It is this unique perspective and approach to curating and institution building that has made Filipovic one of today’s most closely watched curators. After nearly 10 years of running the non-collecting, contemporary-focused Kunsthalle, she embarked on a new journey two months ago, becoming the director of the storied 17th-century Kunstmuseum Basel. A child of immigrants who grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire, she is still somewhat of an outsider in Basel; she is the first non-European and only the second woman to lead the Kunstmuseum, the holdings of which span from the 15th century to today.

“I’d like to think I bring the best of both worlds with me,” Filipovic recently told ARTnews of her upbringing in the US and her adopted home of Europe, where she in 1998. During her tenure at the Kunsthalle, she organized more than 60 exhibitions, including acclaimed ones for artists like Michael Armitage, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Yngve Holen, Anne Imhof, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. In 2022, she organized the Croatian Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale, and, prior to moving to Basel, she was senior curator at Wiels in Brussels, from 2009 to 2014, and she co-curated, with Adam Szymczk, the 2008 Berlin Biennale.

MoMA PS1 director Connie Butler once called Filipovic a “visionary,” adding that she had “one of the best curatorial programs anywhere.” When she was selected to lead the Kunstmuseum, the selection committee’s president Felix Uhlmann said, at the time, that Filipovic’s “infectious enthusiasm for the entire spectrum of art history, and her ability to inspire people for art” is ultimately what made the committee choose her for the position.

Filipovic is a conciliatory figure, whose new mandate includes strengthening the museum’s global standing and ushering it into the future, at a time when art institutions around the world strive for more inclusivity, both in terms of their public and in the telling of art history. With the support of the institution, Filipovic said she is also “pushing to go further and faster.”

She added, “It’s important that we all remember that this should not be a cemetery of beautiful dead things, but a spaceship. It should carry us into the future.”

A museum spaceship may seem like a concept out of step with a 17th-century institution, housing over 300,000 works spanning seven centuries. But Filipovic argues the Kunstmuseum was radical for its day: it became the world’s first public museum in 1661.

The question that animates her vision for the Kunstmuseum, which will also undergo a renovation beginning in 2027, she said, is “How can you run a very old museum that nevertheless has inscribed in its DNA the idea that it should still speak to generations in the future?”

One way Filipovic hopes to carry the institution forward is by exhibiting the work of underrepresented artists more frequently, including in a planned rehang beginning this summer in the museum’s newest building that draws on an expansive acquisition strategy that she has already implemented, adding pieces by Helen Frankenthaler, Julie Mehretu, and Cameron Rowland. “Every acquisition becomes a manifesto of sorts, and a chance to rethink what legacy we leave for future generations,” she said.

Filipovic recently commissioned Louis Lawler to create a work for the new building’s foyer. Lawler’s photographs can seem to swipe across, distort, or blur canonic artworks, questioning the systems and institutions that have lionized and valued them. Lawler’s work “becomes a commentary on what has been glorified in the museum and how we are taking steps to actually look at that,” she said.

But, Filipovic also wants to continue to activate works already in the collection, including some of the museum’s most famed ones, by pursuing and displaying new research, which is also already underway, about their historical contexts, subjects, and provenance. Part of her aim is to show how centuries-old work remains acutely relevant to the questions we face today. Take Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–22), a life-size and somewhat jarring depiction of the deceased Jesus in the early stages of decay. The work, she said, “speaks to our present at a time of crisis and war and death. Our society has had some of the same problems and questions and yet resilience has carried us through.”

And in maintaining a permanent collection that dates back nearly 400 years, Filipovic will also have to navigate the Kunstmuseum through delicate situations like restitution claims, several of which have come up in the past few years. These include a 2020 settlement for an undisclosed sum over the museum’s purchase of 200 works once owned by a Jewish collector from a 1933 auction, and an ongoing claim over a Henri Rousseau painting a collector sold to support herself while in exile in Switzerland after fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany. (In a statement in January, the museum said it is negotiating a “just and fair solution” with the latter collector’s heirs.)

While Filipovic had not been involved in those restitution claims, she spoke more broadly about how she plans to address such claims going forward, including continuing to support extensive, proactive research into the provenance of artworks in the collection, begun by her predecessor Josef Helfenstein, and then finding ways to share that information with the public.

