There are any number of can’t miss museum shows this fall, from the Obama Portraits and Jasper Johns to Labyrinth of Forms and Surrealism Beyond Borders.
Here are this season’s must-see museum exhibitions in NYC.
Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald’s presidential portraits of former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama are on a five city tour across the country so that millions of Americans have the chance to see these important works of American art. And through October 24, the Brooklyn Museum is home to these powerful presidential portraits!
The tour began at the Art Institute of Chicago, is currently in New York, and will continue on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. See these pieces of American history before they leave NYC for LA!
The largest and most comprehensive retrospective of works by Jasper Johns ever, Mind/Mirror is a two-part exhibition simultaneously taking place at the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two museums with which Johns has long-standing relationships.
Planned as a celebration of Johns’ 90th birthday (but postponed a year due to Covid, with Johns recently celebrating 91!), the exhibition presents some of Johns’ most iconic works along with never-before exhibited masterpieces in a range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing and prints.
Greater New York is MoMA PS1’s quinquennial survey of artists currently living and working in New York. Presenting over 100 works by 47 artists and collectives, this year’s brilliant iteration explores a few ideas: land rights, under-represented artists, and the artists who have been cast aside to the margins of art history. In addition to a diverse roster of artists, the exhibition features a range of media and is extremely engaging from start to finish.
This fall marks a season of Warhol-mania in New York, with Photo Factory at Fotografiska and Revelation at the Brooklyn Museum! Photo Factory at Fotografiska presents 120 photographs and four 16mm videos that come together as an intimate visual diary, documenting Warhol’s rich life and vibrant circle.
Andy Warhol: Revelation explores how the artist’s Catholic upbringing profoundly impacted his career. From his deifying portraits of celebrities to his appropriated Renaissance masterpieces, Catholic imagery appears in Warhol’s work again and again. This exhibition offers a new lens through which we can study and learn more about this master of American pop art.
At the age of 71, Joseph E. Yoakum (1891-1972) took up a new practice: drawing the beautiful landscapes he had travelled to throughout his life. Opening this November at MoMA, Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw presents over 100 works by Yoakum—a self-taught artist who made the majority of his work within the last ten years of his life. These extraordinary landscapes, some real and others imagined, reveal the mind of an artist who saw intense beauty and his own identity in the world around him.
Jennifer Packer’s portraits of family and friends blur the lines between abstraction and formalism, presenting a new approach to portraiture. Together, Packer’s intimate works exhibit beautiful views of Black life as her sitters look back, their commanding presence felt through Packer’s evocative brushwork and ability for her works to come to life. The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing brings together over thirty drawings and paintings, making this show the largest survey exhibition of Packer’s works to date.
Gillian Laub documents the intense emotional, psychological and political landscapes of her family through her photographs. In her works, intense emotions and family dynamics are on display as the inner worlds of her subjects are revealed.
Organized in reverse-chronological order along the Guggenheim’s ramp, Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle presents the work of Kandinsky as tied to periods of the artist’s life in space and time. This exhibition begins with paintings made at the end of Kandinsky’s life in France, charts back to work made in Germany (where he taught at the Bauhaus) and finally to Russia, where Kandinsky’s life began.
This amazing exhibition reveals Kandinsky’s ultimate pursuit for spiritual expression, what Kandinsky called the artist’s “inner necessity,” as he pioneered non-representational painting.
Through September 5
1071 5th Avenue
Images: Dominant Curve, April 1936 (above); Striped, November 1934 (below) | courtesy of the Artists Rights Society
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction features roughly 400 works by the modern artist and includes textiles, applied arts objects, marionettes, interior and architectural designs, furniture, paintings and relief sculptures, works on paper, photographs, and more.
This retrospective traces the innovative artist’s rich career, which includes stints as an applied arts teacher; member of the Dada movement; textile maker; designer of stained glass windows, murals, furniture, interiors, and buildings; painter; sculptor; magazine editor; and trailblazer of geometric abstraction!
In art history books, surrealism is often framed as a Western European movement. Surrealism Beyond Borders seeks to shift the conversation as it considers the reality of the Surrealist movement: a revolution where dreams and the unconscious are prioritized over the everyday, a phenomenon which occurred through geographical borders and periods of times. Surrealism Beyond Borders explores the movement across 45 countries and eight decades.
October 11-January 30
1000 5the Avenue
Pictured: Koga Harue, Umi (The Sea), 1929 |courtesy of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
In the 1930s, abstraction began sweeping the modern art world as the movement à la mode, with many of America’s great artists dedicating themselves to abstraction as they pursued the development of a new visual language that reflected their times. Many of the most important figures within the American abstract art movement were women.
Though a few of these trailblazing female artists, such as Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Helen Frankenthaler, and Alma Thomas, have been recognized by the history books, many have not. Labyrinth of Forms is dedicated to the amazing women artists who lead the abstract art movement. The exhibition presents works by 27 artists, some famous and others less so, and presents abstract art in a new way to new generations.
In its fifth iteration, the New Museum’s 2021 Triennial features the work of forty international artists, all of whom are under fifty years old. This year’s triennial takes its title from a Brazilian proverb:
Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura (Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole).
(Like the theme of the proverb, the works on view made from a diverse range of medium emphasize resilience and transformation.)
October 28-January 23
235 Bowery
Image: Amalie Smith, Clay Theory, 2019 (still). 3D video, color, sound; 18:05 min | courtesy the artist
Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams provides an epic deep dive into one of Paris’s storied fashion houses. Journeying into Dior’s rich history, the exhibition showcases the evolution of Dior’s garments and tells the story of how the fashion house blurred the lines between couture and ready-to-wear.
For the exhibition, the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court is transformed into a magical fashion wonderland, showcasing over 200 incredible couture garments, accessories, videos, fashion sketches, photographs and more.
