Curated by Donna De Salvo with Christie Mitchell and Mark Loiacono

Andy Warhol’s works, persona, and entourage never lose their currency. Every new cohort discovers the style and sensibility of the Factory as if they had been minted yesterday. That phenomenon makes the major retrospective at the Whitney this fall as much a ritualized return as a recapitulation of the receding past. But history will be present in abundance, a wealth of new knowledge and ideas having accumulated since the last such exercise. Whitney deputy director and senior curator Donna De Salvo’s own landmark exhibition of 1989, “Success Is a Job in New York,” brought Warhol’s pre-Pop advertising career into clear view; team member Mark Loiacono closes the circle with unmatched expertise on the artist’s underestimated late work. It can be guaranteed that “From A to B and Back Again” will prove an inescapable cultural event. It also promises an equal intellectual bonanza. Travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 18, 2019–September 2, 2019; the Art Institute of Chicago, October 20, 2019–January 26, 2020.

— Thomas Crow

Curated by Tracey Bashkoff with David Horowitz

More than a century after the fact, Hilma af Klint’s unfulfilled dream of displaying her divinely inspired abstract paintings in a spiral-shaped temple will finally come true. For her first major retrospective in the US, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “temple of the spirit” will host more than 160 of Klint’s works, most made in secret in Sweden between 1906 and 1920, while the artist was under the influence of theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and the occult. Some consider these paintings the earliest examples of modernist abstraction. By bringing her seldom-seen work into a venue famous both for its helical architecture and for its collection of “non-objective” paintings by Kandinsky, Klee, and the like, “Paintings for the Future” endorses Klint’s mystical conviction that the spiral symbolizes the dualities of the universe—good and evil, male and female, known and unknown—slowly reaching equilibrium.

— Canada Choate

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton

In this age of self-serious and self-congratulatory art, the sculptor Sarah Lucas offers up something entirely original and sui generis: humor and play. An anti-didactic feminist who finds, for instance, much amusement in all the fuss that surrounds the phallus, Lucas produces pieces that address our post-Freudian world—a world that still cleaves to self-defining signs and symbols as a way of expressing our investment in what gender dictates about behavior. As part of the original Young British Art scene in London, Lucas was, of course, well known in her native England, but not so much in the US. It’s terrific that the New Museum will redress this with a retrospective that will include about thirty years of politically astute, hard-edged, hilarious, autobiographical, and tender work. Travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, June 9–September 1, 2019.

— Hilton Als

Curated by Zehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan

In 1947, the sun finally set on the British Raj. In the same year, a group of leftists, including luminaries such as M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza, and F. N. Souza, founded the influential Progressive Artists’ Group. This fall at New York’s Asia Society, the revolutionary Bombay Progressives and their followers will anchor a landmark survey of more than eighty works accompanied by an illustrated catalogue. The Progressives insisted on a break both with tradition—Mughal miniatures and courtly paintings; vernacular, tribal, and folk art—and with empire to forge new visual languages and a modernism that was thoroughly, unmistakably Indian. Times have changed—Bombay is now Mumbai, and Hindu fundamentalism has all but destroyed the idea of a pluralist, secular nation. Emphasizing painting in the tumultuous postindependence period, this show takes us back to a time when another India was possible.

— Rahel Aima

Curated by David Getsy

Seditionary glamour girl Stephen Varble would’ve likely puked watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, as he was not very keen on the shameless self-promotion the program’s stars so readily embrace. The artist defied all kinds of categorization in his one-of-a-kind costumes and frocks—frequently made out of garbage—which he used for guerrilla performances that irritated New York’s hallowed sites of capitalist exchange, such as Tiffany, Chemical Bank, and sundry commercial art galleries. Varble died in 1984, as did much of his legacy. But the Leslie-Lohman Museum will bring his oeuvre back to life for a retrospective that will showcase a range of the artist’s extant works, including garments, drawings, photographs, archival materials, and excerpts from his fever-dreamy Journey to the Sun, 1978–83, a fantastical video project that Varble spent the last five years of his life trying to complete.

— Alex Jovanovich

Curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa

Part of a slow-moving wave of late-blooming, venturously eclectic New York painters who are widely esteemed by fellow practitioners but who, despite increasing international renown, have still not quite found the public they deserve—Chris Martin and Dona Nelson also come to mind—Rochelle Feinstein is probably the most politically feisty of the lot. She uses abstract painting to question just about everything, and then uses just about anything to question abstract painting. Following on the heels of a three-venue German/Swiss retrospective in 2015–16, this exhibition, the first US survey of Feinstein’s work, comprises some thirty works on canvas and paper dating from between 1994 and 2018 and should win new admirers for one of the most ingeniously irascible artists around.

— Barry Schwabsky

Curated by Sophia Marisa Lucas with Baseera Khan

In 2013, the Queens Museum completed a new wing that doubled the institution’s size and created a skylit interior plaza for public gatherings. A second phase of construction will incorporate a branch of the Queens Library. To consider what forms of community engagement might arise from the merger of museum and library, the eighth Queens International will explore alternative modes of reading, information storage, and archival research, with work by Gabriela Salazar, Milford Graves, Camel Collective, and other borough-based artists. Concurrently, Patrick Killoran, Mo Kong, and Paolo Javier (in collaboration with David Mason) will stage interventions in select library branches. The exhibition is being organized by assistant curator Sophia Marisa Lucas with artist Baseera Khan, and will be accompanied by a website designed by Ryan Kuo and edited by Larissa Harris.

— Colby Chamberlain