Museum and Gallery Listings for Sept. 2-8 - NYTimes.com
Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows:nytimes.com/art.
Museums
American Folk Art Museum: ‘Super Stars: Quilts From the American Folk Art Museum’(through Dec. 31) This location is featuring 20 quilts in which stars figure in some way, whether as pieced-together geometric forms or as little tufts of thread that suggest a distant galaxy. American Folk Art Museum Lincoln Square Branch, 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street, (212) 595-9533, folkartmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith)
★ Asia Society and Museum: ‘The Buddhist Heritage of Pakistan: Art of Gandhara’ (through Oct. 30) After a seemingly endless run of geopolitical roadblocks, this exhibition of ancient far northern Indian art, most of it from the collections of two museums in Pakistan, finally arrived, six months late, at Asia Society. Is the show worth all the diplomatic headaches it caused? With its images of bruiser bodhisattvas and polycultural goddesses, and some notable flights into the stratosphere of sculptural splendor, it is. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, (212) 288-6400, asiasociety.org. (Holland Cotter)
★ Brooklyn Museum: ‘Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior’ (through Oct. 2) Hindu sculptures are no ordinary things. Concentrations of spiritual energy so dense as to turn physics inside out, they funnel light from other universes into our mundane world. The light takes a little time to penetrate this show, dauntingly crowded with objects, ideas and information. But it shines through in the end as we trace the many earthly forms taken by one of Hinduism’s greatest gods and arrive at the spiritual matinee idol named Krishna. With his sapphire skin and sweet flute songs, he radiates devotional love, and everyone falls for him, including us. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Guggenheim Museum: ‘The Hugo Boss Prize 2010: Hans-Peter Feldmann’(through Nov. 2) Mr. Feldmann, the septuagenarian German artist who was the surprise pick for the Boss Prize honors, has decided to exhibit his prize money in the form of 100,000 $1 bills, pinned to the wall of one of the Guggenheim’s Tower galleries. What sounds on paper like a conceptual stunt or a riff on Warholian materialism becomes overpoweringly physical in person, thanks to the smell of the used bills and the traces of their circulation. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org. (Karen Rosenberg)
Guggenheim Museum: ‘Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity’ (through Sept. 28) This five-decade retrospective fills the museum with about 90 works in a Zen-Minimalist, be-here-now vein by a Korean artist who lives in Paris and Japan. Sculptures consist of ordinary, pumpkin-size boulders juxtaposed with sheets and slabs of dark, glossy steel. Paintings made of wide brush strokes executed in gridded order on raw canvas exemplify tension between action and restraint. In its always near-perfect composure, Mr. Lee’s art teeters perilously between art and décor. 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, (212) 423-3500,guggenheim.org. (Ken Johnson)
Jewish Museum: ‘Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore’ (through Sept. 25) This exhibition samples the extraordinary trove of European art amassed by two American spinsters in the first half of the 20th century, work now owned by the Baltimore Museum of Art. Although some major collection highlights are absent, the pieces here — presented in the order of acquisition — generate a compelling portrait of the Cones as collectors. 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street, (212) 423-3337, thejewishmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘The Andean Tunic, 400 B.C.E.-1800 C.E.’(through Oct. 16) This small show celebrates the festive yet functional garments woven south of the equator. To the modern eye, they’re wearable paintings; lovers of Keith Haring and Elizabeth Murray will find much to admire. So will anyone interested in the complex relationships among art, clothing, ritual and power. (212) 535-7710,metmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Anthony Caro on the Roof’ (through Oct. 30) No one in the 1960s produced groovier abstract sculpture than the British artist Anthony Caro, five of whose heavy metal assemblages grace the Met’s Rooftop Garden. But only one of these works has that startling, newborn feeling. Sporting a new coat of shiny, taxicab-yellow paint, “Midday” (1960) has the look of a jaunty, industrial dinosaur. The others, dating from 1968 to 2010, show a development toward an increasingly conservative, ponderous monumentality. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Frans Hals in the Metropolitan Museum’(through Oct. 10) This small but potent show gathers the Met’s 11 confirmed works by the great 17th-century Dutch painter, appending them with two outstanding loans and a selection of contextualizing works. It gives a remarkably full account of his talent and the painterly realisms — vivacious to relatively restrained — that he formulated. It also reveals an artist who viewed his subjects with a nonjudgmental equanimity, whether he depicted them singly or in groups, in dignified repose or unbridled revelry. As a result, a strange kind of gravity and sympathy for the human condition emanates from these works, raw as they can sometimes seem. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Mother India: The Goddess in Indian Painting’(through Nov. 27) Sculptures, paintings and drawings from the Met’s collection represent manifestations of Devi, the Great Mother goddess who is thought to be the most popular of all Indian deities. Among works dating from the first millennium B.C. to 1990 are pieces of exceptional beauty, including a small, 12th-century argillite sculpture depicting the 16-armed Durga slaying her most fearsome opponent, Mahishasura, after he emerges from the lopped neck of his buffalo disguise. Carved in extraordinarily refined detail, it is a marvel of formal and metaphorical concentration. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)
Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Night Vision: Photography After Dark’ (through Sept. 18) It wasn’t until the gelatin dry-plate process was introduced in the late 1880s that exposure time was lowered enough for photographs to be taken regularly after dark. Alfred Stieglitz was among the first to photograph New York at night. His work is shown alongside Berenice Abbott’s spectral “Nightview, New York” from 1932, taken from the window of a skyscraper; Brassaï’s nocturnal views of Paris; and Weegee’s high-contrast picture of a crime scene. Diane Arbus, Bill Brandt, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Kohei Yoshiyuki are among the other artists included in this modest, lovely show of 40 black-and-white photographs drawn from the museum’s collection, which stops a couple of decades short of the present. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Martha Schwendener)
★ El Museo del Barrio: ‘El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files 2011’ (through Jan. 8) Because of a long renovation of El Museo del Barrio’s Fifth Avenue building, four years have passed since the museum’s last biannual survey of new Latino, Caribbean and Latin American art. As if to make up for lost time, the new edition is the biggest so far, including work by 75 artists spread over seven shows in four boroughs, with the main event at El Museo itself. The “S” this year is for “Street,” which covers everything from graffiti to junk sculpture to painted cityscapes, and some of the work has problems with focus. Yet taking the street as a subject opens the possibility to at least think about other subjects, like money for artists, and the lack of it. Another segment of the show is on display at Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx; a Brooklyn show is scheduled to start in November. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem, (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org. (Cotter)
Museum of Arts and Design: ‘Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities’ (through Sept. 18) In the age of the flat screen, a show about the diorama sounds charmingly naïve. Yet “Otherworldly” circles back to the two-dimensional image in ways that feel very sophisticated. A good number of the show’s more than 40 artists build model homes, cities and landscapes mainly to photograph them. At times the exhibition feels like a Hollywood film-studio tour in miniature. 2 Columbus Circle, (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Harun Farocki: Images of War (at a Distance)’(through Jan. 2) Harun Farocki’s film and video work is almost too interesting to be art. The fascinating subject matter of “Serious Games I-IV,” the main attraction in this thought-provoking show, deals with video-game technology used to train soldiers in practices of high-tech modern warfare. Mixing his own films, footage uncovered in industrial and military archives and laconic texts, he offers a self-reflexive, cinematic Cubism in which the medium itself as a vehicle of truth is subject to radical doubt. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing’ (through Sept. 19) This show of contemporary drawings (most acquired since 2005) is anchored by a group of telegrams sent by the Japanese artist On Kawara to friends and associates; each one bears the message “I am still alive.” The artists seem to be in a permanent state of wariness and suspicion, which is sometimes the result of political instability and at other times more innate. But their efforts to process matters of life and death in short bursts of creative activity feel very of the moment. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Project 95: Runa Islam’ (through Sept. 19) Part of MoMA’s “Projects” series, this exhibition showcases a newly commissioned film (“Emergence,” 2011) based on a cracked glass negative from the Smithsonian’s archives. Also on view are three recent works of comparable poetry and rigor: two lyrical looks at the Italian landscape and a hypnotic structural exploration of a Japanese folding screen. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Museum of Modern Art: ‘Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects’ (through Nov. 7) This broad, ambitious survey of interactive design is made for the texting, tweeting, social-networking, app-downloading, smartphone-wielding museumgoer. Its nearly 200 projects include not only crowd-pleasing video games, robots and chattering objects but also some surprisingly seductive interfaces, charts and information systems — each with its own hash tag. (212) 708-9400,moma.org. (Rosenberg)
