If you're anything like us, you're probably itching for the art season to start. (Sure, summer is lovely but let's get on with the Fall shows already!) From artists like David Hockney, Louise Bourgeois, Carolee Schneemann, and Mark Bradford, here are some of the most exciting museum shows to look forward to this September, October, and November.
SEPTEMBER
LOUISE BOURGEOIS: An Unfolding Portrait
MoMA, September 24 – January 1
Regarded as one of the most important and influential sculptors of the 20th century, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is less known for her printed oeuvre—the subject of this exhibition, which comprises some never-before-exhibited prints and illustrated books alongside related sculptures, drawings, and paintings dated from the beginning of her career in the 1940s until the last two decades of her life.
RACHEL WHITEREAD
Tate Modern, September 12 – February 4
British sculptor Rachel Whiteread was the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993, the year she also cast a life-sized reproduction of the interior of a house in London’s East End (House lasted a few months before being controversially demolished.) The Tate will mount the most comprehensive survey to date of the artist’s 25-year career, which is marked by the use of industrial materials like plaster, concrete, rubber, and metal to cast every-day objects and domestic spaces.
JENNY HOLZER
Blenheim Palace, Setpember 28 – ongoing
Most contemporary artists would probably find it odd to mount an exhibition in Blenheim Palace, the principal residence of the Dukes of Marlborough in Oxfordshire, England. But for Holzer, who’s work directly addresses power and conflict, a palace might be a dream come true. The artist will create new work that addresses England’s military and political history, and will involve augmented reality as well as her signature LED signs and large-scale light projections.
ILYA and EMILIA KABAKOV: The Utopian Projects
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, September 7 – March 4
The art world’s beloved artist-couple, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, has been working collaboratively for almost 30 years, and reflect the experiences they shared while living in the Soviet Union. Their theatrical, whimsical, and eccentric installations and images will be on view at the Hirshhorn for the artists' first major US exhibition. The Kabakov’s will also mount their first major UK museum show at the Tate Modern in October.
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, September 7 to March 4
Encompassing a mix of alternative print media, mail art, fashion culture, punk music, and artists’ responses to the AIDS epidemic, this exhibition is the first historical look at the collaborations between a network of queer Chicano artists working from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.
MAX ERNST: Beyond Painting
MoMA, September 23 – January 21
Drawing from the MoMA’s collection, this survey of Dada and Surrealist artist Max Ernst will feature roughly 100 works from the artist’s experimental career that spanned painting, collages, rubbings, sculptures of painted stone and bronze, prints, and illustrated books and collage novels. The German-born artist worked between the end of World War I throughout the aftermath of World War, using techniques that went “beyond painting” to express what couldn’t be explained by rational means.
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon
New Museum, September 27 – January 21
In “Trigger,” an intergenerational group of artist explore gender and identity, and consider “how even in a fluid conception of gender is nonetheless marked by ongoing negotiations of power and cannot be understood outside its complex intersections with race, class, sexuality, and disability.” The New Museum exhibition will present over 40 artists, continuing the museum's engagement with gender and art since the early 1980s.
COLLECTION: Collect the Artists With Major Upcoming Museum Shows
OCTOBER
Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, October 6 – January 7th
Spanning Chinese art from 1989 to 2008, this exhibition “offers an interpretative survey of Chinese experimental art framed by the geopolitical dynamics attending the end of the Cold War, the spread of globalization, and the rise of China.” The show includes works by over 70 artists and collectives, including a major installation by Huang Yong Ping involving a tortoise-shaped cage wherein hundreds of living bugs and reptiles devour one another throughout the course of the exhibition.
CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN: Kinetic Painting
MoMA PS1, October 22 – March 11
A pioneer in feminist performance art, Carolee Schneemann is known for positioning her own body within her work, playing the roles of “both image and image-maker.” For the first comprehensive retrospective of the influential artist’s career, MoMA PS1 will present Schneemann’s well-known oeuvre within the context of some of her lesser-known early paintings and assemblages.
HEIMO ZOBERNIG: Chess Painting
MIT List Visual Arts Center, October 27 – December 31
Vienna-based artist Heimo Zobrenig plays with the theatricality of the museum, making works that “playfully acknowledges and amplifies methods of display and design in questioning the hierarchies and mechanisms at work in the presentation and understanding of an artwork.” (Think: pedestals, benches, architecture.)
