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.
Candice Breitz, Factum Jacob, 2009, stills from a two-channel video installation.
Candice Breitz: Same Same
THE POWER PLANT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
TORONTO
Through November 22
Curated by Gregory Burke
In the 1986 film Heartburn, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep play journalists doomed to an unfaithful marriage; a year later, in Ironweed, the two stars cross paths again as Depression-era drifters. For Him + Her—a two-room, fourteen-channel video installation from 2008—Candice Breitz samples clips from some fifty of Nicholson’s and Streep’s roles, weaving them together to effect a schizophrenic chorus. This work joins five other video-based pieces (including a new commission) in the South African artist’s forthcoming survey, which frames her delicious appropriations of Hollywood and the music industry, and their erstwhile cult stars, as canny interrogations of subjectivity’s formation. As a supplement to the show, the Power Plant will host a conference, titled “The Scripted Life,” featuring Breitz and a distinguished cast of artists and scholars.
— Suzanne Hudson
Rachel Harrison, Perth Amboy, 2001, mixed media, dimensions variable.
Rachel Harrison
BARD CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY
Through December 30
Curated by Tom Eccles
Brash, dispersed, hyperassociative yet precise, New York–based artist Rachel Harrison’s work exacts virtuosity from cultural excess with wit and elegance to spare; one can see why her first major survey’s title, “Consider the Lobster,” comes from an essay by the late David Foster Wallace. Six reconfigured installations and a selection of sculptures and photographs made since 1995 compose the bulk of the show, which is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by curator Tom Eccles, Jack Bankowsky, Iwona Blazwick, and David Joselit. The second part of the exhibition (in the Hessel, and not traveling) takes a different tack, with Eccles and Harrison collaborating with six artists—Nayland Blake, Tom Burr, Harry Dodge, Alix Lambert, Allen Ruppersberg, and Andrea Zittel—in curating works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.
— Fionn Meade
Susan Rothenberg, Cabin Fever, 1976,
acrylic and tempera on canvas, 67 x 84 1/8". © 2009 Susan Rothenberg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Susan Rothenberg
MODERN ART MUSEUM OF FORT WORTH
FORT WORTH, TX
Through January 4 2010
Curated by Michael Auping
The earliest of the twenty-five canvases in this exhibition (organized with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico) date from the mid-1970s, when a group of works on horse themes catapulted Susan Rothenberg to the forefront of the New Image painters. Long settled in Galisteo, Texas, Rothenberg has for some time employed a much smaller, stitch-like stroke, a mode resistant to the “frozen motion” (as the artist describes it) of the equine ideogram on which her considerable reputation rests. Absorbed by the small wonders of Texan domestic life as well as by the state’s vast landscape, she now makes paintings that appear eccentrically Impressionist, with a characteristic loss of edge as figures and grounds meld into one another owing to her agile and flickering touch.
— Robert Pincus-Witten
Arthur Wesley Dow, August Moon, 1905, woodcut print, 5 1/3 x 7 1/2".
"The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989"
NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART
KANSAS CITY
Through January 3 2010
Curated by Alexandra Munroe
“The Third Mind” looks to subvert the narrative of cultural influence’s one-way flow from West to East by focusing on how artists, writers, and filmmakers in the United States have consistently drawn on “Asian” (mainly Japanese, Chinese, and Indian) artistic traditions and religious practices. Curator Alexandra Munroe arranges more than 200 works into seven roughly chronological sections, beginning with pieces by Mary Cassatt and John La Farge, among others, and ending with the likes of Meredith Monk and Bill Viola. The show’s title, referencing a 1965 work by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin that recombined textual fragments to form new narratives, evokes the eclecticism that has characterized American appropriations of the Asian ever since Matthew C. Perry landed in Japan.
— Philip Tinari
Dan Christensen, April Blue, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 95 x 77".
“Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting”
THE SHELDON MUSEUM OF ART
LINCOLN, NE
Through January 31 2010
Curated by Rachael Blackburn Cozad
Dan Christensen was a painter. That is, he was a painter. Like, a P-A-I-N-T-E-R. Christensen graduated in 1964 from the Kansas City Art Institute and began, well, painting about painting. And he was canny enough to narrow down his subject matter to composition, color, and—mais oui!—the way paint behaves on canvas. He was also gutsy enough to try almost any way—from grids of muted color blocks to ropy, aerobatic, candy-color sprays—of combining those elements to arrive at some sort of visual poetry: He scraped, he stained, and his color ranged from tastefully tan to psychedelically bright. Did all of his paintings turn out to be masterpieces? No. But enough of them are beautiful and different from the work of other “color painters” to merit this thirty-five-work retrospective.