★ New Museum: ‘Ostalgia’ (through Sept. 25) This tough, absorbing exhibition fills all five floors of the New Museum with contemporary art from, or about, Russia and former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe. A fair number of the artists are unfamiliar to New York; some have difficult, even harrowing histories. But a show that could have been a surveyish introduction to them is something more. It’s an extended essay about what happens when art and life meet not because it’s a cool idea, but because they have no choice: they either join forces or lose everything. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower East Side, (212) 219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Cotter)
Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools’ (through Sept. 11) This solo turn from Mr. Arcangel, the digital wunderkind, artist-musician and inveterate hacker, seems a trifle scrubbed clean, sanitized and austere. Containing work almost entirely from 2011, it tells us little of his funkier early digital efforts or artistic development. A few pieces reflect his longstanding interest in television and video games; in others he tries too hard to establish his formalist bona fides with wry riffs on abstract painting and sculpture. Mr. Arcangel seems guided by a somewhat callow faith in the avant-garde, striving to perpetuate its tradition, dating from Duchamp, of laying claim to new areas of nonart for art’s sake. Sometimes he succeeds, but not always. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. ( Smith)
Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Breaking Ground: The Whitney’s Founding Collection’ (through Sept. 18) In anticipation of its move to a new home in 2015, the Whitney is cooking up a series of six back-to-back experimental permanent-collection shows at its present location. The first of them is a sampler of the earliest work in the holdings, and as a summary of the institution’s initial view of American Modernism, what a curious thing it is. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)
★ Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘Lyonel Feininger: At The Edge of the World’ (through Oct. 16) This overdue survey is an eye-opener, especially for the rapturous storybook street scenes that Feininger (1871-1956) painted from 1907 to 1911 — fresh off his triumph as a comic-strip artist and with a big assist from Fauvism’s heated palette — and for the hand-carved and painted toylike figures and buildings that may be his most original response to Cubism. But the show diligently emphasizes the stiltedly mystical Cubified landscapes into which Feininger’s painting style hardened after 1918. There’s too little evidence of the photographs, woodcuts and pencil sketches that, with the carved sculptures, kept his natural, urbane lightness alive. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Smith)
Whitney Museum of American Art: ‘More Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson’ (through Sept. 18) These 17 brief films about ordinary African-American life are completely unordinary (and here, not always about African-Americans; one stars a hive of bees). Some seem to be purely archival and topical, others simply and casually anecdotal, though as one quickly learns, “pure,” “simple” and “casual” are not words in Mr. Everson’s aesthetic vocabulary. He is an astoundingly prolific artist; the time is not far off when he’ll need an entire museum. (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)
Galleries: Uptown
★ Lyonel Feininger: ‘Drawings and Watercolors from the Julie Feininger Estate’ (through Oct. 15) On the occasion of the Feininger retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a gallery long involved with his career presents a parallel survey of works on paper from his widow’s estate. It compensates for some of the museum show’s shortcomings, most impressively with a gratifying profusion of small, lively woodcut prints from 1918-23 that will be unfamiliar to most viewers. Moeller Fine Art New York, 36 East 64th Street, (212) 644-2133, moellerfineart.com. (Smith)
Galleries: Chelsea
★ ‘La Carte d’Après Nature’ (through Oct. 8) Using the Belgian painter René Magritte as a kind of divining rod, this show, organized by the artist Thomas Demand (a version of one seen last year at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco), finds surrealism in some unlikely places. Among the objects on view are three paintings by Magritte; 19th-century landscape photographs by the German artist August Kotzsch; 1970s shots of parkgoing tourists by the Italian artist Luigi Ghirri; and an architectural model from the 1967 Montreal Expo. Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, (212) 243-0200,matthewmarks.com. (Rosenberg)
Jay Critchley: ‘Deep Bones’ / Chad Person: ‘A Hero Never Fails’ (through Sept. 10) Two Cassandras in separate but complementary shows decry our addictions to oil, drugs and competition. Mr. Critchley has mummified, Egyptian-style, a whole ’70s-era sports car using plastic bags instead of fabric as wrapping. Mr. Person offers faux folk signs that say things like “Resign” and “Accept Less,” as well as a depressed-looking inflatable representing the cartoon character Underdog. Freight + Volume, 530 West 24th Street, (212) 691-7700, freightandvolume.com. (Johnson)