“Once that the research has been done, I think it is the responsibility of the museum—and it has already been committed to this before my time, and it will continue to during my time—to render this information accessible,” she said.

When it comes to the collection rehang, an exercise that has become something of a global trend of late, Filipovic said the initiative is less about following the lead of other institutions than it is a “feeling that there are so many stories that can be told,” she said. “By rehanging the collection, you’re demanding that the public notice. That every juxtaposition might provoke a new reading of each work.”

Her aim, she continued, is “not to give the public the feeling that [the collection] has been set up and is sleeping [nor] that these truths are inalienable. It is not so.”

The Headlines

RESTITUTION REPORT. Last week, the Swiss city of Basel said it would provide funding to five institutions, so that they could research objects that may have been unethically obtained, Swissinfo reports. The project will further work that already started at the Kunstmuseum Basel, which has begun reviewing the provenances of some artworks that were acquired during the Nazi era. The project has been given a budget of CHF 250,000 (about $259,000). Meanwhile, the Guardian offered a look inside the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which has repeatedly faced the scorn of experts and activists who claim that many objects on view were acquired via colonialism. “A genuine willingness to learn from past mistakes and rethink how ethnological collections are displayed is tangible in the newly opened eastern wing,” Philip Olterman writes.

A FREUDIAN FRACAS has been ongoing for years over a painting of a nude man shown bent over from behind. Its owner claims that the painting is a true Lucian Freud, but many others who knew Freud or are connected to his estate say otherwise. For the New Yorker, Sam Knight penned a thrilling deep dive into the state of the picture and its unnamed owner’s attempts to prove its authenticity, which even involve, at one point, analysis by artificial intelligence. Matters are made complicated, Knight notes, by the fact that Freud himself may have at one point disowned it. As Knight notes, “The perils of the authentication process, and the slim chance of extreme rewards, mean that some quests never end.” That likely means this report will not be the final word.

The Digest

After pushback from anti-gentrification groups, the Brooklyn arts space Pioneer Works withdrew from Innovation QNS, a project that will erect eight new buildings in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. A rep for Pioneer Works said the space has always had a “mixed outlook” on the project. [Hyperallergic]

The German auction houses Karl & Faber and Van Ham are linking up for what they are calling an “Auction Alliance.” They will remain separate, however. [Frankfurter Allgemeine]

The Cleveland Museum of Art has unveiled a new strategic plan that intends to grow the institution’s attendance to 1 million visitors a year by 2027. An earlier initiative to expand its endowment has been tabled (for now), and the museum instead focusing on diversifying its offerings. [Cleveland.com]

Workers at the Walters Art Museum in Maryland have sued the institution, claiming that it has refused to comply with a FOIA request to turn over union-related communications. A museum spokesperson said the Walters will “engage in the legal process as appropriate.” [Hyperallergic]

Poland has demanded that Russia give back seven works that it said were stolen during World War II. A representative for Vladimir Putin said the request is “immoral,” and that it is part of “the ‘cancelation’ of Russian culture in Europe.” [The Art Newspaper]

Loïc Raguénès, a French painter known for his spare, semi-abstract paintings, has died at 54. The cause was a heart attack. [Clearing and Libération]

The Kicker

DAZED AND CONFUSED. Archaeologists have discovered that the ancient Canaanites took psychoactive drugs. Haaretz reports that experts found traces of opium in a 3,300-year-old ceramic vessel. They were located in an ancient Canaanite necropolis in modern-day Israel. What purpose the drugs may have once served remains unclear, but we now know that their trade network may have been even more complex than scholars once knew, given that the archaeologists are certain the opium came in liquid form that was imported from Cyprus. Call the vessel an object of high importance, if you will. [Haaretz]

Chris Burden famously dug up the floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, leaving its foundations—its physical ones and its metaphorical ones—exposed.  Andy Warhol, Fred Wilson, and others have been invited to dive into permanent collections and exhibit works that tell stories not typically portrayed by their owners. Andrea Fraser has offered unforgettable tours that have provided alternative—and hotly political—views of museum spaces.

