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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.
Elliott Hundley, The Lightning’s Bride (detail), 2011 six panels, wood, sound board, ink-jet print, on Kitakata paper, pins, paper, plastic, magnifying lenses, metal, photographs, wire, found paintings, 8' 3" x 24' 1 1/4" x 1' 7".
“Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae”
NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER
DALLAS
Through April 22
Curated by Christopher Bedford
Ambitious, dramatic, and earnestly personal, Elliott Hundley’s assemblage-based practice is forged from ancient narratives and contemporary realities, sublimating notorious characters and plotlines into cyclonic images or structures. “The Bacchae” will feature a dozen works made in the past two years, all drawing from Euripides’s tragedy. Including quasi-figurative sculpture and billboard- size prints, paintings, and collages, this body of work breaks down the revenge story into discrete elements—gendered accoutrements of bacchic ritual are poised like spindly shipwrecks on the gallery floor; a semiabstract portrait of Pentheus renders the young man at once whole and torn to pieces at his mother’s hands. And with essays by curator Christopher Bedford, poet and classicist Anne Carson, critic Doug Harvey, and art historian Richard Meyer, the accompanying catalogue should further tempt the imagination, providing rich perspectives on Hundley’s modern-day interpretations of the classics.
— Catherine Taft
Clay Geerdes, Cockettes Photo, 1972, color photograph, 32 x 24". From “West of Center,” MCA Denver.
“West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977”
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART DENVER (MCA DENVER)
DENVER
Through February 19
Curated by Adam Lerner and Elissa Auther
The Happenings and Coalitions of the New York avant-garde are well known; less so their counterparts from the western US. In a concerted effort to redress this imbalance, “West of Center” assembles more than 130 artworks and artifacts from this highly experimental moment, investigating the extension of aesthetic thought outside of its comfort zone via hybridized modes of social, political, and ecological intervention by collective groups working left of the Continental Divide. Moving between the workshops of Anna and Lawrence Halprin, the media events of Ant Farm, and the agitprop posters of Black Panther Emory Douglas, with stops along the way for Drop City eco-aesthetics and psychedelic light shows, this exhibition (and its catalogue with two dozen contributors) will fill in some blanks in this era’s cultural history while also serving as a timely reminder of what artists can do in the absence of a viable market for art.
— Jan Tumlir
Zoe Strauss, Mom Were OK, 2005, color photograph, 12 x 18".
“Zoe Strauss: Ten Years”
PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
PHILADELPHIA
Through April 22
Curated by Peter Barberie
From 2000 (when she bought herself a camera for her thirtieth birthday) until 2010, untrained photographer Zoe Strauss documented the strangers and architecture she encountered in her hometown of Philadelphia and in her travels. The resultant bracing images reflect the harsh realities of late capitalism and at the same time capture glimpses of love. Each May, Strauss would hang the prints and sell color photocopies of them for five dollars in a one-day-only exhibition under an I-95 overpass. This show, the artist’s first major retrospective, revisits that decadelong project, presenting approximately 170 prints, a group of slide shows assembled by the artist, and thirty-nine billboards placed throughout the city that return her pictures from those years to the streets in which she took them. A catalogue features essays by Barberie and Sally Stein, and a conversational text by Strauss herself, who is, as the artist might say, the real deal.
— Julia Bryan-Wilson
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
Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea, 2007, still from a color video, 5 minutes 30 seconds.
“The Workers”
MASSACHUSETTS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART (MASS MOCA)
NORTH ADAMS, MA
Through March 15
Curated by Susan Cross and Carla Herrera-Prats
“That ain’t working”: The refrain from the 1985 Dire Straits hit sums up the widespread demotion of cultural production from the ranks of honest labor to mere fun and games. According to this worldview, artists get “money for nothing,” not to mention “chicks for free.” “The Workers” proposes that the status of labor in our current economic climate is still up for debate, bringing together roughly forty pieces (some made specifically for the show) in a wide range of media, by twenty-five international artists and collectives including Allan Sekula, Emily Jacir, Harun Farocki, Laboratorio 060, and Yoshua Okón. Lent resonance by MASS MOCA’s post-postindustrial location, this exhibition promises to illuminate the ongoing clashes of gender, class, and global capital intrinsic to representations of work—artistic and otherwise.
— Julia Bryan-Wilson
Yvonne Rainer, Trio A, 1973. © Babette Mangolte Courtesy of Broadway 1602, New York.
Yvonne Rainer
DIA:BEACON
BEACON
Through May 12
Curated by Yasmil Raymond
On the heels of its well-acclaimed collaborations with Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, Dia will present the work of avant-garde choreographer Yvonne Rainer beginning this fall. Building on Sid Sachs’s excellent archival show “Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002,” Yasmil Raymond has organized a live exhibition that will stage seven of Rainer’s key pieces in varied combinations over three weekends. The repertoire will range from early pieces, including Three Satie Spoons, 1961, and We Shall Run, 1963, to Rainer’s newest work, Assisted Living: Good Sports 2, 2011 (one of several that she has choreographed since returning to dance from a nearly three-decade hiatus). Watching Rainer and her group of dancers perform cheek by jowl with artwork by her venerable New York peers will be revealing. And Dia:Beacon’s out-of-town romance is sure to invoke the spirit of Anna Halprin’s dance-deck retreat in the woods of Marin County—a site that influenced Rainer’s earliest experiments in movement.