Pictured above: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, I Still Face You, 2015, acrylic, color pencils, charcoal, oil, and transfers on paper
After a year and a half of stops and starts, the art world feels like a dam about to burst, flooding us with a wave of exhibitions that will keep us exploring museums all season long. New York City alone will have the latest incarnation of MoMA PS1’s signature survey Greater New York, the New Museum’s Triennial and the Performa Biennial festival of performance art, all on view simultaneously. The ninth edition of Performa, which begins October 12 and runs through Halloween, will be held entirely outdoors, with some artists also broadcasting their projects.
And on the West Coast, a major San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition devoted to the late abstract painter Joan Mitchell and a Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art survey of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, known for her captivating videos, are already drawing visitors. These other shows, from coast to coast, are also sure to be standouts.
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Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror
Image Credit: Vaga at Artists Rights Society/Philadelphia Museum of Art/Photo Studio: Joseph Hu Pictured above: Jasper Johns, According to What, 1964, oil, charcoal and graphite on canvas with objects (six panels)
Commensurate with Johns’s towering stature over the past seven decades, this retrospective requires both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to do its subject justice. Nearly 500 works—many from the artist’s own collection, never before seen by the public—will be on display across the two venues, demonstrating not only how Johns, now 91, led the charge out of abstract expressionism and into pop and conceptual art, but also how he came to define the intrinsic being of an artist, forever inventing, tweaking, reconsidering and riffing. From his iconic “Flags,” “Maps” and “Targets” to his extensive explorations in printmaking and his recent “Regrets” series, which poignantly addresses mortality, the show promises to be the blockbuster Johns deserves.
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Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing
Image Credit: Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co./Corvi-Mora Pictured above: Jennifer Packer, Say Her Name, 2017, oil on canvas
The Whitney will be quite the destination in October, as the museum also mounts
a survey of Packer’s still-early career (she’s only 37). A star in a generation brimming with exceptional Black figurative artists, Packer unabashedly defines her choice to paint Black subjects as a political act, countering centuries of neglect. She executes her portraits with detail and nuance, in an abstracted style that blends beauty and intensity.Even her paintings of flowers feel heavy with emotion: She has described them as funerary bouquets; they stand as symbols of grief inflicted by racial violence and as memorials to the victims. Say Her Name, for instance, references Sandra Bland, a Black woman who died in police custody in Texas. The exhibition, which premiered at the Serpentine in London, brings together roughly three dozen works from the past decade. Another acclaimed Packer show, Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep, is also on view at LA MOCA.
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Van Gogh and the Olive Groves
Image Credit: Minneapolis Institute of Art/The William Hood Dunwoody Fund Pictured above: Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees, November 1889, oil on canvas
For those longing to see authentic oil paintings by the tormented artist rather than a pixelated-wonderland version, the Dallas Museum of Art is premiering Van Gogh and the Olive Groves in October. The exhibition revolves around his canvases depicting the orchards that captivated him during his stay at an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889.
Painted from June to December at different hours of the day, with human figures and without, the landscapes capture the passage of time and the cycle of nature, all the more affecting considering that van Gogh took his own life the following year. But whether rendered in quick flecks or swirling strokes, these richly toned trees are a joy to behold.
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Jeff Wall
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist/Glenstone Museum Pictured above: Jeff Wall, Mother of pearl, 2016, inkjet print
The highly influential Canadian photographer, who brought a meticulously composed, cinematic style to contemporary photography, will have his biggest US exhibition since his 2007 mid-career survey at the Museum of Modern Art, opening in October at Glenstone, the suburban-D.C. museum founded by mega collectors Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales. The show will span five decades of Wall’s practice, which often entails designing historically accurate sets and costumes, casting actors and digitally piecing together dozens of shots to create a final image. Even his street photography, which he calls “near-documentary,” is carefully staged. As he once said, “Things that happen in the street are real, and things that happen in my head are real, too.”
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Black American Portraits
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist/Roberts Projects Los Angeles/Photo: Robert Wedemeyer Pictured above: Otis Kwame Quaiecoe, Lady on Blue Couch, 2019, oil on canvas
In an unprecedented move for official presidential and first lady portraits, Kehinde Wiley’s and Amy Sherald’s strikingly original depictions of Barack and Michelle Obama, respectively, have been taking a victory lap around American museums this year. When they alight at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 7, they will be flanked by Black American Portraits, an exhibition of some 150 works by Black artists from circa 1800 to the present day, including Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady and Titus Kaphar and touching on emancipation, the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement. Coming 45 years after LACMA presented curator David Driskell’s groundbreaking Two Centuries of Black American Art, which helped start the conversation about who is seen and who is marginalized, the show arrives with high expectations.