The latest artist to fit within this lineage is Ruth Buchanan, whose practice has periodically involved long-term engagements with museums and their staff. She’s now zeroed in on the Kunstmuseum Basel, the biggest museum in the Swiss city that’s currently host to the world’s biggest fair, and she’s considered its collection, the workers who keep it running, and the sterile setting in which the art appears. (Len Schaller, who curated the exhibition with Maja Wismer, is even listed as a coauthor of one work.)

Her resulting show, “Heute Nacht geträumt,” features some new objects, including sculptures that she made with Kunstmuseum Basel staff, but for the most part, Buchanan’s interventions are not immediately noticeable—which is especially the case because the show includes artworks that she didn’t make, among them a painting by Miriam Cahn.

Buchanan, who is based in Aotearoa New Zealand and is of Te Āti Awa, Taranaki and Pakeha descent, has instead opted to seamlessly embed her show into the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection while also questioning the institution’s value.

To hear more about how she enlivened the Kunstmuseum Basel, ARTnews spoke with Buchanan by email.

In preparing to do this exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, you did a deep dive into the museum’s history and collection. It’s not the first time you’ve done this with an institution: you also did it for a 2019 project at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand. As you’re beginning to research a museum and its holdings, how do you start? What is your process like? 

My work is fundamentally about relationships—how things fit together, whether it is a body on the softness or hardness of a seat or whether it’s our sense of fitting into (or not fitting into) (art) histories as we have known them. For this reason when I begin working into an institution and its collection I have tended to focus on the whole and the mechanisms that have shaped that whole, recurrent trends and tendencies rather than individual works. In working in this way, eschewing standards of performing art history through exhibiting of canon hits or even my own favorites, I’ve opted to give space for friction and discomfort that makes the moments of joy, experimentation or precedent setting all the more palpable.

Installation view of “Ruth Buchanan: Heute Nacht geträumt,” 2022, at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.

As with the Govett-Brewster work, you have pulled out certain works from the collection to explore their relationship to the museum’s architecture and history. There’s a section centered around Minimalism, which you note influenced the look of the Kunstmuseum’s contemporary building. Why did you zero in on Minimalism, and how did you select these works? 

The selection from the collection came about by dividing the four-story building into four time periods. Each time period then had a “selection grid” applied to it which guided what is exhibited—for example, showing the first and last work acquired in that calendar year. For the ground floor we focused on the time “Pre-history—1982” which as a timeframe fundamentally shaped the foundation of the museum both as an institution and a building. The ground floor was purpose built for large scale minimal work, so we selected an ensemble of sculptural and large-scale wall works that reflect this. We even have a work that was included in the opening exhibition of 1980.

More than producing a “document,” it was important to me that we offer this foundational impulse as an embodied experience, and while many of the pieces included in this section are wonderful, none of them are neutral. While it would be legitimate not to show these work anymore as we attempt to expand and reform standardized narratives of art history, not to mention the brutality of some of this history, I think a legitimate option is to expose and undermine the suggestion of neutrality. The access to “Pre-history–1982” is mediated by a large sculpture by myself, Enclosure (2022), which functions like a fence, so there is no predetermined “classical” interaction with this work. Rather, it is radically interrupted and specified.

The other ready-made work you’ve included in the show is a Miriam Cahn painting that you have situated alongside objects of your own creation. What interested you about the Cahn painting? 

Our exhibition works a lot with placing an emphasis on exceptions, that most systems, whether they be categorizing systems or an artistic process, must reckon with their own limitation. The Cahn piece is my exception. Using the “selection grid,” this work would not have been included in the show, but on encounter with it, it became clear to me we had to include it. The work Heute Nacht geträumt (mein werkstatt N.Y.), 2011, also provided the title of the show, and translates as “last night I dream (my studio NY).”

In developing the exhibition I wanted to imagine the museum as an engine, something totally alive, and this work is that engine. It is so potent! It calls up the imaginative and sets it to work, and from my perspective imaginative work will always also be political work. Cahn is also one of the few woman artists who reoccur through the collection so it also felt good to acknowledge that. 

Throughout this show, there are references to bodies that are not explicitly shown. One of the core questions you asked during the making of the show was “Where does my body belong?” Enclosure (When the sick rule the world reverb), 2019/22, the long steel work you made for the show, shares a name with a Dodie Bellamy book that considers disease and bodily functions, among other topics. Why did you invoke the body in relation to an institution like the Kunstmuseum Basel? 

