Shining a light on art pioneer Ree Morton

The 1970s artwork of female trailblazer Ree Morton is so connivingly subtle and deft it ends up dazzling. And yet it also does remain rather quiet, as if whispering, as if so self-assured it only needs to give the broad, friendly outlines of ideas. These are then puffed up with some words or dotted lines as if they are very interior thoughts that have escaped, untrammeled.

"The Plant that Heals May Also Poison," a savvy retrospective of Morton's work at the Tang (originating at the ICA in Philadelphia), gives a full sense of Morton's mature work, which she made in her thirties before dying in a car crash. There are reconstructed small installations that are simultaneously perplexing and cheerful, simple-seeming drawings that look faint and obscure and yet remain bold and brave when you enter them, and sculptural objects that play with words the way a mischievous cake decorator might but without winking.

Yes, this is good stuff: bold, unique, and without affectation.

The early 1970s, you have to remember, marked a rough patch for the visual arts, then suffering an identity crisis after the bursting bubbles of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art. Work from that period made by women—whether it was "feminist" or not, and much of it was—broke out of the mostly male molds that came before. It took on an outsized importance, one that grows to this day (think Ana Mendieta, Lynda Benglis, and Judy Chicago just for starters).

Here at the Tang, Morton's defiance of formal norms is what many will notice first. There are many inventive, plasticized canvas bas-relief shapes. And there are post-minimalist experiments like "Paintings and Objects," where a canvas is pressed flat against the wall by wooden supports. Some yellow repeating marks cloud whether this is the front or the back of the painting. Around this is another...