Curated by Helaine Posner

Dana Schutz paints with directness and expediency, and her work has an exhilaration that comes from giving form to internal feelings. She is an American symbolist who is sometimes mistaken for a realist. Her paintings often depict scenes that are absurd, goofy, or grotesque: things seen in the mind’s eye. A woman eating her own arm, a nude man lying prone in the desert, someone caught midsneeze— the pictures revel in the power of pictorial visualization. Schutz has a winning curiosity about strange forms that the self, and self-destruction, can take; you can imagine her saying, “Nothing human is foreign to me.” This survey, with more than forty paintings and drawings made over the past decade, will prove Schutz to be that rare thing: a maverick leading the way in the mainstream.

— David Salle

Curated by Bonnie Clearwater

In 1996, MoCA, North Miami launched a program meant to raise the profile of emerging local artists. The first installment was a solo project by Mark Handforth. Since then, Handforth’s work has garnered international recognition, yet he has chosen to remain in Miami, participating in the city’s increasingly dynamic contemporary art scene. This fall, the museum will host its second exhibition of the artist’s work, promising a presentation appropriately larger in scope and ambition, including forty sculptures made since the mid-1990s. Viewers will be afforded the opportunity to connect with the humor and pathos that Handforth brings to vernacular urban materials—from lampposts and street signs to fluorescent light fixtures and metal trash cans—and to enjoy the romantic levity he so slyly smuggles into the formalism of abstract sculpture. A catalogue with an essay by curator Bonnie Clearwater (who brought Handforth to the museum fifteen years ago) and an interview with the artist by Tom Eccles accompanies the show.

— Anne Ellegood