9 Must-See Shows Around the U.S. This Spring
Along with spring flowers and rainstorms, a new crop of museum exhibitions is blooming in cities around the country, from Miami to Maryland. With major shows of contemporary artists Mickalene Thomas, Tyler Mitchell, and Raqib Shaw, plus spotlights on the late Lebanese artist Huguette Caland and beloved surrealist Salvador Dalí, here’s our list of the must-see art shows over the next few months.
“Huguette Caland: Outside the Line (1970–84)”
May 3–October 6, 2024
ICA Miami
This show continues a rising tide of notice in Lebanese artist Caland’s final years, during which she was included in major showcases like the Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” biennial and the Venice Biennale. The daughter of a Lebanese president, she grew up in a freewheeling art scene in Beirut until moving to Paris in 1970, five years before unrest engulfed her homeland. Writing in 2021, Artnet’s Ben Davis called her “elegant and free spirited,” saying that her work had “an often frank, surrealist-tinged eroticism, featuring interlocking body parts and faces emerging from tangles of lines.” Overseen by ICA curator Donna Honarpisheh, this show focuses on her series “Bribes de corps” (Body Parts, 1973–76) and associated works, “reflecting her preoccupation with the body and formal experimentation in drawing and abstract painting.”
“Walton Ford: Birds and Beasts of the Studio“
Through October 20, 2024
The Morgan Library & Museum
The breadth of potential in watercolor painting is on display at the Morgan Library, as the museum is hosting sixty studies by the prolific artist Walton Ford. Though a study is usually connoted as a lesser version of a larger work, Ford’s detailed depictions of the natural world take on a different life altogether as seen in a smaller scale rendering of his large-scale paintings, with the details blurred. The show at the Morgan Library focuses mainly on his paintings of animals, and appear almost storybook in their smaller iterations, cluing viewers into Ford’s eye for the fantasy and humor he finds in the animal kingdom. “Birds and Beasts of the Studio” was organized by two curators with expertise in drawing, Isabelle Dervaux and Jennifer Tonkovich, and is currently on view until October 20, 2024.
“Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams”
Through July 14, 2024
Baltimore Museum of Art
Described by Baltimore Museum of Art director Asma Naeem as a “living legend and a pillar of Baltimore’s artistic community,” Joyce J. Scott is the subject of a long overdue and much welcome retrospective on view now at the BMA before heading to Seattle in October. An artist and activist whose work spans sculpture, textiles, beads, printmaking, and performance, Scott tackles the weight of history with humor and wit, ensuring that any and all viewers will find something to connect with in her work.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”
May 10–September 2, 2024
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The much anticipated 2024 Costume Institute show promises to deliver a full sensorial and sartorial experience when the “Sleeping Beauties” are awakened—those fragile garments in the museum’s storage that not even Kim Kardashian could get her hands on. Around 250 objects by the likes of Cristóbal Balenciaga, Loewe, Elsa Schiaparelli,and Iris van Herpen will be displayed with A.I. enhancements and brought back to something like their original state.
“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love”
May 25–September 29, 2024
The Broad
The California stop kicks off the first major international tour of Mickalene Thomas, featuring works created over the last 20 years. Taking its title from a text by feminist author bell hooks, the exhibition will center on Thomas’s singular mode of portraying Black women, which often incorporate collaged elements that reflect the many layers of individuality. Purely contemporary portraits are interspersed with works that reference art historical themes, as in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe les Trois Femmes Noires d’aprés Picasso. After the Broad, the immersive and extensive exhibition travels to the Hayward Gallery, London and the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.
“Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West”
June 9–September 2, 2024
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The only proper response, before Raqib Shaw’s expansive, luminously colored, richly detailed works, painted with porcupine quills and fine needles, is to be stunned into silence. This show is named for Rudyard Kipling’s 1889 poem “The Ballad of East and West,” and sums up Shaw’s love of the beauty and mythology of Kashmir, where he was born and raised, as well as Western Renaissance artists like Cranach and Holbein, whose works he studied on arrival in London, where he still lives. The show is organized by the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; when it was at the Frist, the New York Times called Shaw’s works “intricate, technicolored paintings that can be both tranquil and somewhat haunting.”
“Tyler Mitchell: Idyllic Space”
June 21–October 27, 2024
High Museum of Art
American photographer Tyler Mitchell catapulted to fame photographing Beyoncé for the September issue of Vogue in 2018—the first Black artist to shoot the cover image in the publication’s history. Following this history- and career-making moment, Mitchell has worked with brands such as Givenchy, Loewe, and Marc Jacobs, solidifying his place as one of the leading fashion photographers of today. Outside of fashion, Mitchell has become recognized for his nuanced portrayals of Black life. “Idyllic Space,” a form of homecoming for the artist as an Atlanta native, will see over 30 photographs and the debut of a photo-sculptural work brought together, wherein fashion and art are synthesized to explore themes such as identity, beauty, nature, and rest.
