There’s a wealth of terrific museum shows hitting New York this fall. Be sure not to miss any of them! Click through our slide show to see the ones that have us most excited.
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"Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Opens Sept. 18
Andy Warhol’s influence on contemporary art is undeniable, but no institution has attempted to track it definitively—until now. “Regarding Warhol” gathers works by artists who owe great debts to the king of downtown. The show is divided into five themes seen in Warhol and his successors: “Daily News: From Banality to Disaster” (Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Ai Weiwei), “Portraiture: Celebrity and Power” (Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Cindy Sherman), “Queer Studies: Shifting Identities” (Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Christopher Makos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie), “Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction, and Seriality” (Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Christopher Wool) and “No Boundaries: Business, Collaboration, and Spectacle” (Koons again, Takashi Murakami). At the end, you will wonder if there is a square inch of contemporary art Warhol didn’t influence.
(Courtesy the Met) -
"Mickalene Thomas: The Origin of the Universe" at the Brooklyn Museum | Opens Sept. 28
Fresh from the Santa Monica Museum of Art, “Origin of the Universe” is the Brooklyn-based Ms. Thomas’s first solo museum exhibition, and it’s jam-packed with rhinestones, afros and other “Blaxploitation” ephemera from her childhood in the 1970s. The history of painting is never far away in her work, and the show takes its title from a piece based on the Courbet painting of the same name, which replaces the original’s white, er, subject with a black one. The show will also feature a new series of paintings that offer a unique take on landscapes. Ms. Thomas is not one to miss: none other than Michelle Obama commissioned a portrait from her.
(Courtesy Brooklyn Museum) -
"Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969-1989" at the New Museum | Opens Sept. 19
Remember the Bowery from the days before it was the hot spot for startup millionaires and the twee coffee that runs through their veins? No? Well, then this exhibition will either jog your memory or, for a younger generation, provide a dose of history. Urban decay is documented here, with plenty of drug abuse and deadbeat landlords. The artist list is diverse. There’s Marcia Resnick, Keith Haring, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, and even Adam Purple, the so-called “Guerrilla Gardener” who sowed his seeds in abandoned lots, back when those existed downtown.
Arturo Vega, Photo booth self portraits, ca. 1974. Black-and-white photographs, 8 1/4 x 9 1/2 in (20.9 x 24.1 cm). (Courtesy Arturo Vega) -
"Bashford Dean and the Creation of the Arms and Armor Department" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Opens Oct. 2
Admit it: if you’re at the Met and you pass the arms and armor collection you can’t help but take a peek. Don’t be ashamed: we’re all murderous animals, it’s quite normal. The department celebrates its centennial this year, and to mark the occasion, they’ve assembled an exhibition honoring Bashford Dean, the curator who founded it. An eccentric professor, Dean trained as a zoologist and was Curator of Fishes at the American Museum of Natural History before coming to the Met, where he laid the foundation for the field of research at large. Oh, and there will be samurai swords.
Dean, ca. 1900, wearing a full suit of Japanese Armor (04.4.2) that he acquired while conducting scientific research in Japan. He later donated the armor and his entire collection of Japanese arms and armor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum) -
"Wade Guyton OS" at the Whitney | Opens Oct. 4
Best known for his elaborate collaborations with artist Kelley Walker, Wade Guyton makes paintings with Epson inkjet printers and flatbed scanners. With this mid-career retrospective, the Whitney continues to look at some of the themes of Cory Arcangel’s from last year: the effect on art of digital imagery and processes. Mr. Guyton’s show takes as its title the standard abbreviation for a computer’s operating system, and his work can be understood as an exploration of painting’s OS. This may be his first major survey exhibition in a museum, but it’s not his first prolonged stay in one: as a student he worked as a guard at Dia: Chelsea.
(Courtesy the Whitney) -
"Picasso Black and White" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Opens Oct. 5
Picasso was, of course, a master of all colors but working in black and white (and gray) led him to new depths of expression—think of Guernica. Aside from some early blue and rose paintings, the starkness of the Guggenheim’s show—it consists of some 100 pieces in a variety of mediums dating from 1904 to 1971—may be overwhelming, in the best possible way; wear a tux, if you’re looking to blend in.
(Courtesy Guggenheim) -
"Matt Connors: Impressionism" at MoMA PS1 | Opens Oct. 21
New York’s young painters have been doing some pretty fascinating things with abstraction and Matt Connors is one of the best. Here’s a line from the press release that helps explain why he’s so good: “His paintings are remarkable for the apparent thinness of their surface; paint ends up in them, rather than on them.” The works are somehow archaeological, which explains why previous texts on his works, such as one for a show last year at Lüttgenmeijer in Berlin, expound upon things like mysterious Peruvian drawings: were they left by the ancients or by extraterrestrials? The MoMA PS1 exhibition is Mr. Connors’s first solo U.S. museum outing, and it will be a mix of older and newer works, some created specifically for the show.
Small Super Graphic, 2010, Oil and pencil on linen, 15.75 x 12 in (40.01 x 30.48 cm). (Courtesy Robert Wedemeyer/Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles) -
"Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos" at The New Museum | Opens Oct. 24
Don’t you hate it when you don’t get all the art history references in a show? Well, you’re in luck. This show of the German conceptual artist is styled as an imaginary universe rather than a retrospective and will take the form of installations featuring her drawings and ceramics, along with examples by their artistic forebears and successors. Didn’t know her knit paintings play well with Judith Scott’s yarn sculptures? Not a problem—Scott’s threadwork will be right next to Trockel’s. Now if only she’d address the precedent for that piece where she had spiders spin webs while on LSD …
(Courtesy New Museum) -
"Martha Rosler: Meta-Monumental Garage Sale" at MoMA | Opens Nov. 17
For her first big solo show at MoMA, Martha Rosler is going straight to the heart of the museum, its atrium—the very same space where, two years ago, Marina Abramovic engaged in staring contests with total strangers during her own retrospective. Ms. Rosler’s show is just as unconventional, if not more so: originally staged at the University of California, San Diego in 1973, and then in Basel, Switzerland, and elsewhere, it’s an actual garage sale hawking items donated by the artist, MoMA staff and the general public. Visitors will have a chance to haggle with Ms. Rosler, who will donate the proceeds to a charity. Donations have been solicited over the summer, though thankfully, as The New York Times notes, “Food and other perishable items, liquids, weapons and toxic or hazardous materials [were not] accepted.”
Martha Rosler, Travelling Garage Sale, La Mamelle Gallery, San Francisco, USA, 1977. (Courtesy MoMA) -
"Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread" at Park Avenue Armory | Opens Dec. 7
The Park Avenue Armory is quickly becoming an essential stop on New York’s contemporary art itinerary, and this fall’s collaboration with Ann Hamilton will be a must-see. Ms. Hamilton has long had an obsession with text and its destruction—in 1993, an installation at Dia: Chelsea consisted of a figure in a room filled with horse hair, meticulously burning lines of text in a book—and she’s continued the theme here. Readers stand at one end of the hall, their voices beamed to portable radio receivers that visitors may carry with them as they explore the space. The pièce de résistance: 30 fairground-style swings in the center of the Drill Hall.
Hamilton. (Courtesy Ann Hamilton Studio)
