I went to MoMA PS1 two days before Vaginal Davis’s “Magnificent Product” opened and had the sublime pleasure of meeting Ms. Davis herself, at work at a table in one of the galleries. She is one of those people who draws you into her world, even just with conversation—during ours, we learned we were both born in 1961. “So were Kembra Pfahler and Ron Athey,” she noted, naming two legendary peers and collaborators. “So was President Barack Obama,” Davis added. “Oh, she’s holding up well,” I said, and we fell about laughing.

I mention this to frame my contention that Davis is one of the leading artists of her generation. And I mean that without qualification: not the leading queer artist or trans artist or Black artist or punk artist or performing artist, though she may be all of those too. Davis is the artist who for me seized upon and transformed the most relevant swath of cultural material of her era. And she still does.

“Magnificent Product” is not exactly a retrospective. Davis continually repurposes, revises, and expands on her own body of work, along with everything else her method ingests. It’s a method continually on the lookout for fragments of the shared culture that can be cut from their world with a view to making them part of a world of her own. Those fragments can be copied, reduced, reimagined, and reinstalled in a constellation with other fragments to sugge...