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.
Digital rendering of James Turrell’s Skyspace installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2013. Rendering: Andreas Tjeldflaat.
James Turrell
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
HOUSTON, LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK
Through August 18
Curated by Alison de Lima Greene, Carmen Giménez, Michael Govan, Christine Y. Kim, Nat Tro
With works ranging from small enclosures to volcano-size constructions, James Turrell has spent more than four decades crafting spaces in which to contemplate natural and artificial light. Beginning this April, three institutions in as many cities will work in concert to present a retrospective: The MFAH will gather a suite of the artist’s light projections and installations from 1967 to today; LACMA’s sprawling chapter will feature almost fifty drawings, photographs, models, and holograms; and in his first solo museum exhibition in New York since 1980, Turrell will transform the Guggenheim’s rotunda into a vast Skyspace. This tripartite exhibition will occasion two new publications and unveil many works for the first time, in a continent-spanning presentation befitting an artist who addresses spatial, architectural, and geographic context on scales both intimate and vast.
— James Merle Thomas
Hung Liu, Chinese Profile III, 1998, oil on canvas, 80 x 80”.
“Summoning Ghosts: The Art Of Hung Liu”
OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA
OAKLAND, CA
Through June 30
Curated by René de Guzman
Hung Liu’s debut retrospective of more than eighty works will juxtapose her socialist-realist sketches from the 1970s, made while the artist was still living in China and at the height of the Cultural Revolution, with paintings realized since her immigration to the United States in 1984. Liu has an affinity for portraits—her luminous canvases drip with the likenesses of children, laborers, and the elderly, many depicted in timeless, ambiguous environments—and while her symbolism and pictorial narratives convey painterly reflections on a haunted past, her works stir the collective memory of American audiences in their visualization of the traumas of cultural assimilation. Liu’s life experience and wide-ranging technical repertoire will be explored in the show’s catalogue, in essays by de Guzman, Bill Berkson, Stephanie Hanor, Wu Hung, Yiyun Li, and Karen Smith.
— Lee Ambrozy
“An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and their Circle”
CROCKER ART MUSEUM
SACRAMENTO
Through September 1
Curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff
Finally, with Jay DeFeo’s epic work making a grand tour, a definitive edition of Robert Duncan’s The H. D. Book becoming available, and Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian’s recent collection of Jack Spicer’s poetry spiking the cultural punch, certain elemental structures of the San Francisco Renaissance are coming into focus. Using as its launchpad the dynamic domesticity of Duncan and his longtime companion, the still too little celebrated collagist Jess (Collins), this show of thirty-five artists from their magic circle—many too long in the shadows, with Lilly Fenichel, Miriam Hoffman, and Lawrence Jordan among them—should underscore the visual concordance of that groovily finicky heyday.
Travels to the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, Jan. 14–Mar. 29, 2014; Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, DC, Apr. 26–Aug. 17, 2014; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Sept. 14, 2014–Jan. 11, 2015.
— Bruce Hainley
Corita Kent leading Mary’s Day Parade, 1964, Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles.
“Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent”
THE FRANCES YOUNG TANG TEACHING MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY
Through July 28
Curated by Ian Berry and Michael Duncan
Few could claim as many seemingly irreconcilable labels as Corita Kent: activist, commercially successful printmaker, teacher, Catholic nun. Sister Corita (as she was known) gave the practice of Pop art a distinctively religious and political spin, turning the visual language of advertising into eye-catching statements confronting racism, sexism, issues of faith, and the war in Vietnam. In this, the first major survey of Kent’s influential work, Berry and Duncan bring together more than two hundred items spanning her career (beginning in 1951), including serigraph prints, paintings, rarely seen ephemera, and videos of protests and public performances with her students. “Someday Is Now,” along with its extensive catalogue, will provide an opportunity to grasp this artist in all her complexity.