Gertrude Stein (right) and Alice Toklas in their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, 1922. Photo: Man Ray. © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

“The Steins Collect”

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
NEW YORK
Through June 3
Curated by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, Rebecca Rabinow, and Gary Tinterow

This bulging blockbuster (with more than two hundred works by some forty artists, plus documentation of all types) is devoted to the collections and personalities of the Stein siblings—Michael, the eldest brother; his wife, Sarah; his younger brother, Leo, and still younger sister, Gertrude. Textbook masterpieces abound, such as the 1905 portrait of Mme Matisse, Woman with a Hat, and plenty of Picassos, from MoMA’s Rose Period Boy Leading a Horse, 1905–1906, to the Met’s implacable Iberian portrait of Gertrude. “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” and its sizable catalogue admirably give each family member his or her due, offering a renewed appreciation for Leo, Michael, and Sarah (the latter remembered as the nucleus of the Académie Matisse), and so rescuing them from Gertrude’s overbearing shadow.

— Robert Pincus-Witten

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #413, 2003, chromogenic color print, 46 x 31 1/8".

Cindy Sherman

MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through June 11
Curated by Eva Respini

Since the mid-1970s, Cindy Sherman has been continually reinventing and photographing herself––as a paper doll or a movie character, wearing Comme des Garçons or displaying too many nips and tucks. Whatever guise she assumes, whether looking gorgeous or weird, Sherman is always and never herself. At the time she made her “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977–80, she was persona non grata at the Museum of Modern Art’s Photography Department; when MoMA acquired the full set of “Stills” in 1995, they had become canonical postmodern artworks––thanks in large part to the thoughtful attention of feminist critics. Now the museum is mounting a full-scale retrospective of more than 180 photographs from all the major series, accompanied by a catalogue with a conversation between Sherman and John Waters and essays by Respini and critic Johanna Burton.

Travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, July 14–Oct. 7; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Nov. 3, 2012–Feb. 10, 2013; Dallas Museum of Art, Mar. 17–June 9, 2013.

— Douglas Crimp

Klara Lidén, Der Mythos des Fortschritts (Moonwalk) [The Myth of Progress (Moonwalk)], 2008, color DVD (still), 4 minutes.

“Klara Liden: Bodies of Society”

NEW MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through July 1
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Jenny Moore

With a squatter’s ingenuity, Klara Liden finds opportunities for her sly, poetic assertions of autonomy in the unpoliced moments and discarded materials of cities. The young Swedish artist’s first large-scale American museum exhibition will feature more than ten works made over the past decade, including a sculpture, an installation, a slide show, videos (such as her early Paralyzed, 2003, in which she performs improvised acrobatics on a Stockholm subway car), and excerpts from her “Poster Paintings” series, 2007–10 (sheaves of stolen advertising posters painted over with white). But if Liden’s installation at Reena Spaulings last winter—for which she built a fortlike enclosure for a small forest of scavenged Christmas trees—is any indication, we can anticipate something startling and poignant for her planned intervention into the New Museum’s aseptic architecture.

— Johanna Fateman

Tauba Auerbach, RGB Colorspace Atlas (detail), 2011, digital offset print on paper, case-bound book, with airbrushed cloth cover and page edges and binding construction by Daniel Kelm, set of three books, each 8 x 8 x 8".

“Ecstatic Alphabets/ Heaps Of Language”

MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through August 27
Curated by Laura Hoptman

If over the past forty-odd years “language in art” has become a commonplace of artistic production and discourse, a new form of integrating writing and typography into visual art has recently emerged—one that, by returning to experimental poetry’s concentration on the material qualities of language, works to pulverize contemporary speech and loose it from received meaning. MoMA takes note of this development in an exhibition assembling sixty-four works by twelve contemporary artists and artists’ groups—from the concrete lettering of Tauba Auerbach to the activist scripts of Sharon Hayes—and juxtaposing them with a selection of the museum’s own text-based art spanning the twentieth century. Insiders look forward to seeing British artist and designer Paul Elliman’s work alongside that of his former students Shannon Ebner, Experimental Jetset, and Dexter Sinister, the design and publishing collaboration, which will print a new edition of its Bulletins of the Serving Library to accompany the exhibition.

— Tom McDonough

Mella Jaarsma, I Eat You Eat Me, 2001–. Performance view, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2002.

“Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art”

SMART MUSEUM OF ART, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHICAGO
Through June 10
Curated by Stephanie Smith

In the 1960s and ’70s, Daniel Spoerri, George Maciunas, Gordon Matta-Clark, and others deployed gastronomic modes of collectivism to dismantle the rarefied experience of art. With the prompt of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s activities since the 1990s and the rise of participation as the ur-form of art experience, these earlier experiments are being historicized anew. “Feast”—a chronological account of this approach from the 1930s on, comprising artworks, documentary materials, and newly commissioned performances by nearly thirty intergenerational artists—will no doubt raise the timely question of whether the contemporary, institutionalized staging of these food projects can preserve their radicality in an altered landscape of temporality and human exchange. The catalogue will feature contributions by Smith and pioneers in chronicling this experiential mode of artistic practice, including Charles Esche and Hannah Higgins.

— Julia Robinson

Mark Bradford, Ghost and Stooges, 2011, mixed-media collage on canvas, 8' 6" x 12'. From “The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol.”

“The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol”

VARIOUS VENUES
LOS ANGELES
Through August 20
Curated by Jeffrey Deitch

If for a long while abstract painting was regarded as a cul-de-sac, seemingly foreclosed to advanced practice, things have certainly turned around in the past decade, and abstraction now characterizes much of the most popular (and marketable) new painting. With “The Painting Factory,” LA MoCA’s trend-spotting director, Jeffrey Deitch, situates the varied practices of Tauba Auerbach, Mark Bradford, DAS INSTITUT, Urs Fischer, Wade Guyton, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Seth Price, Sterling Ruby, and Kelley Walker in a family tree running back through Rudolf Stingel and Christopher Wool to the master of mediated, mechanized painting himself—Andy Warhol. Whether this curatorial conceit illuminates the artists’ practices or masks vital differences remains to be seen, but the endeavor—and its catalogue, which features a text on, or interview with, each artist and a discussion between Johanna Burton, Scott Rothkopf, and James Meyer—promises to stake out contentious territory in this ongoing conversation about painting.

— Jordan Kantor