Fall Art Preview: 14 New York Museum Exhibitions Not to Miss

Mark Leckey returns, and Kerry James Marshall brings down the house.

Installation view of Mark Leckey: UniAddDumThs (2016), at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.

The editors at artnet News searched New York City high and low for the most exciting, bizarre, and thought-provoking exhibitions this fall. From Chelsea to the Lower East Side, we’ve got you covered. (We’ve also included a nonprofit in the list, which is marked with an asterisk.)

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (2014). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (2014). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1. “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” at the Met Breuer
Kerry James Marshall’s largest museum retrospective to date travels to the Met from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, with nearly 80 works including 72 paintings. Marshall, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, before the Civil Rights Act was passed, is known for his large-scale narrative history paintings that bring black figures to the fore, chronicling the African American experience. (Sarah Cascone)

“Kerry James Marshall: Mastry” is on view at Met Breuer, 1000 Fifth Avenue, from October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017.

A still from Pipilotti Rist's Ever Is Over All (1997). Courtesy of the New Museum.

A still from Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All (1997). Courtesy of the New Museum.

2. “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” at the New Museum
The Swiss video and installation artist will take over the three main floors of the New Museum in a wildly-ambitious show, which is billed as the first, and most comprehensive, New York survey of her work. Fans of Beyoncé‘s “Hold Up” video (or that of Dorothy’s red slippers) will get a kick out of Rist’s Ever Is Over All slow-motion video, featuring the artist swinging a “long-stemmed flower” and shattering car windows as she goes. You’re next. (Kathleen Massara)

“Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest”  is on view at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, from October 26–January 8, 2017.

Marilyn Minter, Blue Poles (2007). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

Marilyn Minter, Blue Poles (2007). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

3. “Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” at the Brooklyn Museum

Marilyn Minter’s continuing exploration of the construct of femininity has never been more necessary—and all the more pressing that her show at the Brooklyn Museum (which originated at the Contemporary Arts museum Houston) is opening in early November around election time. This show will begin with Minter’s early work, a series of photographs she took in 1969 of her mother, and track the evolution of her work to her more recent sensual paintings and video critiquing, celebrating, and delineating the representation of women. (Rozalia Jovanovic)

“Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy, from November 4, 2016–April 2, 2017.

Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953). L’Œil cacodylate (The Cacodylic Eye). 1921. Oil, enamel paint, gelatin silver prints, postcard, and cut-and-pasted printed papers on canvas, 58 1/2 x 46 1/4″ (148.6 x 117.4 cm). Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris. Purchase in honor of the era of Le Bœuf sur le Toit, 1967. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953). L’Œil cacodylate (The Cacodylic Eye). 1921. Oil, enamel paint, gelatin silver prints, postcard, and cut-and-pasted printed papers on canvas, 58 1/2 x 46 1/4″ (148.6 x 117.4 cm). Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle, Paris. Purchase in honor of the era of Le Bœuf sur le Toit, 1967. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

4. “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction” at the Museum of Modern Art
From the annals of the hard to believe: MoMA has put together the very first major U.S. survey of the profoundly influential work of the French shapeshifter Francis Picabia (1879-1953). Bringing together more than 200 works in media as varied as painting, performance, poetry, publishing and film, the exhibition honors an artist whose career ranged in style and substance across the first half of the twentieth century—from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from photo-based realism to Art Informel, all the while studiously avoiding the idea of a signature look or medium. (Christian Viveros-Fauné)

“Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction”  is on view at MoMA, 11 W 53rd Street, from November 21, 2016–March 19, 2017.

Carmen Herrera, Untitled (1948). Collection of Yolanda Santos. Art © Carmen Herrera.

Carmen Herrera, Untitled (1948). Collection of Yolanda Santos. Art © Carmen Herrera.

5. “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” Whitney Museum
This marks Herrera’s first solo museum show in New York since a 1988 exhibition at El Museo del Barrio. The Cuban-born painter turned 101 a few months ago and is still actively working today. Amazingly, her first painting sale came when she was 89, so to say attention to her incredible abstract work is long overdue is putting it mildly.

The next much anticipated milestone is the Whitney Museum’s upcoming retrospective. It will feature roughly 50 works, spanning three decades (1948–78), starting with early abstractions made while the artist was living in Paris in the years after World War II. While there she pursued a geometric, hard-edged style that continues in her work today. The show includes abstractions from her “Blanco y Verde” series in addition to later paintings, drawings, and some rare three-dimensional pieces.  (Eileen Kinsella)

“Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” is on view at the Whitney Museum, 99 Gansevoort Street, from September 16–January 2, 2017.

Chasse of Ambazac. From the Treasury of Grandmont Limoges, ca. 1180 – 90. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Chasse of Ambazac. From the Treasury of Grandmont
Limoges, ca. 1180 – 90. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

6. “Jerusalem: Every People Under Heaven” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
In our moment of heightened religious conflict, the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a look back at a span of time in which people of numerous faiths and origins thrived in Jerusalem, in an area not much larger than Midtown Manhattan. The show includes dozens of items on loan from the Holy City’s religious communities, artifacts that, says the museum, have never left the city’s walls. (Brian Boucher)

“Jerusalem: Every People Under Heaven” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue, from September 26, 2016–January 8, 2017.

