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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.
William Eggleston, Untitled (Back of Black Car in Green Vines) from the “Los Alamos Project”, 1965–1974, dye-transfer print, 16 x 20".
The Spectacular of Vernacular
ACKLAND ART MUSEUM
CHAPEL HILL
Through April 18
Curated by Darsie Alexander
For this show, Alexander explores regionalism and the culturally specific, calling on some thirty artists to consider the ramifications of the “vernacular”—particularly as formulated by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas (1972)—in light of our changing relationship to mass culture during the past four decades. Featuring artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois, Walker Evans, and William E. Jones, the exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that includes a substantial essay by Alexander. As the show proposes a newer view of the vernacular as entwined with spectacle, hopefully attention will still be paid to its etymology as firmly located within historical questions of ownership, race, and class.
— Johanna Burton
Jesús Rafael Soto, Sans titre (La ficelle-matière transformée) (Untitled [The String-Transformed Material]), 1961 paint on wire and wood, 35 3/4 x 35 3/4 x 7".
“Soto: Paris And Beyond, 1950–1970”
GREY ART GALLERY
NEW YORK CITY
Through March 31
Curated by Estrellita B. Brodsky
If what set postwar France’s most ambitious artists apart was their grappling with painting’s potential as a generative site for aesthetic forms, perceptual models, and social experiences, then it is high time to reassess the “kinetic” contributions of the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto. At the Grey Art Gallery, approximately fifty works made in the twenty years after he moved to Paris in 1950, including a dozen of his “Vibrations,” will evidence Soto’s experiments with painting’s hybrid condition as a material surface provoking immaterial effects, as a static object inducing arbitrary incidents, and as a flat support conjuring three-dimensional phenomenological possibilities. By exacerbating these paradoxes, Soto helped redefine the spectator as an active participant, perhaps anticipating the contestation of power that marked the events of May ’68. Brodsky’s and Sarah K. Rich’s catalogue essays will expand on Soto’s dialogue with contemporaries such as Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely.
— Nuit Banai
Radcliffe Bailey, Enroute, 2006, mixed media on Plexiglas, 68 x 68 x 5 1/2".
“Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine”
DAVIS MUSEUM AND CULTURAL CENTER, WELLESLEY COLLEGE
WELLESLEY
Through May 6
Curated by Carol Thompson and Michael Rooks
For the most comprehensive Radcliffe Bailey survey to date, the High Museum will fete its local son with a dense exhibition organized into three sections: “Water,” “Blues,” and “Blood.” The show will comprise more than thirty works made between the early 1990s and the present, along with a selection of African sculptures underscoring the artist’s investigation of his own ancestral history. (Several years ago, Bailey traced his DNA to its Mende origins.) Central to the installation will be Bailey’s medicine-cabinet sculptures, which encase cultural talismans spanning the breadth of the artist’s sources of inspiration. A catalogue with newly commissioned essays accompanies the show.