Spring Museum Guide
Spring Museum Guide
New York has no shortage of exceptional museum exhibitions opening this spring. From a historic Ingres exhibition at the Met to a retrospective of works by Amy Sherald at the Whitney, there are numerous landmark shows at New York’s beloved art institutions this season.
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
1000 5th Avenue
Casper David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature
Through May 11
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)’s smoky, spiritual landscapes inspire meditation regarding the bond between nature and the self. An exhibition of evocative landscapes by the great painter of German Romanticism display the artist’s masterful ability to present the complex human relationship to the natural world in any medium. This wonderful exhibition includes Friedrich’s most famous works, including Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and The Monk by the Sea.
Image courtesy of the Met
Sargent and Paris
April 27-August 3
Sargent and Paris surveys the amazing portraits and figurative works of the American expatriate painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), who achieved great success in Paris and beyond as the most sought-after portraitist of his time. Sargent and Parischarts Sargent’s early career, beginning with his 1874 arrival in Paris as an art student through his rise in the 1880s when he became celebrated and scandalized at the Paris Salon with his utterly beautiful portrait Madame X.
Image courtesy of the Met
Lorna Simpson: Source Notes
May 19-November 2
Working on the vanguard of conceptual photography since the 1980s, Lorna Simpson is known for her intensely-beautiful works that source, collage, and draw inspiration from vintage photography found in the archives of Ebony Magazine, Jet Magazine, the Associated Press, and the Library of Congress. Source Notes will present over thirty works by Simpson that encompass recent sculptures, collages, and major paintings, including works presented at Simpson’s celebrated Venice Biennale debut in 2015. This exciting exhibition will be the first to survey Simpson’s entire painting practice to date.
Image courtesy of the Met
The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble
April 15-October 19
This year’s rooftop commission will be refreshing, inspiring, and unique with Jennie C. Jones’s Ensemble, a large-scale installation of acoustic sculptures that explores the formal and sonic potential of stringed instruments. Jones has often employed sound and listening into her practice, from works that feature lines and bars embedded into their compositions referring to musical notation to works with sound-absorbing fiberglass panels affixed to them. This genre-defying installation continues Jones’s embrace of sound as a means to challenge minimalism, informed by her time spent immersed with Black improvisation and avant-garde music.
Image by Joshua Franzos
THE FRICK COLLECTION
1 East 70th Street
The Frick Collection
Reopening April 17
After five years of renovations and a stint at the Breuer Building on Madison Avenue, the Frick Collection will finally reopen its Gilded Age home at the 1914 Carrère and Hastings mansion this spring. Visitors can enjoy reinstalled masterworks in new and restored spaces on the first floor and explore new galleries on the previously private second floor, which will be publicly accessible for the first time.
Image courtesy of Selldorf Architects
Vermeer’s Love Letters
June 18-September 8
Vermeer’s Love Letters, a three-work special exhibition, will inaugurate the institution’s new special exhibition galleries after its massive renovation. Bringing together works by Vermeer from around the world, the show unites Mistress and Maid from the Frick’s own collection with The Love Letter on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Lady Writing a Letter, with her Maid on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland.
Image courtesy of the Frick
THE GUGGENHEIM
1071 Fifth Avenue
Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers at the Guggenheim
April 18-January 18
This spring, a major solo exhibition by contemporary powerhouse Rashid Johnson will fill the Guggenheim’s rotunda. This retrospective presents nearly 90 works in an array of media, including Johnson’s searing black-soap paintings, fearless spray-painted text works, extraordinary large-scale sculptures, and rarer works on film and video. Topping off the exhibition at the apex of the rotunda will be Johnson’s Sanguine, a monumental site-specific work with an embedded piano for accompanying musical performances.
Image courtesy of the Guggenheim
Collection in Focus: Faith Ringgold at the Guggenheim
May 9-September 14
The Guggenheim will also present Faith Ringgold’s momentous work Woman on a Bridge #1 of 5: Tar Beach (1988) contextualized with works that inspired Ringgold (by artists such as Chagall and Picasso) and works that Ringgold in turn inspired (by artists such as Sanford Biggers and Tschabalala Self). This monumental quilt is the first in a five-part series that narrates the story of a young girl who dreams of flying from her Harlem rooftop to celebrate and explore her sense of self, freedom, liberty, and creativity.
Image courtesy of the Guggenheim
MoMA
11 West 53rd Street
Jack Whitten: The Messenger
March 23-August 2
In a brilliant career spanning six decades, Jack Whitten became known for his original, dynamic, and imposing works that bridge the divide between gestural abstraction and process-driven art. Opening at MoMA this month, Jack Whitten: The Messenger features over 175 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that illuminate Whitten’s singular artistic journey as a witness to technological change and racial prejudice. Spanning the 1960s to the end of the artist’s life in 2018, this exhibition presents Whitten’s explorations of race, technology, love, and war, informed by his involvement with the Civil Rights movement in segregated Alabama as well as his experience working on the vanguard of the New York art scene starting in 1960s.
Image courtesy of MoMA
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
April 20-September 13
Woven Histories shines a spotlight on abstract textile art and spans a range of textile practices, including weaving, knotting, braiding, basketry, apparel making, and many more examples of art making that challenge widely-accepted notions that separate fine art with crafts. This expansive exhibition brings together over 150 artworks by Anni Albers, Hannah Hoch, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Ed Rossbach, Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel, Igshaan Adams, and many others.
Image courtesy of NGA
Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers
May 11-September 27
What Stands Behind the Flowers is dedicated to the newly-discovered portfolio of botanical art by the visionary pioneer of abstract art Hilma af Klint. Klint is best known for her highly-spiritual works that weave between pure abstraction, surrealism, and mysticism, but this exhibition presents a new angle to Klint’s work with delicate, jewel-toned watercolors of flowers that shed light on the artist’s attune to nature.
Image courtesy of MoMA
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
99 Gansevoort Street
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
April 9-August 10
Spotlighting one of the most prominent painter of portraits working today, American Sublime will be the first exhibition at a major New York museum dedicated to Amy Sherald. Featuring fifty paintings dating from 2007 on, this exhibition brings together Sherald’s most iconic paintings, including portraits of First Lady Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, with rare and new works. Sherald has become an art world force thanks to her powerful practice of depicting Black Americans—subjects that have historically been left out of portrait and figurative painting—and art lovers around the world are hungry for her beautiful and arresting visions of selfhood and interiority.
Be sure to look out for Four Ways of Being, a billboard commission by Sherald accompanying the exhibition that faces the Whitney and High Line.
Image courtesy of the Whitney
EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO
1230 5th Avenue
Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop
April 23-August 3
The first large-scale museum exhibition of works by the Brooklyn-born and based artist Candida Alvarez, Circle, Point, Hoop brings together painting, drawings, and collage works that span five decades of this artist’s career. Having emerged onto the male-dominated New York art scene of the 1970s, Alvarez carved out her own voice with works that interweave her personal narrative with formal exploration. Alvarez’s work fearlessly oscillates between abstraction and figuration with colorful, lyrical pieces that make your heart sing.
Image courtesy of El Museo del Barrio