In 2008, the American Conceptualist Adam Pendleton, then in his mid-twenties, conceived Black Dada, a poetic manifesto of sorts, about avant-gardism, abstraction, and civil rights. In 2015, Pendleton planted a flag for Black Lives Matter at the Venice Biennale. In the ambitious installation Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?, the artist fills MoMAs five-story atrium with paintings, drawings, and textiles, augmented with sound and moving images. (Opens Sept. 18.)
Jasper Johns is arguably the most revered American painter alive. He may also be the most elusive. What do his iconic targets, flags, numbers, maps, and, more recently, hat-wearing skeletons mean? Dont ask Johnshes been silent on the subject throughout his nearly seven-decade career. The Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art join forces for the concurrent, two-part retrospective JasperJohns: Mind/Mirroran homage to the artists fascination with doublingfeaturing some five hundred canvases, drawings, sculptures, and prints, many on loan from the artist himself. (Opens Sept. 29.)
The fifth edition of Greater New York, a quinquennial survey at MoMA PS1, was delayed a year by the pandemic. Its unusual premisethat documentary and Surrealist impulses are symbiotic, not oppositionalsuggests its been worth the wait. The shows list of New York City-based artists and collectives is refreshingly intimate: there are only forty-seven participants, two-thirds fewer than in 2015. Expect rediscoveries of overlooked figures, as well as new voices. (Opens Oct. 7.)
Were it not for Vasily Kandinsky, there might never have been a Guggenheim Museum. Kandinskys essay On the Spiritual in Art, written in 1911, had a profound influence on Hilla Rebay, the art adviser (and the museums first director) who persuaded Solomon R. Guggenheim to acquire the Russian painters groundbreaking abstractions. In the retrospective Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle, the artists vibrant paintings, watercolors, and woodcuts line the museums rotunda, accompanied by a trio of solo shows by contemporary artistsfirst Etel Adnan, then Jennie C. Jones, and finally Cecilia Vicuñawho share his faith in the power of non-objective form. (Opens Oct. 8.)
If you associate Surrealism with Paris between the World Wars, youre right and youre wrong. The sweeping exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, at the Met, reframes the movement as a globe-trotting phenomenon that landed in forty-five countries (including Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey) between the nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-seventies. (Opens Oct. 11.)
The 2021 New Museum Triennial takes its title, Soft Water Hard Stone, from a Brazilian proverb, a double-entendre referring to both the merits of persistence and the inevitable impermanence of all things. Forty international artists, all of them under fifty years old, emphasize resilience and transformation in a wide range of mediums. (Opens Oct. 28.)read more
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