‘Heads With Tails’ (through Sept. 9) This diverting late-summer show, organized by West Street Gallery, inserts early video works by William Wegman into a mix of contemporary paintings, drawings and sculptures. Silliness and sobriety trade off in these mostly small works, which can’t really match Mr. Wegman’s eager yet deadpan humor. Harris Lieberman, 508 West 26th Street, (212) 206-1290, harrislieberman.com. (Rosenberg)
★ ‘Sigmar Polke: Photoworks, 1964-2000’ (through Sept. 10) If this genius of postwar German art, who died last summer at 69, had made no paintings, his wide-ranging photographic work would have assured him a prominent place in history. That’s proven by this generous survey — the first in New York devoted to Polke’s photography, the medium perfectly suited his mercurial sensibility. He exploited its ease, immateriality and darkroom processes; spiked it with his works in other mediums (as well as himself); and used it to make his every activity an occasion for making art. His talent for making something from nothing is never more magical. Leo Koenig Inc., 545 West 23rd Street, (212) 334-9255, leokoenig.com. (Smith)
Galleries: Other
★ Simon Dinnerstein: ‘The Fulbright Triptych and Selected Works at the German Consulate General’ (through Sept. 15) The shining star of this exhibition is “The Fulbright Triptych,” a little-known masterpiece of 1970s realism begun by the young Simon Dinnerstein during a Fulbright fellowship in Germany in 1971 and completed in his hometown, Brooklyn, three years later. Incorporating carefully rendered art postcards, children’s drawings and personal memorabilia; a formidable worktable laid out with printmaking tools and outdoor views; and the artist and his family, it synthesizes portrait, still life, interior and landscape and rummages through visual culture while sampling a dazzling range of textures and representational styles. It should be seen by anyone interested in the history of recent art and its oversights. German Consulate General, 871 United Nations Plaza, First Avenue, at 49th Street, (212) 610-9700, germany.info. (Smith)
Public Art
‘Mark di Suvero at Governors Island: Presented by Storm King Art Center’(through Sept. 25) With 11 works spanning more than three decades, this show organized by Storm King Art Center — the 500-acre sculpture park in the Hudson Valley — is Mark di Suvero’s biggest New York City survey since 1975. The all-outdoor exhibition works alongside the island’s packed calendar of activities and festivals, offering bike riders and picnickers culture by osmosis. Plan to spend some time along the island’s southern end, where four of Mr. di Suvero’s best sculptures engage the waterfront and one another in invigorating ways. Governors Island, govisland.com. (Rosenberg)
Out Of Town
★ Hansel Museum of Art: ‘If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now’ (through Dec. 16) This ultra-smart, often lavishly furnished exhibition provides the viewer with lots of ostentatiously pedigreed chairs and couches on which to sit or lie, and a fitful selection of American and European paintings, sculptures, drawings and videos to contemplate, along with several re-creations of wall installations by the German painter-provocateur Blinky Palermo. Distinctions between private and public, art and décor, form and function, and politics and aesthetics are all fruitfully blurred, and the question of what makes collectors tick is variously broached. There is attitude to spare, and the artworks often feel a bit put upon. But there are numerous balls in the air, and quite a few hit their intended targets. Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.; (845) 758-7598,bard.edu/ccs. (Smith)
‘Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977’ (through Oct. 31) Already influential at the time of his unexpected death, at 33, in 1977, the German artist Blinky Palermo (born Peter Schwarze) has come to seem essential to an art world obsessed with painting by means other than paint. Much, therefore, is expected of his first full-dress survey in North America. Split between two institutions and further subdivided by medium (cloth pictures and wall drawings at Bard, metal paintings at Dia), the show feels choppy but true to Palermo’s geographic and artistic schisms. Dia:Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, N.Y., (845) 440-0100, diaart.org; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., (845) 758-7598, bard.edu/ccs. (Rosenberg)
Philadelphia Museum of Art: ‘Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus’ (through Oct. 30) The works in this exhibition amount to a gutsy makeover of the most depicted man in Western art. Jesus was, of course, Jewish. But few artists emphasized his ethnicity, or his humanity, as frankly and directly as Rembrandt did. Though smaller than a conventional blockbuster, this show is a powerful declaration of faith — not just Rembrandt’s faith in Jesus, but our own faith in the secular authority of Rembrandt’s hand. Benjamin Franklin Parkway, at 26th Street, Philadelphia, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
★ Portland Museum of Art: ‘John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury’ (through Oct. 10) This excellent show focuses on the last two decades of Marin, a painter whom many at the time — the ’30s and ’40s — considered the greatest living American artist. It presents 50 watercolors and oil paintings picturing views around his Cape Split, Me., summer home; his Cliffiside, N.J., winter residence; and Manhattan. Some of the works update Winslow Homer’s naturalism, but most teeter on the brink of Cubist-Expressionist abstraction. All are impetuously energetic. 7 Congress Square, Portland, Me., (207) 775-6148, portlandmuseum.org. (Johnson)
★ Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute: ‘Pissarro’s People’ (through Oct. 2) The Impressionist Camille Pissarro was, by temperament and belief, a welcomer of people and ideals, and there’s an embracing feel to this modest, open-hearted exhibition of paintings and works on paper that demonstrates how central a role the human presence was in the work of an artist usually associated with landscapes. Pissarro’s idealism was insistent, sometimes to the point of making his art look bland. But his ethical generosity shines through like good karma and makes him an artist to love. 225 South Street, Williamstown, Mass., (413) 458-2303, clarkart.edu. (Cotter)
Last Chance
‘The Atomic Explosion: A Collection of Vintage Photographs’ (closes on Friday) This show gathers 66 images of American nuclear tests and detonations, most of them conducted at the Nevada Test Site and on the Marshall Islands during the 1940s and ’50s. The massing mushroom clouds in these images, photographed from miles away, are made to seem benignly organic. A giant portobello rises over Bikini Atoll; slender enokis sprout in Nevada. The news-service captions on many of the prints feel just as innocuous; one compares a double-capped cloud to “a giant dumbbell.” Peter Blum SoHo, 99 Wooster Street, (212) 343-0441, peterblumgallery.com. (Rosenberg)
Bronx Museum of the Arts: ‘Bronx Calling: The First AIM Biennial’ (closes on Monday) Some of the 72 participants in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program from 2010 and 2011, all included in this two-site exhibition, will warrant keeping an eye on. One for sure is Jessica Stoller, who creates exquisite, tabletop-scale, glazed porcelain figurative sculptures with a spooky, feminist edge. Other standouts: Matthew Conradt’s large, vaguely nightmarish collages picturing faceless figures in Cubist-Surrealist compositions; Romy Scheroder’s assemblages made of disparate pieces of wooden furniture; and Karla Wozniak’s thick and crusty paintings of landscapes blighted by road signs. 1040 Grand Concourse, at 165th Street, Morrisania, the Bronx, (718) 681-6000, bronxmuseum.org; also showing at Wave Hill, West 249th Street and Independence Avenue, Riverdale, the Bronx, (718) 549-3200, wavehill.org. (Johnson)
★ MoMA PS1: Ryan Trecartin: ‘Any Ever’ (closes on Monday) This game-changing show of seven related videos, viewed amid eccentric seating arrangements procured mostly from Ikea, reflects the combined imagination of a supertalented young artist and his band of merry, cross-dressing pranksters. The results teeter giddily at the intersection of art, reality television and social networking; forge an integration of video and installation art, not to mention a blend of actual life and animation undreamt of by Walt Disney; and evince an aspirational faith in the potential of uninhibited self-expression, both individual and collective, to counter the mounting materialism of everyday life. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens; (718) 784-2084, ps1.org. (Smith)
Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands’ (closes on Sunday) Medieval illuminations — so rich in narrative, embellishment and religious expression — can display sartorial trends that can help experts date manuscripts and discern the subtleties of a figure’s status or character. There are many examples here, as well as mannequins in full-scale model attire — say, a splendid hunting ensemble of gold-embroidered blue velvet and lilac wool felt for the men, and for the women, a princessy gown of yellow silk trimmed in black crushed velvet, accessorized by a turret. This lively show will teach you to scrutinize centuries-old manuscripts as you would a style magazine. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, Ext. 560, themorgan.org. (Rosenberg)
Museum of Modern Art: ‘Boris Mikhailov: Case History’ (closes on Monday) This exhibition’s visceral photographs of homeless people in Ukraine are not for the squeamish. The 19 photos, large-format examples from a series of more than 400 images produced in the late 1990s, portray people in grungy rooms or in wintery outdoor sites naked or pulling aside their clothes to expose parts of their bodies. Thus Mr. Mikhailov protests a society that allows people to fall into such substandard states and conditions. (212) 708-9400,moma.org. (Johnson)
Andra Ursuta: ‘Vandal Lust’ (closes on Sunday) For her much-improved second solo show, this young, Romanian-born artist pays tribute to Ilya Kabakov’s dream of Eastern bloc escape, the 1984 installation “The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment,” by imagining a similar attempt using a medieval catapult. The plan’s failure is evident in a dented wall and a life-size mannequin of the artist crumpled on the floor. Looming over her, the catapult itself is a bizarre, cobbled-together assemblage of materials, scales and odd intimations. For all its brutishness, it conjures delicate architectural miniaturization, a network of tiny hallways clogged with stuff and redolent of stymied lives. Ramiken Crucible, 389 Grand Street, near Clinton Street, Lower East Side, (917) 434-4245,ramikencrucible.com. (Smith)