MARK DION: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist
Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, October 1 - January 1
Known for his quirky cabinets of curiosities, Dion has been making work that explores how we collect, interpret, and display nature. The artist’s first U.S. survey is organized around the artist’s three primary methods—fieldwork, excavation, and cultivation—bringing together over 20 of Dion’s most notable works in addition to a newly commissioned interactive sculpture.
TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA
The Whitney, October 20 - Ongoing
The young artist Toyin Ojih Odutola makes intimate portraits that follow the lives two fictional aristocratic Nigerian families. Her first solo museum exhibition in New York presents a new body of works that “explore the complexity and malleability of identity,” rendered as life-size figures set against domestic backdrops inspired by the artist’s interpretations of art history and popular culture and well as her own experiences with migration and dislocation.
ADRIÁN VILLAR ROJAS: The Theater of Disappearance
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 22 – February 26
Creating a singular, site-specific installation inside The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA’s warehouse space, Argentinian-born Villar Rojas asks the question: “What happens after the end of art?” His installations often make nuanced adjustments, like the size of doorways, colors of walls, floor heights, or the placements of windows, allowing the artist to create a “parasitic relationship” with the institution.
Items: Is Fashion Modern?
The Museum of Modern Art, October 1 – January 28
Presenting 111 items of clothing and accessories—from the Levi’s 501s and the Little Black Dress to the pearl necklace and the sari—"Items" presents objects that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. “Driven first and foremost by objects, not designers, the exhibition considers the many relationships between fashion and functionality, culture, aesthetics, politics, labor, identity, economy, and technology.”
NOVEMBER
LAURA OWENS
The Whitney Museum of American Art, November 10 – February 4
This mid-career survey will present Owen’s paintings from the mid-1990s that went against the grain by including craft materials, to her more recent, large-scale paintings that “make virtuosic use of silkscreen, computer manipulation, digital printing, and material exploration.”
JOSEF ALBERS in Mexico
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, November 3 – February 18
Known for his crucial role in developing the Bauhaus and for his innovations in Geometric Abstraction, Joseph Albers isn’t often thought of as a photographer. But "Josef Albers in Mexico" presents photographs and photo collages (many of which have never before been made public) from the artist’s trips to Mexico and other Latin American countries where he found inspiration in the architecture of ancient Mesoamerica.
STEPHEN SHORE
Museum of Modern Art, November 19 – May 28
From the geletin silver prints he made as a teenager to his current work exploring digital platforms, "Stephen Shore" presents the entirety of the influential photographer’s work over the last five decades. Known for photographing the mundane and for capturing American pop culture in a straight-forward, matter-of-fact manner, Shore will present his first survey in New York.
CAROL BOVE
The Contemporary Austin, November 18 – Ongoing
An exhibition of Carol Bove's new large-scale "noodle" sculptures will be The Contemporary Austin’s first solo show in the sculpture park. Bove began her career in Berekely, California where she incorporated found objects into domestically scaled “junk” sculptures; Bove later moved to the waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn where she began making assemblages incorporating the industrial materials of her environment.
MARK BRADFORD: Pickett’s Charge
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, November 8 – November 12, 2018
For Mark Bradford’s site-specific exhibition in the Hirshhorn’s donut-shaped gallery, the artist has mined the Smithsonian’s archive to focus his historical research on the often overlooked female voices of the Civil Rights movement. Known for his large abstract paintings imbued with personal history, Bradford uses materials like billboard poster remnants, bleaching agents, and caulking to draw attention to the “invisible underbelly of a community.”
Learning to Read with JOHN BALDESSARI
Museo Jumex, November 11 – April 8
Organized by the “lessons” that Baldessari’s work conveys, this Mexico-City exhibition “draws on the artist’s practice of addressing pedagogic themes of instruction, the class, and judgment that appear in his work from the 1960s to the present.” The major survey will feature over 80 works, from his early instruction paintings and photo-collages to the videos, text-based works, and sculptures that made Baldessari's over-fifty-year career so varied and celebrated.
DAVID HOCKNEY
The Met Fifth Avenue, November 27 – February 25
One of the most well-known and celebrated painters of the 20th century, David Hockney has worked with a wide range of two-dimensonal media over almost 60 years. Now in his 80s, the artist will present his most iconic works from 1960 to the present in this major retrospective at The Met.
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