As September arrives, bringing the waning days of summer, New Yorkers can look forward to a fresh array of new museum shows. Exhibitions opening in museums across NYC will examine sculpture and sound; revolutionary art from the era when Black Power came to the fore; exploration of an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art; computational art and more. Continue reading for the New York City museum shows we’re most excited about in September.
New Museum: “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal”
September 4, 2018 through January 6, 2019
New Museum will present “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal,” the first solo museum exhibition for the French artist in the United States.
Marguerite Humeau’s new installation of sculpture and sound continues the artist’s focus on the origins of humankind and associated histories of language, love, spirituality, and war, with the artist enriching her own thinking through interdisciplinary, speculative inquiry. Featuring a new body of digitally rendered sculptures realized in cast bronze and carved stone, the works reflect Humeau’s research into the correspondence between the shapes of ancient Venus figurines and the contours of animal brains.
In a darkened gallery space, the 10 Venus-like figures will prophesize the extinction of their offspring (i.e. humankind) in an ominous scene of polyphonic trance. At first appearing formally ambiguous, the sculptures resemble brains, figures or spirits of different ages and status. Alluding to animism, totemism and spiritual travel, the artist’s works evoke mediums and visionaries while offering a forum for imagined voices and premonitions and underscoring the brevity of human existence relative to cosmic and geologic time.
The New Museum is located at 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002. www.newmuseum.org.
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Marguerite Humeau, 35000 A.C (Sphinx Death Mask), 2018. Bronze, 18 1/8 × 8 1/4 × 18 1/8 in (46 × 21 × 46 cm). Courtesy the artist and CLEARING New York/Brussels. Image Credit: Marguerite Humeau – Battaglia Foundry Sculpture Prize #02. Photo: © Virginia Taroni. Courtesy Archivio Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan
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Brooklyn Museum: “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”
September 14, 2018 through February 3, 2019
Brooklyn Museum will present “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” a retrospective examining Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983.
Featuring more than 150 artworks from more than 60 black artists, the exhibition will shine a light on one of the most politically, socially and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Working in communities, in collectives and individually, Black artists created a range of art responsive to the moment. Featuring figurative and abstract painting, prints and photography, assemblage and sculpture, as well as performance, the works directly address the unjust social conditions facing Black Americans, reference racial violence and celebrate Black culture. The exhibition brings together work by, among many, Faith Ringgold, Emory Douglas, Jack Whitten, Melvin Edward, Emma Amos, Barkley Hendricks and more.
The Brooklyn Museum is located at 200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238. www.brooklynmuseum.org.
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Barkley Hendricks (American, 1945–2017). Blood (Donald Formey), 1975. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 501/2 in. (182.9 x 128.3 cm). Courtesy of Dr. Kenneth Montague | The Wedge Collection, Toronto. © Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum)
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MoMA: “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done”
September 16, 2018 through February 3, 2018
MoMA will present “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done,” highlighting the significance of the history of the Judson Dance Theater.
Taking their name from the Judson Memorial Church, a socially engaged Protestant congregation in New York, the Judson Dance Theater was composed of a group of choreographers, visual artists, composers and filmmakers who presented workshops, classes and performances in the 1960s. In pieces organized as a series of open workshops that were developed into performances, the artists challenged traditional understandings of choreography, expanding dance in ways that reconsidered its place in the world.
The group incorporated “ordinary” movements along with games, simple tasks, and social dances to infuse their pieces with spontaneity. The exhibition will feature live performance and some 300 objects, including film, photographic documentation, sculpture, scores, music, poetry, architectural drawings and archival material. Featuring members such as Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann and many more, the exhibition will celebrate the group’s multidisciplinary and collaborative ethos and the scope of their influence on all fields of art in the later 20th century.
The Museum of Modern Art is located at 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019. www.moma.org.
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Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art.
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The Met Breuer: “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy”
September 18, 2018 through January 6, 2019
The Met Breuer will present “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy,” an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art.
Featuring 70 works by 30 artists, the exhibition is comprised of art that has explored the hidden operations of power and the symbiotic suspicion between governments and their citizens in Western democracies in the years since World War II. Featuring work from the last 50 years, the exhibition is split into two parts. The first part looks at works by artists who used the public record to uncover hidden webs of deceit, such as the shell corporations used by New York’s largest landlord.
The second part features artists who focus on disaffected citizens, with fantastical work that nevertheless uncovers uncomfortable information overload and weakened trust in institutions. Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation art from 1969-2016, the Met Breuer considers “Everything Is Connected” to be the first exhibition to tackle this perennially provocative topic.
The Met Breuer is located at 945 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10021. www.metmuseum.org/met-breuer.
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Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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The New Museum: “Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel”
September 26, 2018 through January 20, 2019
The New Museum will present “Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel,” the first American survey of the British artist’s work.
Sarah Lucas, who was initially associated with the Young British Artists and is now one of the most influential artists in the UK, has been creating a distinctive and provocative body of work for the past 30 years. Subverting traditional notions of gender, sexuality and identity, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux. Her work challenges social norms with human figure and anthropomorphic forms recurring throughout her work in erotic, humorous, fragmented, and fantastical anatomies of desire.
With more than 150 of the artist’s photographic, sculptural and installation works on the three main floors of the museum, the exhibition will reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice, including early sculptures that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloids that reflect the objectification of the female body. Her biomorphic sculptures, which have never been shown together in the United States, will also be on display, as well as sculptures created for the exhibition that will be installed on the museum’s fourth floor.
The New Museum is located at 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002. www.newmuseum.org.
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Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel. Courtesy of The New Museum.
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Whitney Museum: “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018”
September 28, 2018 through April 14, 2019
The Whitney Museum will present “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018.”
Featuring work from the Whitney’s collection, the exhibition establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, drawing on 50 years of conceptual, video and computational art. The works are all programmed through the use of sets of rules, instructions or code, and also address the use of programming in their creation.
Two strands of artistic expression will be linked in the exhibition. The first examines “the program” as instructions, rules and algorithms, with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on the idea. The second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences. The exhibition not only looks at the evolution of computational art but also how rules and instructions in art have both responded to and been shaped by technologies, altering contemporary image culture.
Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014. www.whitney.org.
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“Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018”. Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art.
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