I invoke the body because we have to, museums have to. Dodie published that book in 2015, so she was already beginning to discuss the way in which our physical experience dramatically affects key issues of equity such as value and access. With the reckoning with what is to be a human with a body in the world that I now hope we’re all alive to, there have been significant shifts in language in many facets of daily life, including in museums and the broader arena of the cultural. It’s great to see this more reflective language and strategy emerge, but what we’ve had less access to is embodied experiences of what this kind of reckoning means in real time. I always ask: how do we know we are entering an institution in transformation? If we only know that by reading an updated mission statement on a website, then I think there is an important ingredient missing. This exhibition is one answer to that question, what a museum under transformation might feel like as a spatial-temporal experience. 

Ruth Buchanan with Len Schaller, Epoch Studies, 2001–21.

As part of the project, you worked with museum staff, making the work Spiral Time (2022) with them. How did that work come about? What conversations did you have with museum staff in the process? 

The museum engine applies to all facets of this exhibition, from back of house to front of house, and also timeframes for when and how different stakeholders became involved. We know by now that many standard procedures within the museum world don’t serve many of the those employed by the museum, let alone the artists and artwork. In order for me to make this exhibition and the process from which it emerged as deep and textured as possible, it was important that I draw in as many arenas of museum life as I could, including the day to day care of the artwork.

The invigilation team [the guards]—who, despite being so crucial to the sense of any exhibition, and often the key to “Do I want to come back?,” one of the questions we ask on the floor where this piece is installed—is not usually invited into an exhibition until the day before the opening. To me, this feels out of step in 2022. We need to draw on tools of abundance rather than scarcity. Therefore, the curatorial team, Maja Wismer and Len Schaller, and I ran a week-long natural wild-dyeing workshop, inviting the invigilators to come and dye parts of their uniform as well as to co-produce a large-scale textile work which is now included in the exhibition.

The museum facilitated that they could come during regular working hours so it didn’t impact their down time, and we spent a week over hot pots of boiling elderberry, sweating it out together, talking through the project, their job, my job, Basel. It was such a great exchange! It also allowed the staff to express their desires for this kind of participation and exchange in an ongoing way. From a matauranga Māori perspective, it makes sense to work in this holistic, and frankly reasonable, way, to give proper space to reform processes, stay curious, and share agency.

This project could be situated with a lineage known as institutional critique, which addresses museums and art spaces themselves. Do you in some way hope to reorient viewers’ understanding of the Kunstmuseum Basel? Did working on it any way change your own perception of museums? 

Definitely, this exhibition should certainly be understood as an invitation for reorientation of the viewer and their relationship with this museum in particular, but also with museums in general, whether that’s through enjoying the standard museum white walls becoming a washy lilac, or whether that’s through analyzing the under-represented communities within the collection.

While I see my practice as emerging from the legacies of feminism and institutional critique, scholar Marina Vishmidt has very helpfully described the difference between critique and transformation. She has said critique is the moment of pointing, while transformation is the moment of grabbing. This is where my interest lies, moving to grabbing at the museum matrix. Working on this exhibition, it became clearer than ever to me the fundamental role museums can play in shaping the cultural narrative, the opportunity they have to set precedents and offer an otherwise and that there is the will for this, but so many of the systems need redressing. The more we invite the body, the human, a variety of perspectives and paradigms to get into dynamic, maybe even dangerous contact with each other the more often we’ll encounter this otherwise in a meaningful way.

There is an incredibly powerful poem from Diane Di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letters” series that sums it up for me, #51. “As soon as we submit / to a system based on casualty, linear time / we submit, again, to the old values, plunge again / into slavery. Be strong. We have the right to make / the universe we dream. / No need to fear ’science’ / grovelling / apology for things as they are, ALL POWER / TO JOY, which will remake the world.”

By the end of the 1960s, the prolific German artist had adopted display cases as a key part of his practice. With glass glazed to resemble museum showcases, they hold objects of political or social importance, many of which were items associated with Beuys’s past performances.

Produced between 1949 and 1984, the 11 display cases now owned by the Kunstmuseum act as histories of what he called “social sculpture,” or staged interactions which urged participants to incorporate social concerns into their everyday lives. Beuys was a dedicated advocate of art as a force for social change, once stating that “it was simply impossible for human beings to bring their creative intention into the world any other way than through action.”