Jean Dubuffet, L’Arnaque (The Swindle), June 2, 1962. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Jean Dubuffet, L’Arnaque (The Swindle), June 2, 1962. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

7. “Dubuffet Drawings, 1935–1962” at the Morgan Library
Jean Dubuffet is on the verge of a full-blown renaissance. Following his recent retrospective at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, “Dubuffet’s Drawings, 1935-1962” promises to magnify the late artist’s creative process by honing in on his draftsmanship. Over 100 drawings are to be exhibited in the first museum retrospective to focus solely on Dubuffet’s work in the medium. (Caroline Elbaor)

“Dubuffet Drawings, 1935–1962” is on view at the Morgan Library, 225 Madison Avenue, from September 30, 2016–January 2, 2017.

Gran Fury, <em>Kissing Doesn't Kill New York City</em> (1989). Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn’t Kill New York City (1989). Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

8. “Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York” at the Museum of the City of New York
Queer culture in the Big Apple gets a retrospective at the Museum of the City of New York this October. In an exhibition of over 200 works and supplementary ephemera, ten artists, including Harmony Hammond, Greer Lankton, and the collective Gran Fury, are observed, and contextualized, in a show about the “vibrant lives of artists who were suffering from injustice,” as the museum’s director Whitney Donhauser succinctly describes. It’s hard to imagine how a single show can encompass a century’s worth of queer experiences without losing the nuances, but we’re in for the ride. (Rain Embuscado)

“Gay Gotham” is on view at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, from October 7, 2016–March 26, 2017.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980. Image courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980. Image courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

9. “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art” at the Queens Museum
Laderman is probably most celebrated for her 1969 “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” in which she reclaimed the value work of the upkeep of both art and society as an act on a par with creation itself. The show organized by the QMA’s Larissa Harris and guest curator Patricia C. Phillips dedicates all of its temporary exhibition space—apparently a first for the museum, for any artist—to telling the story of what led to this, including her experiments with difficult-to-maintain inflatable sculptures, and what came next, most famously a 40-year artist residency with New York City’s Department of Sanitation, but also, much, much more. (Ben Davis)

“Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art” is on view at the Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, from September 18, 2016–February 19, 2017.

Agnes Martin, Untitled #2 (1992). © 2015 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Agnes Martin, Untitled #2 (1992). © 2015 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

10. Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim
Organized by London’s Tate Modern, where it debuted, this career retrospective of American painter Agnes Martin is on its next-to-last stop on a world tour that will take it next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Martin (1912–2004), an American painter known for luminous, hand-drawn, gridded abstractions, is the subject of a 2013 book of reminiscences by her dealer, Pace founder Arne Glimcher, as well as a recent biography by art historian Nancy Princenthal, and this is the first major show since her death in 2004, which allows freedom that the artist quashed during her lifetime; she discouraged exhibitions, especially those with catalogues, much less catalogues with essays. (Brian Boucher)

“Agnes Martin” is on view at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, from October 7, 2016–January 11, 2017.

Installation view of Mark Leckey: UniAddDumThs,” 2016, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Installation view of Mark Leckey: UniAddDumThs,” 2016, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Courtesy of MoMA PS1.

11. Mark Leckey at MoMA PS1
The first comprehensive survey of influential, Turner Prize-winning British artist Mark Leckey, known for creating surprisingly affecting media collages that are both brainy and personal, as in his celebrated ode to the British dance scene, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). (Ben Davis)

“Mark Leckey” is on view at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, from October 23, 2016–March 5, 2017.

Simon Starling, video still from the Hawk Dance. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

Simon Starling, video still from the Hawk Dance. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

*12. “Simon Starling: At Twilight” at Japan Society
In his first solo museum show in New York, Simon Starling reimagines the 1916 W.B. Yeats 1916 play At the Hawk’s Well, which was inspired by Noh, Japan’s masked theater tradition. Starling has created his own masks and costumes, which will be displayed in a gallery outfitted to look like a Noh stage. The exhibition also includes a performance video of a restaging of the play’s “hawk dance,” with new choreography by Javier de Frutos. (Sarah Cascone)

“Simon Starling: At Twilight” is on view at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street, from October 14, 2016–January 15, 2017.

Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

13.“Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918” at the Neue Galerie
Gustav Klimt’s two portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer were famously embroiled in a Nazi-looted art restitution case that inspired the film Woman in Gold starring Helen Mirren. At the Neue Galerie, they are being reunited for the first time since Bloch-Bauer’s niece, Maria Altmann, won her lawsuit and sold them in 2006.

The exhibition will feature other examples of Klimt’s society portraits of women, as well as modern-day recreations of the designs of Viennese fashion designer Emilie Flöge, who outfitted many of the artist’s subjects. (Sarah Cascone)

“Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918” is on view at Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, from September 22, 2016–January 16, 2017.

Aki Sasamoto, preliminary research image, 2016. Courtesy the artist.

Aki Sasamoto, preliminary research image (2016). Courtesy the artist.

14. “Aki Sasamoto: Delicate Cycle” at the SculptureCenter
The artist’s first US solo exhibition will take place in SculptureCenter’s spooky  lower level galleries, where she’ll install a site-specific installation. She’ll also be doing six “Delicate Cycle” performances relating to, as it states on the event page, “washing machines, bed sheets, and mobile units” (three of which are already sold out). While there, don’t miss Cosima von Bonin’s first New York solo museum exhibition, “Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea?” which will feature some of the German contemporary artist’s adorable and strange plush sculptures. (Kathleen Massara)

“Aki Sasamoto: Delicate Cycle” is on view at the Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, from September 19, 2016–January 2, 2017.


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