work by Shinnecock Courtney N. Leonard, "Artifice (Breach Series)," one of the last things you see, references the tribe's restoration project to seed new oyster beds on the eastern end of Long Island.