Museum Guide
Spring is just around the corner, and what better way to celebrate a new season than with art? Here’s our curated guide to the museum shows you’ll want to see this weekend and the weeks ahead.
Faith Ringgold: American People at New Museum
We could not be more thrilled that the major (and long-overdue) Faith Ringgold retrospective is finally here! Presenting work from a span of over fifty years, Faith Ringgold: American People is the most comprehensive exhibition of this incredible artist, activist and educator, who is now in her 91st year of age.
From her breathtaking Tar Beach story quilts to her radical American People series of cubist-style paintings, this exhibition shows how Ringgold’s work brilliantly evolved with the times. With her heartfelt and politically-charged narratives, Faith Ringgold’s art is a must-see for people from all generations.
February 17-June 5
235 Bowery
Images: Sonny’s Bridge, 1986, © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2021 & New Museum (above); Sonny’s Bridge, 1986, © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2021 & New Museum; Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach, 1988 © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2022 & New Museum (below)
Tomás Saraceno: Particular Matter(s) at The Shed
With his largest U.S. exhibition to date, the visionary Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno transforms 28,000 square feet of The Shed into another way of experiencing our world.
Dedicated to imagining sustainable futures amid this climate catastrophe, this exhibition surveys Saraceno’s work and presents two new commissions, “Museo Aero Solar” (a colossal grounded balloon made of grocery bags) and the mind-blowing “Free the Air: How To Hear the Universe In A Spider/Web,” that allows you to see—or rather hear—the world as a spider.
February 11-April 17
545 West 30th Street
Installation image courtesy of Argencia EFE
Holbein: Capturing Character at the Morgan Library & Museum
Active in Basel during the Reformation, Hans Holbein the Younger is known for his masterful portraits of courtiers, merchants, scholars, and statesmen in 16th-century Basel and later as court painter to Tudor King Henry VIII in England.
The first major retrospective of works by Hans Holberin the Younger in the U.S., Capturing Character provides an excellent look into Holbein’s magnificent portraiture practice, where his subjects, their style and times come alive.
February 11-May 15
225 Madison Avenue
Image: Derich Born, 1533, courtesy of Wikimedia
Charles Ray: Figure Ground at the Met
Charles Ray is known as a trailblazer in sculpture, at the forefront of using technology to help guide his hand in creating breathtaking works. Often using computers and robots in his process, L.A.-based Ray creates work that addresses mass media, consumerism, popular culture and art history.
Though Ray uses technology in addition to his hand, the artist is notoriously slow at producing work, so museum exhibitions are rare for Ray—his last major NYC show was in 1998. But 2022 is different: in addition to the show at the Met, exhibitions opened last month at Glenstone Museum and this month at Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Bourse de Commerce.
January 31-June 5
1000 5th Avenue
Installation image: Anna-Marie Kellen // Metropolitan Museum of Art via WSJ
The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time at Brooklyn Museum
Be sure to make it to The Slipstream before it closes in April! This exhibition pulls work from its collection to provide a profound meditation on 2020. Though the exhibition explores a difficult moment that we are in many ways still in, one is left with feelings of hope and joy.
Artists include Yuji Agematsu, Sanford Biggers, Diedrick Brackens, Mark Bradford, Jonathan Lydon Chase, Mel Chin, Ed Clark, Derek Fordjour, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Aaron Gilbert, Arthur Jafa, Simone Leigh, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Tschabalala Self, Laurie Simmons, Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Fred Wilson, too many to list!
Through April 10
200 Eastern Parkway
Image: detail of work by Derek Fordjour, Blue Horn, 2017, photography by Natasha Schlesinger
Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running at the Jewish Museum
Before he became “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema,” Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) was forced to flee his native Lithuania in 1944. He spent the next five years working in a Nazi work camp and then Displaced Persons camps throughout Germany before Mekas and his brother came to New York as two stateless refugees. Mekas would go on to become a prolific filmmaker (and founder of numerous film co-ops), with much of his work informed by his memory of and longing for his homeland.
Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running explores Mekas’s legacy and presents eleven films in an immersive environment alongside photography, and rare archival materials.
February 18-June 5
1109 5th Avenue
Image: Jonas Mekas photographed by Antanas Sutkus in Semeniškiai, Lithuania, 1971. © Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / LATGA-A, Vilnius, courtesy of Jewish Museum
Liu Xiaodong: Uummannaq at Faurschou New York
At the Faurschou Foundation in Brooklyn, an exhibition of Liu Xiaodong's epic “Greenland” paintings are on view alongside work by Tiffany Chung, Shilpa Gupta, Mona Hatoum and Shirin Neshat. If you’re not familiar, Liu Xiaodong is a Chinese contemporary artist whose large-scale paintings depict modern life. It is no doubt that these epic, intimate works are history paintings, documenting our modern times.
February 27-July 31
148 Green Street, Brooklyn
Image: The last hunters, 2017, courtesy of Pikasus Arte News
Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale at ICP
As its title suggests, Actual Size! presents work whose subject matter are depicted in real scale. With works by Jeff Wall, Ace Lehner, Laura Letinsky, Kija Lucas, Aspen Mays, Tanya Marcuse, among others, Actual Size! playfully explores and pushes the bounds of museum presentations and photography.
January 28-May 2
79 Essex Street
Image: Tanya Marcuse, Woven Nº 30, 2018, © Tanya Marcuse
Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art at the Brooklyn Museum
Monet to Morisot features almost ninety paintings, sculptures and works on paper by artists that include Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Vasily Kandinsky, among others. Together, these works explore and challenge the idea of a canon of European art and unearth new ways of thinking about a genre of art history.
February 11, 2022-May 21, 2023
200 Eastern Parkway
Image: Claude Monet, The Doge’s Palace, 1908, courtesy of Brooklyn Museum
Mark your calendar!
Though these exhibitions are still weeks from opening, make sure they are on your radar—you won’t want to miss them.
Propagazioni: Giuseppe Penone at Sèvres
Opens March 17 at Frick Madison
Image: Propagazione Di Sèvres—Indice Sinistro (Sèvres Propagation—Left Index Finger), 2013 © Archivio Penone
Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents at the Met
Opens April 11 at the Met
Image: Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, courtesy of the Met
Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as it’s Kept
Opens April 6 at the Whitney
Henri Matisse: The Red Studio
Opens May 1 at MoMA
Image: Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, courtesy of MoMA
