U.S. Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Susan Rothenberg, Cabin Fever, 1976,
acrylic and tempera on canvas, 67 x 84 1/8". © 2009 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Susan Rothenberg
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM
SANTA FE
Through May 16
Curated by Michael Auping
The earliest of the twenty-five canvases in this exhibition (organized with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico) date from the mid-1970s, when a group of works on horse themes catapulted Susan Rothenberg to the forefront of the New Image painters. Long settled in Galisteo, Texas, Rothenberg has for some time employed a much smaller, stitch-like stroke, a mode resistant to the “frozen motion” (as the artist describes it) of the equine ideogram on which her considerable reputation rests. Absorbed by the small wonders of Texan domestic life as well as by the state’s vast landscape, she now makes paintings that appear eccentrically Impressionist, with a characteristic loss of edge as figures and grounds meld into one another owing to her agile and flickering touch.
— Robert Pincus-Witten
Georgia O'Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918, oil on canvas, 35 x 29 1/8". © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
WASHINGTON, DC
Through May 9
Curated by Barbara Haskell, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Bruce Robertson, and Elizabeth Hutton Tur
For the past few decades, American art’s first lady has looked a bit kitschy to insiders, her artistic mode as pseudo-authentic as “southwestern” cuisine. Then there is her troublesome status as a celebrity, thanks in part to Alfred Stieglitz’s racy portraits (some of which appear in this exhibition), as well as to her subject matter. But maybe we were wrong. By foregrounding her abstractions—130 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures—the case can be made for a radicality underlying her popularity, a rigor beneath the flowers. And seen through the eyes of today’s younger artists, O’Keeffe’s brand of American art looks interesting again, specific and local amid globalism’s anyspacewhatever, late, late modernism.
— Katy Siegel
Katarzyna Kozyra, Summertale, 2008, still from a color video, 20 minutes 30 seconds.
“Virtuoso Illusion”
MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER
CAMBRIDGE, MA
Through April 4
Curated by Michael Rush
This exhibition examines how artists have long used drag not just to genderbend but also to invent new personae using a range of technologies. Featuring videos, installations, photographs, and documentation of performances by many of the usual suspects (Claude Cahun, Andy Warhol, the inevitable Matthew Barney), it also includes bracing trans and queer work by Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, and Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn. But in line with the exhibition’s subtitle, “Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde,” it seems to be Ryan Trecartin who is the engine driving the show, with his rowdy refusal of stable identities altogether. “There are so many things to be, Sally!” one of his characters proclaims. “I know,” responds another, “and I don’t want to be any of them.” A catalogue with essays by curator Michael Rush, art historian Ara H. Merjian, and performance artist John Kelly promises to grant such lines some historical ballast.
— Julia Bryan-Wilson
Joaquín Torres-García, Two White Men, ca. 1929, oil and iron tacks on wood, two parts, from left: 10 1/4 x 3 1/2 x 3/4", 8 3/4 x 3 x 3/4".
Joaquín Torres-García
SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART
SAN DIEGO
Through May 30
Curated by Josef Helfenstein and Mari Carmen Ramírez
One of the key advocates of abstraction in Latin America, Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) is best known for paintings that situate pre-Columbian symbols within modernist grids. This exhibition’s focus on the Uruguayan artist’s use of wood unveils a more complex project involving the reconciliation of painting and sculpture, whether through totemlike structures, idiosyncratic assemblages, or toys that verge on folk art. The show comprises some ninety drawings, oil paintings, and works in wood from Torres-García’s formative period in 1920s New York and Europe through his emergence as a pedagogue and champion of Constructive Universalism in the ’30s and ’40s via his own workshop school in Montevideo. The catalogue includes previously untranslated texts by the artist, which should provide further insight into his vision for a transnational modernism.
— Daniel Quiles
Maurizio Cattelan, Ave Maria, 2007, polyurethane, metal, clothes, paint, dimensions variable.
Maurizio Cattelan
THE MENIL COLLECTION
HOUSTON
Through August 15
Curated by Franklin Sirmans
Maurizio Cattelan has been described as a conceptual artist, a curator, a publisher, and a smart-ass. “Comedians manipulate and make fun of reality,” he has remarked. “Whereas I actually think that reality is far more provocative than my art.” In recent years, Cattelan (with longtime collaborators Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik) has busied himself with the “doorfront” Wrong Gallery and with curating the 2006 Berlin Biennial. His show at the Menil Collection focuses on sculptures first shown in Europe in 2007—for instance, Ave Maria, a trio of saluting arms that extend from the wall—as well as four new works. During the exhibition’s run, a selection of Cattelan’s pieces will be situated in galleries throughout the museum among works from the collection. Love to love a smart smart-ass.
— David Rimanelli
Charles Burchfield, The Night Wind, 1918, watercolor, gouache, and pencil. © The Museum of Modern Art.
Charles Burchfield
BURCHFIELD PENNEY ART CENTER AT BUFFALO STATE COLLEGE
BUFFALO
Through May 23
Curated by Robert Gober
The eye for selection and sensitivity to space evident in Robert Gober’s sculptures and installations were last directed to curating in 2005, when the artist chose items from the Menil Collection in Houston to accompany his own work. Now Gober has assembled a full-fledged survey devoted to watercolorist Charles Burchfield (1893–1967), whose visions of the American scene are by turns ecstatic and morbid, mystical and bleak. The exhibition presents ephemera from Burchfield’s life (doodle-filled journal pages, correspondence with his early supporter Alfred H. Barr Jr.) alongside seventy-four watercolors. Psychedelic avant la lettre, the paintings feature plants, stars, insects, and dilapidated houses that melt or radiate shimmering coronas; a vocabulary of synesthetic marks lets the landscapes breathe, buzz, and hum their lost innocence.