Art can move us in a variety of ways, emotional and otherwise, but how can it suggest movement? One of the great endeavors in art making is to convey movement within a naturally static medium. “Nothing rests in our compositions,” modernist photographer Ilse Bing once stated, “even if it seemingly rests, there is a dynamic of movement which you feel.” Presented below, for your enjoyment and contemplation, are the top ten poses and gestures that can be seen in our fall exhibition, on view until December 10.

1). The movements captured in Frazier’s suite of cyanotypes—choreographed for a performance piece the artist created with artist Liz Magic Laser—are borrowed from mid-century advertisements for the steel industry.

2). The hand of German’s sculpture, created as a figure of protection and healing much like nkisi figures made by the Kongo peoples of central Africa, extends toward the viewer in a meaningful gesture of invitation or supplication.

3). The way Salgado captured the listless poses of two weary oil-covered workers in the Greater Burgan oil field in southeastern Kuwait makes them appear almost statue-like.

4). I have always loved this image, in which the gestures of two children playing patty-cake are juxtaposed with those of their mothers, backs toward them, endeavoring to hail a cab.

5). Here Bing captures a dancer mid-step making a dramatic pointed gesture in the third act of Mozart’s comic opera Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), presented at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in East Sussex, England on June 8, 1937.

6). In this study for a painting, Kokoshka depicts his subject lying on a couch in a classic odalisque pose in the French tradition of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and others.

8). In this scene drawn from The Adventures of Kintaro, the Golden Boy, the hero’s parents—an aristocratic woman and a humble guard named Kintoki—meet for the first time. The energy of their meeting is apparent is the way the woman dramatically draws back from the man.

9). This woodcut depicts a scene from the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) in which the Tiburtine sibyl—one of a number of female oracles—faces the ancient Roman emperor Augustus and gestures emphatically toward the sky, where the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child have appeared in answer to the emperor’s question as to whether a greater ruler than he would ever exist.

10). This Zapotec urn takes the form of a male figure decked out in a headdress, face mask, pectoral, and garment. The figure is seated cross-legged and the taut position of his shoulders and upper body suggest that he has placed his hands on his knees the moment before. As we contemplate the urn, along with the other works of art in the exhibition, he contemplates us back, returning our gaze.