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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.
Edward Ruscha, Standard Station with Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 1964, oil on canvas, 65 x 121 1/2".
Ed Ruscha: Road Tested
MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
FORT WORTH
Through April 17 2017
Curated by Michael Auping
In Ed Ruscha’s 1967 artist’s book Royal Road Test, language hits the highway. Through photos that resemble crime scene evidence, it documents the aftermath of defenestrating a typewriter from a moving Buick, a caper that synthesized two of the artist’s enduring preoccupations—words and roads. While Ruscha’s linguistic endeavors have been ably examined in exhibition and criticism alike, this show is the first to consider the automotive as a through-line in his work. It is most apparent as subject, in images of streets and maps, filling stations and car grilles. Yet, as the exhibition’s ninety paintings, drawings, photographs, books, and prints confirm, the theme also registers on the level of medium—in panoramic perspectives that imply a vantage behind the windshield—and procedure: “Road testing,” with its connotations of trial and experiment, is an apt figure for Ruscha’s half century (and counting) of restless innovation.
— Lisa Turvey
F. Holland Day, Menelek, 1897, platinum print, 9 5/8 x 7 11/16".
“Making A Presence: F. Holland Day in Artistic Photography”
ADDISON GALLERY OF AMERICAN ART
ANDOVER, MA
Through July 31
Curated by Trevor Fairbrother
Self-portraiture has always been a realm of play between representing oneself and imagining what one might like to be. Nineteenth-century photographer F. Holland Day is one of the more curious examples of the artist- as-his-own-affected-subject. A wealthy publisher and bibliophile, Day photographed himself and others––often male nudes––in stark scenes evoking Christian, classical, and mythological characters. The Addison’s exhibition will unveil nearly forty works made by Day between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including his well-known self-portrait as Christ (The Seven Words, 1898), along with related ephemera and portraits of the artist taken by his associates. The attending catalogue essay by Fairbrother will, one hopes, raise questions as to the depth of Day’s religious convictions versus his apparent delight in masquerade.
— Richard Hawkins
Tom Wesselmann, Bedroom Painting No. 38, 1978, oil on canvas, 84 x 97".
“Beyond Pop: Tom Wesselmann”
MONTRÉAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS | MICHAL AND RENATA HORNSTEIN PAVILION
MONTREAL
Through October 7
Curated by Stéphane Aquin and Marco Livingstone
When Pop artist Tom Wesselmann ghostwrote his own monograph in 1980 (his nom de plume: Slim Stealingworth), it wasn’t so much a postmodernist gesture of institutional masquerade as it was an attempt to slip himself into the canon; until that point, scholars simply hadn’t given him the attention he felt he deserved. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will argue for Wesselmann’s canonization by more conventional means, hosting his first North American retrospective, including 150 paintings, drawings, collages, and models (plus archival material) dating from 1959 through 2004. There will be nudes in abundance, as well as lesser-known shaped canvases and metallic abstractions. The catalogue includes scholarly essays, testimonials by younger artists, and (most astonishingly) documents of Wesselmann’s forays into country music.
— Sarah K. Rich
Tony Feher, Untitled, 2009, emergency thermal blanket, 19 x 17 x 12".
Tony Feher
DES MOINES ART CENTER
DES MOINES
Through September 2
Curated by Claudia Schmuckli
Tony Feher’s work can certainly be beautiful, but words such as poetic—often used to describe his art—tend to bowdlerize its achievements. The frisson of Feher’s project of imparting aura to mass-produced materials (water bottles, pennies, marbles, plastic bags, polystyrene insulation) derives from the way in which his sculptural arrangements admit to their own precarity: What if the viewer is unwilling or unable to recognize the aesthetic dimension of, for example, Two Unfinished Liters of Diet Coke, Side by Side, on a Styrofoam Box, 1996? This twenty-year survey, organized by Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum, will present fifty-one such works and, in so doing, illuminate the delicate balancing act that subtends Feher’s exhortation to find artistic surplus value everywhere, hidden in plain view.
— Alexander Scrimgeour
Lutz Bacher, Pipe Organ, 2009-2011, tin, paint, speakers, four pipes, and a Yamaha organ, dimensions variable.
Whitney Biennial
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
NEW YORK CITY
Through May 27
Curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders
This living, evolving iteration of the Whitney Biennial (perhaps the last to appear in the famed Breuer building) will give us the American classic in a versatile and fluctuating format: Painting and sculpture installed in an open-plan design such that the idiosyncrasies of the museum’s near-windowless brutalist shell will dictate spatial relations; meanwhile, a designated cinema space––programmed in consultation with Light Industry founders Thomas Beard and Ed Halter––will displace the usual warren of looped-video viewing rooms, allowing invited filmmakers to host screenings of their own work along with that of their influences. Expect to make repeat visits––not just for the films but also for a throng of music, theater, and dance projects planned to take over the fourth floor. Who’s to say whether these structural and programmatic innovations are enough to channel America’s recent revolutionary rumblings, but at least for the spring, the work of the fifty-some artists featured here may well radicalize the Whitney.
— Caroline Busta
Nathalie Djurberg, Deceiving looks, 2011, still from digital video, 5 minutes and 58 seconds.
Nathalie Djurberg
NEW MUSEUM
NEW YORK CITY
Through July 8
Curated by Eric Crosby and Dean Otto
In Nathalie Djurberg’s frenzied stop-motion animations, even innocuous actions—a kiss, a lick—quickly turn violent. The crude, childlike appearance of the Swedish artist’s handmade figures and environments renders her work all the more sinister and unsettling. For “The Parade,” her largest exhibition in an American museum to date, Djurberg explores the social psychology of birds—their mating rituals, flocking patterns, and territorial displays—with eighty-five freestanding mixed-media sculptures and five films (all of which are synced to one incongruously chipper score by Hans Berg). A catalogue with essays by the two curators will supplement Djurberg’s all-new body of work. Taking these strange winged creatures as a point of departure, the artist will undoubtedly present us with a terrifying and exhilarating universe of aviary perversions.