U.S. Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Guillermo Kuitca, "Mozart—da Ponte" I, 1995, mixed media on canvas, 71 x 92". © Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.
Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008
MIAMI ART MUSEUM
MIAMI
Through January 17 2010
Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon
Employing motifs such as maps, architectural plans, and genealogical charts, Guillermo Kuitca makes borders and links—as well as their political and personal mediation—central to his practice. Miami is thus a fitting location to launch this touring midcareer survey, which traces the contours of the Argentinean artist’s oeuvre with some seventy drawings and paintings. One standout is Untitled, 1992 (on view for the first time in the United States), an arrangement of twenty child-size beds with road maps of Europe painted directly onto their mattresses—elegantly cleaving public and private.
— Lisa Turvey
Anne Truitt, First, 1961, latex on wood, 44 1/4 x 17 3/4 x 7". © Estate of Anne Truitt/Bridgeman Art Library.
Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection
HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN
WASHINGTON, DC
Through January 3 2010
Curated by Kristen Hileman
With this retrospective, Anne Truitt, who died in 2004, finally gets the full treatment. Included will be several of the painted wooden abstractions that caught Clement Greenberg’s eye in the late 1960s, eliciting comparisons to Donald Judd and Robert Morris, as well as lesser known work from the succeeding three decades, when she experimented with metal fabrication, augmented her signature columnar forms with horizontal extensions, and developed a two-dimensional practice. From the beginning, Truitt insisted on the importance of referentiality and color—both troublesome to the Minimalists with whom she is often grouped—in seeking “maximum meaning in the simplest possible form,” an objective so deceptively straightforward it requires the cognitive acrobatics of a koan. The show is accompanied by the artist’s first monograph, with essays by curator Hileman and art historian James Meyer.
— Lisa Turvey
Yinka Shonibare, Odile and Odette, 2005, still from a color video, 14 minutes 28 seconds.
Yinka Shonibare
SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
WASHINGTON, DC
Through March 7 2010
Curated by Rachel Kent
In traditional folktales, the trickster serves to reveal cultural complexities, and as critic Jean Fisher has noted, this character has “a global reach,” popping up in narratives everywhere, subverting rules, and confusing codes. So, too, Member of the British Empire Yinka Shonibare, whose multireferential sculptures, installations, paintings, videos, and photographs have reverse-colonized the art world, peopling it with a cast of color-saturated, quasi-surreal masqueraders (often headless and usually engaged in extravagantly absurd pursuits). Featuring twenty works from the past twelve years, this major midcareer survey will highlight Shonibare’s newest output—and promises a carnival of both visual and postcolonial complexity.
— Rachel Withers
Gran Fury, Men Use Condoms or Beat It, 1988, crack-and-peel sticker, 7 1/4 x 8 3/4".
ACT UP New York
CARPENTER CENTER FOR THE VISUAL ARTS
CAMBRIDGE, MA
Through December 23
Curated by Claire Grace and Helen Molesworth
The list of lenders for this exhibition, subtitled “Activism, Art, and the aids Crisis, 1987–1993,” reads like a who’s who of the outraged queers—among them gifted artists, filmmakers, designers, even a hairdresser—who over twenty years ago created art that helped galvanize the movement to “take direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” In addition to some seventy works of mostly collectively produced agitprop by, among others, Fierce Pussy, Gang, Gran Fury, Donald Moffett, the Silence = Death Project, and Ken Woodward, the show includes sketches and mock-ups offering insight into the collaborative process that yielded such unforgettable “demographics.” Also, for the first time, audiences can peruse the hundred-plus recently videotaped interviews with surviving ACT UP members, which Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman have been coordinating as an oral-history project.
— David Deitcher
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Styrofoam Cups), 2003, Styrofoam cups and hot glue, dimensions variable.
Tara Donovan
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN DIEGO, DOWNTOWN
SAN DIEGO
Through February 28 2010
Curated by Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel
Tara Donovan makes I-can-do-that sculptures by taking a household item—a Styrofoam cup, straight pin, drinking straw, or toothpick—and positioning it among thousands of its ilk. You could do it, but you wouldn't. You wouldn't log hundreds of hours meticulously assembling, arranging, affixing, or otherwise conjoining countless identical consumer goods. The results, when seen from afar, offer gestalt experiences that, paradoxically, often conjure natural associations, with, for example, waves, clouds, and mountains. Donovan's first major museum show, accompanied by a comprehensive monograph documenting nearly all her projects to date, presents a dozen sculptures and five major installations from the past twelve years.
— Brian Sholis
Joaquín Torres-García, Two White Men, ca. 1929, oil and iron tacks on wood, two parts, from left: 10 1/4 x 3 1/2 x 3/4", 8 3/4 x 3 x 3/4".
Joaquín Torres-García
THE MENIL COLLECTION
HOUSTON
Through January 3 2010
Curated by Josef Helfenstein and Mari Carmen Ramírez
One of the key advocates of abstraction in Latin America, Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) is best known for paintings that situate pre-Columbian symbols within modernist grids. This exhibition’s focus on the Uruguayan artist’s use of wood unveils a more complex project involving the reconciliation of painting and sculpture, whether through totemlike structures, idiosyncratic assemblages, or toys that verge on folk art. The show comprises some ninety drawings, oil paintings, and works in wood from Torres-García’s formative period in 1920s New York and Europe through his emergence as a pedagogue and champion of Constructive Universalism in the ’30s and ’40s via his own workshop school in Montevideo. The catalogue includes previously untranslated texts by the artist, which should provide further insight into his vision for a transnational modernism.