print December 2020

Lynne Cooke’s top ten highlights of 2020

Lynne Cooke is senior curator for special projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She is currently at work on “Braided Histories,” a planned 2023 exhibition that will explore affiliations and interchanges between abstract artists and textile designers and producers.

1

HANNAH RYGGEN (SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT; CURATED BY MARIT PAASCHE AND ESTHER SCHLICHT)

Little known beyond Scandinavian shores since her death in 1970, Ryggen was finally given her due in this fascinating exhibition. A self-identified painter who considered her loom her brush, she wove monumental tapestries while

print December 2019

Lynne Cooke

Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator for Special Projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. “Maneuver,” an exhibition she curated that explores aspects of Anni Albers’s diverse legacy, is on view at the Artist’s Institute, New York, through mid-December.

1

NANCY SPERO (MOMA PS1, NEW YORK; CURATED BY JULIE AULT)

Kudos to artist-curator Ault for organizing this long-overdue survey, Spero’s first in her hometown. Rigorously selected and brilliantly installed, the show gave full rein to Spero’s fierce and fearless voice.

2

“DIEDRICK BRACKENS: DARLING DIVINED” (NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK; CURATED BY

print October 2018

Anni Albers

IN A 1985 INTERVIEW, Anni Albers remarked, “I find that, when the work is made with threads, it’s considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art.” This was her somewhat oblique explanation of why she hadn’t received “the longed-for pat on the shoulder,” i.e., recognition as an artist, until after she gave up weaving and immersed herself in printmaking—a transition that occurred when she was in her sixties. It’s hard to judge whether Albers’s tone was wry or rueful or (as one critic alleged) “some-what bitter,” and therefore it’s unclear what her comment might indicate about the

print January 2017

Merce Cunningham

AS DANCE INCREASINGLY ASSUMES CENTER STAGE in today’s cultural landscape, contemporary choreographers have added the art museum to their regular circuit of venues. But Merce Cunningham was, as usual, ahead of the curve. In 1964, at the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna, he launched the first of hundreds of what he called Events: unique programs that collaged extracts from his repertory and were devised for a particular setting, and which he would continue to create over the next forty-five years. Cunningham’s pioneering intervention into the museum context was predicated on the strong

previews January 2017

“Louise Lawler: Why Pictures Now”

The success of Louise Lawler’s highly anticipated first New York museum survey hangs on the question of how this immensely influential artist will negotiate the demands of a retrospective, which all but necessitates the repackaging of the artist’s work into an “authoritative” reading. For principled refusal fuels every aspect of Lawler’s exacting practice, which is marked by the artist’s reservation with respect to doing what’s deemed proper for a successful career, and reticence, if masked by nonchalance, in response to the demand for a signature

print February 2016

“The Shadow of the Avant-Garde: Rousseau and the Forgotten Masters”

FINDING A TITLE to anchor a thematic group show is notoriously fraught, as “The Shadow of the Avant-Garde: Rousseau and the Forgotten Masters” demonstrated. German art historian Veit Loers coined the titular phrase to refer to a corpus that is the necessary complement to the art of the historical avant-gardes, the negative or occluded partner in the pairing—namely, the work of those non-Europeans, “folk,” children, and other “primitives” whom the early modernists “discovered.” The show’s subtitle indicated that the exhibition would focus on the renowned Henri Rousseau, the first and still

print December 2015

Lynne Cooke

1 JOAN JONAS (US PAVILION, 56TH VENICE BIENNALE; CURATED BY PAUL C. HA AND UTE META BAUER) The extraordinary richness of Jonas’s imagery has never been more evident or labile in its interweaving of performance and installation. Ghosts of the physically departed yet psychically present mingled with mute species at risk of extinction, and youth was counterpointed with age in hauntingly elliptical pictures and stories—makeshift mnemonic talismans constructed in the face of ineluctable change.

2 GREER LANKTON (PARTICIPANT INC, NEW YORK) Extensively researched, this landmark show recuperated a

print November 2015

“Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions”

WALKING INTO “Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions” at Tate Liverpool, visitors found themselves poised between Jasper Johns’s 1962 lithograph Painting with Two Balls II and a mid-1970s David Hammons body print in which the artist’s features are framed within an ace of spades. In tandem with that suggestive pairing, the first gallery contained the Cady Noland sculpture Pipes in a Basket, 1989, which comprises handcuffs and a small American flag alongside a handful of pipes; Kelley Walker’s screen-printed painting Black Star Press (Triptych), 2005, based on scanned photographs of civil rights

print December 2014

Lynne Cooke

1 ROBERT GOBER (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY ANN TEMKIN WITH PAULINA POBOCHA) Enormously impressive, this exhibition evidences an exceptional level of commitment on the part of the artist, curator, and institution. Though Gober’s mapping of the American sociocultural landscape by way of themes of sexuality, politics, religion, and domesticity is often trenchant, even bleak, it is leavened by its resilient generosity of spirit.

2 KARA WALKER, A SUBTLETY (THE FORMER DOMINO SUGAR FACTORY, NEW YORK) This brilliantly sited and contextualized project was that rare thing, a truly public

print September 2014

James Benning

“DECODING FEAR,” a compelling exhibition of James Benning’s work at the Kunsthaus Graz this past spring, was but the latest incarnation of the artist’s Two Cabins Project, an endeavor best understood as a group of interrelated works, shows, and a publication. Installed in Graz in its most expansive form since its 2011 inception, the project established a psychologically charged ambience in which viewers became implicated as they moved through the dark, cavernous gallery. Read literally, the show’s title might refer to Benning’s unpacking of the coded script that Theodore Kaczynski, aka the

previews May 2014

“British Folk Art”

In accordance with the model established by the landmark 1932 show “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this long-overdue survey will encompass almost two hundred artifacts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The curators will consider these works from an aesthetic perspective rather than that of an ethnographer or folklorist. As did its forebear, the London exhibition will feature objects that are readily considered under the (fine-art, not folk-art) rubrics of sculpture

print December 2013

Lynne Cooke

1 ROBERT IRWIN (WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY DONNA DE SALVO) With little more than a taut plane of polyester, Irwin’s site-specific Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light vividly animated the Whitney’s fourth floor while highlighting the signature window that pictures the cityscape beyond. Hard to imagine how that peerless space could be better engaged. Hard to imagine why more than thirty-five years were permitted to elapse between the work’s debut in 1977 and its next appearance—just under the wire, so to speak, before the museum quits Marcel Breuer’s