“Dalí: Disruption and Devotion”
July 6–December 1, 2024
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí is best known as an eccentric whose outsized personality oozed into his hallucinatory artworks—the man himself kept an anteater and an ocelot as pets, and peppered his works with melting clocks and lobster-topped telephones. But his mind bending oeuvre was greatly indebted to and inspired by much more “traditional” works by the European masters who came before him. In this show, around 30 works by Dalí are juxtaposed with treasures from the MFA’s collection by the likes of Velázquez, El Greco, and Orazio Gentileschi. Viewed in tandem, it’s a fascinating look at the throughline of art history that connects say, El Greco’s exaggeratedly elongated forms, with Dalí’s spindly-legged elephants and dripping timepieces.
“Walter Price: Pearl Lines”
August 8–December 8, 2024
Walker Art Center
The late New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl described Walter Price (b. 1989) as having a “style-defying style,” resulting in an “eloquently colorful art.” This show promises a plunge into richly colorful abstract paintings that wrestle with knotty issues of history and race. Judging by the title, we might expect to see some definite themes: it’s nothing less than the 12th show since 2016 titled “Pearl Lines.” Organized by curator Rosario Güiraldes and curatorial assistant Brandon Eng, this iteration constitutes his biggest museum exhibition yet (he’s had institutional shows from MoMA PS1 to the Camden Arts Centre in London). Represented by taste-making New York gallery Greene Naftali, the artist has also appeared in major shows like the 2019 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 Front International, in Cleveland.
by Artnet News April 22, 2024
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/9-must-see-shows-around-the-u-s-this-spring-2467235
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How MoMA Put Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans in Order
The story goes that when Andy Warhol debuted Campbell’s Soup Cans at L.A.’s Ferus Gallery in 1962, a neighboring gallery mounted a pyramid of the supermarket staple with a sign offering the “original” thing at “two for 33 cents.”
A gimmick perhaps, but certainly illustrative of the provocation Warhol caused. Fifty years on, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) faced a different kind of head scratcher when it came to staging “Andy Warhol: ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ and Other Works, 1953-1967”. Namely, how should the museum hang the series of 32 paintings?
To backtrack, MoMA had acquired the 20-by-16 inch works from Irving Blum for a reported $15 million in 1996. For the preceding decade, Blum had loaned the series to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Before that, Blum had held onto the collection, reversing his initial decision to sell the paintings individually. He paid Warhol $1,000 for the privilege.
The dilemma facing MoMA’s curators was that, except for the original Los Angeles exhibition, the cans had largely been shown in a four-by-eight grid formation (including during sporadic stints on Blum’s dining room wall, wherever else). It was an iconic arrangement, one that echoed the visual repetition Warhol later used in his “celebrity” and “disaster” series.
At the Ferus exhibition, however, the cans had been arranged in a line on wooden boards, as though items on a grocery store shelf. MoMA decided to revive the presentation, and since Warhol had left no instructions it opted for the chronological order in which Campbell’s had introduced the soups to market. Tomato, which debuted in 1897, came first.
Today, Warhol and the playful appeal of the Pop Art movement are ubiquitous. They weren’t in 1962. Warhol’s quip at the time “I want to be a machine” would later emerge in his factory studios that churned out work via his silkscreen printing techniques. The soup cans led the way. Warhol projected the image onto canvas, traced the outline, and carefully painted the interiors (he also used a stamp for the fleur-de-lis pattern).
The paintings are imperfect, with noticeable pencil marks and irregularities of paint. MoMA’s decision to place the canvases side-by-side and at eye level highlighted Warhol’s imperfect process.
by Richard Whiddington, February 29, 2024
https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/andy-warhols-soup-cans-2442251
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Excavation Reveals Ancient Town Beneath London’s National Gallery
A Saxon town known as Lundenwic once stood where London’s National Gallery now stands, say experts from Archaeology South-East, part of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, who have found evidence including a hearth from the 7th or 8th century.
The findings result from excavations for Jubilee Walk, part of the National Gallery at the north end of Trafalgar Square. It proves that the urban center of Saxon-era London stretched farther west than previously realized.
“Excavating at the National Gallery was an incredible opportunity to investigate interesting archaeology and to be involved with some truly outstanding outreach, says Stephen White, senior archaeologist with Archaeology South-East. “The evidence we uncovered suggests the urban centre of Lundenwic extends further west than originally thought. This was made all the more exciting by having the chance to share that information, and how it relates to archaeology across London, with young people from this city.”
The walled Roman city of Londinium was abandoned in the 5th century. After the arrival of the Saxons, the town’s profile shifted west. It would come to be known as Lundenwic, a trading center with a waterfront.
“It’s an honour for the National Gallery to be part of a discovery like this, and it brings home to us how everything we are building and re-constructing as part of this project will be part of the fabric and history of London for centuries to come,” said Sarah Younger, director of the redevelopment project that resulted in the new findings.
by Artnet News, February 18, 2024
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/excavation-reveals-ancient-town-beneath-londons-national-gallery-2434742
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