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.
Susan Rothenberg, Cabin Fever, 1976,
acrylic and tempera on canvas, 67 x 84 1/8". © 2009 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Susan Rothenberg
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM
SANTA FE
Through May 16
Curated by Michael Auping
The earliest of the twenty-five canvases in this exhibition (organized with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico) date from the mid-1970s, when a group of works on horse themes catapulted Susan Rothenberg to the forefront of the New Image painters. Long settled in Galisteo, Texas, Rothenberg has for some time employed a much smaller, stitch-like stroke, a mode resistant to the “frozen motion” (as the artist describes it) of the equine ideogram on which her considerable reputation rests. Absorbed by the small wonders of Texan domestic life as well as by the state’s vast landscape, she now makes paintings that appear eccentrically Impressionist, with a characteristic loss of edge as figures and grounds meld into one another owing to her agile and flickering touch.
— Robert Pincus-Witten
Yinka Shonibare, Odile and Odette, 2005, still from a color video, 14 minutes 28 seconds.
Yinka Shonibare
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
WASHINGTON, DC
Through March 7
Curated by Rachel Kent
In traditional folktales, the trickster serves to reveal cultural complexities, and as critic Jean Fisher has noted, this character has “a global reach,” popping up in narratives everywhere, subverting rules, and confusing codes. So, too, Member of the British Empire Yinka Shonibare, whose multireferential sculptures, installations, paintings, videos, and photographs have reverse-colonized the art world, peopling it with a cast of color-saturated, quasi-surreal masqueraders (often headless and usually engaged in extravagantly absurd pursuits). Featuring twenty works from the past twelve years, this major midcareer survey will highlight Shonibare’s newest output—and promises a carnival of both visual and postcolonial complexity.
— Rachel Withers
Georgia O'Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918, oil on canvas, 35 x 29 1/8". © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction
THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION
WASHINGTON, DC
Through May 9
Curated by Barbara Haskell, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Bruce Robertson, and Elizabeth Hutton Tur
For the past few decades, American art’s first lady has looked a bit kitschy to insiders, her artistic mode as pseudo-authentic as “southwestern” cuisine. Then there is her troublesome status as a celebrity, thanks in part to Alfred Stieglitz’s racy portraits (some of which appear in this exhibition), as well as to her subject matter. But maybe we were wrong. By foregrounding her abstractions—130 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures—the case can be made for a radicality underlying her popularity, a rigor beneath the flowers. And seen through the eyes of today’s younger artists, O’Keeffe’s brand of American art looks interesting again, specific and local amid globalism’s anyspacewhatever, late, late modernism.
— Katy Siegel
Katarzyna Kozyra, Summertale, 2008, still from a color video, 20 minutes 30 seconds.
“Virtuoso Illusion”
MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER
CAMBRIDGE, MA
Through April 4
Curated by Michael Rush
This exhibition examines how artists have long used drag not just to genderbend but also to invent new personae using a range of technologies. Featuring videos, installations, photographs, and documentation of performances by many of the usual suspects (Claude Cahun, Andy Warhol, the inevitable Matthew Barney), it also includes bracing trans and queer work by Katarzyna Kozyra, Kalup Linzy, and Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn. But in line with the exhibition’s subtitle, “Cross Dressing and the New Media Avant-Garde,” it seems to be Ryan Trecartin who is the engine driving the show, with his rowdy refusal of stable identities altogether. “There are so many things to be, Sally!” one of his characters proclaims. “I know,” responds another, “and I don’t want to be any of them.” A catalogue with essays by curator Michael Rush, art historian Ara H. Merjian, and performance artist John Kelly promises to grant such lines some historical ballast.
— Julia Bryan-Wilson
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Styrofoam Cups), 2003, Styrofoam cups and hot glue, dimensions variable.
Tara Donovan
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO, DOWNTOWN
SAN DIEGO
Through February 28
Curated by Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel
Tara Donovan makes I-can-do-that sculptures by taking a household item—a Styrofoam cup, straight pin, drinking straw, or toothpick—and positioning it among thousands of its ilk. You could do it, but you wouldn't. You wouldn't log hundreds of hours meticulously assembling, arranging, affixing, or otherwise conjoining countless identical consumer goods. The results, when seen from afar, offer gestalt experiences that, paradoxically, often conjure natural associations, with, for example, waves, clouds, and mountains. Donovan's first major museum show, accompanied by a comprehensive monograph documenting nearly all her projects to date, presents a dozen sculptures and five major installations from the past twelve years.
— Brian Sholis
Bahc Yiso, We Are Happy, 2004, mixed media, 2.3' x 137.8'.
“Your Bright Future”
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
HOUSTON
Through February 14
Curated by Sunjung Kim, Christine Starkman, and Lynn Zelevansky
Organized by LACMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea” features installations, sculptures, videos, computer animations, and Web-based work by artists born in South Korea between 1957 and 1972 and raised during a period of sustained political upheaval. Intended to redress what cocurator Lynn Zelevansky calls Korea’s “virtual absence from the Western imagination,” the show is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Zelevansky, cocurator Christine Starkman, and art historian Joan Kee, as well as interviews with the artists and an informative time line of Korean art and politics from 1945 to the present.