Curated by Claire Gilman

Terry Winters has said that, as a young man mesmerized by Minimalism, he was led by the desire to draw “away from that blankness and toward developing an imagery that could play a role in my work.” This effort precipitated the atmospheric paintings inspired by scientific illustrations of organic specimens for which he first became known in the early 1980s. The seventy—eight works in this retrospective will follow Winters’s development from that time through the more fully abstract approach that has occupied him since the ’90s, with dense weaves of swirling, crisscrossing lines and scattered blips, and will include more recent drawings that reclaim shapes reminiscent of his earliest phase within the more complex spatial context he’s since developed—what he’s called a “vitalized geometry.” 

— Barry Schwabsky

Curated by Christophe Cherix, David Platzker, and Connie Butler

She’s the greatest dancer. For more than five decades, Adrian Piper has advanced and everted that great whirl of thinking and form we too neatly call Conceptual art. Piper shows us how to do it right, perhaps most generously through her signature performance and video works. From Funk Lessons, 1983–84, and The Big Four-Oh, 1988, to her more recent Adrian Moves to Berlin, 2007/2017, in which she grooves to postmillennial Berlin house music in sunny Alexanderplatz, Piper kicks open your mind as she steps to the rhythm. It’s been over a decade since her last solo American museum show, and this retrospective is a big deal: More than 280 works will take over the entirety of MoMA's sixth floor—a first for a living artist. The exhibition will arrive with a new catalogue and a reader, both published by the museum, as well as an auto-biographical text produced by her research foundation in Berlin. Keep up if you can.  

— David Velasco

Curated by Katherine Brinson with Susan Thompson

In the Christian tradition, the “laying on of hands” is a way of transporting a spirit from one body to another. Danh Vo made a similar technique integral to his art. Starting with an array of scavenged objects, ranging from grand chandeliers to presidential pens, Vo alters them—in ways that are undetectable to the human eye—by imbuing them with an affective charge. At times, he cuts these items into pieces, as he did with Roman sculptures and, more metaphorically, the Statue of Liberty. And then there are the cardboard boxes that he emblazons with corporate logos. All of this has made Vo central to contemporary art and a mystical figure in a de-skilled world. If Vo’s practice often focuses on the displacement and migration caused by colonial regimes, this survey of the forty-two-year-old’s career promises to address America’s present state of decay.  

— Alex Kitnick

Curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld

Three long years ago, under Obama’s presidency and a seemingly boundless neoliberal horizon, the last triennial investigated “new visual metaphors for the self” in an expanding digital surround. Today, as institutions falter and certitudes crumble, the Janus-faced character of technology reveals itself. While enabling new modes of identity construction and self-broadcast, it is also accessory to the rise of demagogues and the impoverishment of discourse, yielding social anomie and networks of fascism. Whereas 2015’s triennial examined an increasingly seamless interface between human and machine, the 2018 iteration—as its exuberantly Luddite title suggests—proposes smashing the machine altogether. How might art address an etiolated civil society, emboldened racism, hyperfinancialization, and precarity? “Songs for Sabotage” will bring together approximately thirty emerging international artists—all born after 1981—whose work appropriates and interrogates the “machines, roads, and digital systems” of a “system that seems doomed to failure.” But will the master’s tools, as Audre Lorde famously cautioned, ever dismantle the master’s house? Watch this space.

— Chloe Wyma

Curated by Ruba Katrib

Biographies of New York–based artist Carissa Rodriguez tend toward descriptions of an itinerant practice  encompassing the roles of writer, artist, and gallerist and moving from an early solo show at American Fine Arts (1996) and a stint at the Whitney Independent Study Program (2002) to Rodriguez’s position as director of Reena Spaulings Fine Art from 2004 to 2015. But just as “Reena” serves as the collective nom de plume of the artist’s close colleagues—who engage in a stealth interrogation of the terms of artistic identity—Rodriguez insistently reflects on the figure of the artist relative to the circulation, valuation, installation, and reproduction of the work of art. Rodriguez’s solo exhibition at SculptureCenter (her first at a New York museum) promises to showcase the breadth of such investigations, with an emphasis on the artist’s digital films (both old and newly commissioned), two of which will be the focal point of the show. An accompanying catalogue will include essays from the curator and Leah Pires.

— Pamela M. Lee

Curated by Kelly Taxter

In 1972, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, sharing a space with Gustav Metzger and Stuart Brisley, laid out an array of tinsel, tourist kitsch, and other tailings of human life lived on the floor, calling the piece Celebration? Real Life Revisited. The work’s title, along with its self—supported lighting scheme—the glow of devotional candles and gelled stage spots refracted by decommissioned disco balls—stands, now, as a prescient nod to the post-Fordist Thatcherism that was to come. Before the 1980s, however, the British artist, who was born in 1947 to a Polish Jewish father and a French Catholic mother, had traded his more public life for a deeper engagement with the domestic sphere, focusing on the affective, memory—storing properties of private interiors (literally: wallpaper, furniture, etc.). This exhibition, opening in March, will be Chaimowicz’s first large-scale US solo show. Expect numerous installations from 1978 through the present, as well as works created expressly for this occasion, with many exploring the (now certainly no less fraught) public/private divide.

— Caroline Busta