The Kunstmuseum was an early champion of Beuys, staging one of his first major museum shows in 1969. Since then, the museum has expanded its holding of the artist’s drawings and sculptural works. The 11 cases join a group which had been exhibited together since 1980, including two installations, titled Hearth I and Hearth II, as well as the 1965 felt sculpture Snowfall, which was owned by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation.

Josef Helfenstein, director of the Kunstmuseum Basel, said in a statement, “This great gift is another highlight in the long history of patronage by Dr. h.c. Maja Oeri and her family,” adding that it was a “wonderful present just in time for Beuys’s 100th birthday.”

Jennifer Tee, Ether Plane – Material Plane, Abstraction of a shape, form or presence, 2016. Bienal de São Paulo.

GERT JAN VAN ROOIJ/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE FONS WELTERS, AMSTERDAM

The new season brings major shows for under-seen figures like Ree Morton, Siah Armajani, Rubem Valentim, and Ruth Asawa, as well as diverse, toothsome-sounding surveys like the Carnegie International and a show of contemporary Zimbabwean painting in Cape Town. The most intriguing show of the season? It seems like it will be hard to beat “The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space,” a survey of centuries of objects related to that celestial wonder organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, but that is just one of the ambitious affairs on deck. Below, a look at this season’s most promising shows.

NATIONAL

September

Sanford Biggers
Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis
September 7–December 30

At this survey, works from Biggers’s series “BAM” will be on display alongside several paintings of his paintings. To craft the “BAM” works, Biggers used his collection of wooden African sculptures, which he says possess a “talismanic power.” These figures were then dipped in wax before being shot at—sculpted, in a way—using firearms, a tactic the artist calls “ballistic” sculpting. The paintings likewise make use of found objects—antique quilts, in an allusion to the coded language of the Underground Railroad. —Annie Armstrong

Siah Armajani, Fallujah, 2004–5, glass, wood, paint, copper, steel, rug, chair, table, light fixture, and fabric.

WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS

“Siah Armajani: Follow This Line”
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
September 9–December 30

For far too long, Armajani’s sculptures, many of which resemble surreally fused midwestern bridges and buildings, have gone unsung by critics. But now, just as Armajani is about to turn 80, the Walker Art Center will rectify that. Set to travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Iranian-born artist’s first-ever U.S. retrospective will bring together more than 100 works, from early experiments with abstraction, made via dense clusters of calligraphic text, to more recent sculptural works that draw on the aesthetics of vernacular architecture in the Twin Cities (which Armajani has long called home) and modernist avant-gardes. —Alex Greenberger

“Ree Morton: The Plant That Heals May Also Poison”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
September 14–Decmeber 23

One wonders what kind of art-historical status Morton would’ve occupied had she not died in a car accident at age 40, in 1977. Perhaps she would’ve been considered a feminist-art pioneer for her installations that combine sewn materials, in an attempt to raise what her male colleagues may have labeled “decorative” to the status of high art. Or maybe she would’ve been thought of as an important figure in the Post-Minimalist movement for the way she reinserted what often seemed to be a personal narrative into mass-produced her objects. With more than 40 works on view, this exhibition will stake a claim for Morton, who still remains an under-recognized figure in the United States. —A.G.

Mickalene Thomas, Qusuquzah Lounging with Pink + Black Flower, 2016, rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel.

©MICKALENE THOMAS AND ARTIST RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/PRIVATE COLLECTION

“Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me”
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
September 14–December 30

This exhibition surveys Thomas’s output, with over 50 works—spanning painting, collage, sculpture, and installations—attesting to the artist’s interest in what constitutes the black femme experience. Alongside some of her more famous pieces, photographs that typically take the form of collaged-looking portraits, will be a new work: a multi-channel video piece titled Je t’aime trois, which was funded through the Wexner Center Artist Residency Award. The video piece is scored by composer Terry Lyne Carrington; on October 4, the collaborators will come to the museum to perform entrepe, a live piece inspired by their project. —A.A.

“Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work”
Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis
September 14, 2018–February 16, 2019

Here’s another it’s-about-time exhibition. Recently reappraised as a pioneer in her field, Asawa will finally get a major museum show beyond the West Coast with this survey, which brings together 80 artworks, including nearly 60 of her abstract sculptures, many of them resembling pulsating organic forms. Also featured will be drawings from her days as a student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. Tracing the late artist’s practice over the course of her life, this exhibition spotlights Asawa’s influence on modern and contemporary sculpture. —Claire Selvin

Trisha Brown, Lightfall, 1963, performed at Concert of Dance #4, Judson Memorial Church, New York, by Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton.

PETER MOORE/©BARBARA MOORE, LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK/COURTESY PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK

“Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done”
Museum of Modern Art, New York
September 16, 2018–February 3, 2019

In 1963 Jill Johnston wrote in the Village Voice that the Judson Dance Theater—a New York–based crew of artists, choreographers, and musicians who worked together between 1962 and 1964—made “the present of modern dance more exciting than it’s been for twenty years.” Johnston’s sentiment was shared among her colleagues—Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, and Claes Oldenburg among them—who realized, almost immediately, that the Judson Dance Theater’s experiments with movement defined by chance were truly something new. To show just how influential the collective has been in the intervening years, this 300-object exhibition will bring together documentation and ephemera related to the group’s performances, which featured such artists as Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, and Meredith Monk, and place those pieces alongside performances by contemporary artists. —A.G.

“Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy”
Met Breuer, New York
September 18, 2018–January 6, 2019

We’re in an era of fake news and alternative facts, and this season, the Met Breuer is appropriately taking on the perennial topic of distrust between a government and its people, and how that tension surfaces in art. The exhibition proposes that there are two forms of art that emerge through conspiracy: the kind that relays hard information from public record, uncovering deceit that’s right underneath our noses, and then the kind that looks into the effects of living in a state of constant suspicion. About 70 works by 30 artists will be displayed. —A.A.

Chantal Peñalosa, Untitled, 2017, two inkjet prints on photographic paper.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PROYECTOSMONCLOVA

“Being Here With You/Estando Aquí Contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana”
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
September 20, 2018–February 3, 2019

The artistic communities of these border towns have distinct identities, though the artists working there in recent decades have shown some overlapping thematic concerns, like fantasies and realities surrounding the border, colonialism, the body, public space, and the nature of memory. This exhibition will chart artistic exchanges along the U.S.-Mexico border by presenting work of 42 artists and collectives based in the San Diego and Tijuana region, among them Chantal Peñalosa, Cog•nate Collective, and the late James Luna. —Maximilíano Durón

“Armenia!”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
September 22, 2018–January 13, 2019

Delving into more than 14 centuries worth of Armenian artistic and cultural production, this exhibition has remarkable breadth, which may explain the unusual punctuation of its title. “Armenia!” brings together 148 objects—gilded reliquaries, illuminated manuscripts, textiles, church models, and more—and traces the development of Armenian Christian identity. Pulled from prominent collections like the National History Museum in the Republic of Armenia and the Armenian Museum of America in Boston, nearly all of these works are coming to the United States for the first time. —C.S.

Jim Nutt, Wowidow, 1968.

©JIM NUTT/THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

“Hairy Who? 1966–1969”
Art Institute of Chicago
September 26, 2018–January 6, 2019

In the mid-1960s, a group of alumni of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum—began staging vibrant exhibitions under the name Hairy Who at the Hyde Park Art Center in the city’s South Side neighborhood. The Hairy Who’s work, which is imbued with humor and radical political and social messages, often incorporated unorthodox, everyday materials, like advertisements, catalogues, posters, and comics. Opening on the 50th anniversary of the group’s final show in the Windy City, “Hairy Who? 1966–1969” is the first major survey of their work. Among the roughly 225 works on view, drawn from the collection of the Art Institute as well as those of public and private collections, are large-scale paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and historical ephemera. —C.S.

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel”
New Museum, New York
September 26, 2018–January 20, 2019

Lucas is well-known for her plaster-cast sculptures of various body parts, in particular those below the belt, which she’s been making since her rise to fame as a member of the Young British Artists movement in the 1990s. This show will be her largest survey to date on American turf, and it will include more than just her sculptures—it will also feature her photography and installations. Expect flagrant disregard for the male gaze—and enough repurposed pantyhose to fill an outlet store. —A.A.

“Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor”
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
September 28, 2018–March 17, 2019

Organized by Leslie Umberger, this 155-work show is the first retrospective of Traylor, the indefatigably inventive artist, who was born into slavery in Alabama and lived until 1949. Working mostly with pencil and watercolor, his spare yet powerful drawings, which are often loaded with madcap humor, are key documents of life in the Jim Crow South. —A.A.

October

Spiderwoman Theater, showing, from left, Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel,(Kuna/Rappahannock), Reverb-ber-ber-rations, 1994.

THE ADVERTISER|SUNDAY MAIL, ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA/COURTESY THE ARTISTS

“Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now”
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
October 6, 2018–January 7, 2019

“There is no one way to be a Native artist,” remarked Kathleen Ash-Milby, an associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, last year in Art in America. This deliberately broad exhibition, which is being billed as the first major survey of contemporary Native art, operates with the same guiding philosophy. Bringing together work by 80 artists, among them Kay WalkingStick, Athena LaTocha, and Shan Goshorn, and encompassing a vast array of mediums and approaches, the show aims to turn the spotlight on a slice of recent art history—a distinctly Indigenous perspective—that’s too long been omitted by museums. —A.G.

John Waters, Jackie Copies Divine’s Look, 2001.

©JOHN WATERS/COURTESY MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY/COLLECTION OF JAMES MOUNGER, NEW ORLEANS

“John Waters: Indecent Exposure”
Baltimore Museum of Art
October 7, 2018–January 6, 2019

Perhaps most famous for his transgressive films of the 1970s starring the iconic drag queen Divine, Waters has more recently become a fixture in the contemporary-art world. This retrospective will be Waters’s first, and it’s a homecoming of sorts, as the filmmaker and artist was born and raised in Baltimore, and created a love letter to the city with his 1988 cult film Hairspray. The exhibition will track his artistic output from 1992 until today, and it will include 160 objects, all of them touching on his recurrent themes of using humor to explore, subvert, and mock mainstream culture while also uplifting that which is outside of it. —M.D.

“Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future”
Guggenheim Museum, New York
October 12, 2018–February 3, 2019

In 1906 af Klint began making her first major body of work, “The Paintings for the Temple,” abstract compositions featuring corkscrewing abstract forms. She intended these works to be housed in a spiral-shaped temple that never came to be, but they will be shown in a different, grander spiraling building this season—the Guggenheim Museum, which will give the occult-loving Swedish modernist her first major American museum show. Her abstractions have haunted a crop of young artists similarly fascinated by the supernatural, and you can be sure that this hotly anticipated retrospective will be by turns spooky, perplexing, and alluring. —A.G.

Hilma af Klint, Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 17, from “The SUW/UW Series,” 1915, oil on canvas.

ALBIN DAHLSTRÖM, FOR THE MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM/THE HILMA AF KLINT FOUNDATION, STOCKHOLM

Carnegie International
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
October 13, 2018–March 25, 2019

The longest-running biennial-style show in North America often tends toward artists based in the United States. The 57th edition, under the direction of Ingrid Schaffner, aims to live up to its name and include talent from around the world: Kenyan photographer Mimi Cherono Ng’ok and the Vietnam-based collective Art Labor, to name just two examples. The subject is the concept of the “international” itself, Schaffner has said, but don’t worry, there will also be pioneering American artists, too, like Mel Bochner, Zoe Leonard, and Carnegie International veteran Kerry James Marshall. —A.G.

“Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera”
Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, Texas
October 14, 2018–January 27, 2019

Simmons’s pictures consider how what’s fake can come to seem real through photography, and how women get treated like objects in mass media. Her influence is so great, a major show such as this one is needed in order to take stock of her work. Titled “Big Camera/Little Camera,” in reference to both a 1975 work of hers and perhaps also to Simmons’s large-looming influence, this survey will bring together photographs, sculptures, and videos from the past four decades, from early experiments to works from her 2015 series “How We See,” in which she took pictures of female models with eyes painted onto their eyelids. —A.G.

Wolfgang Tillmans, summer still life, 1995. “One Day at a Time,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

“One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
October 14, 2018–March 11, 2019

In 1962, writing in the magazine Film Culture, Farber theorized what he called “termite art,” which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” His genuine appreciation for déclassé work—what was often considered by many to simply not be art, or to not be good art, in any case—has proven influential, and this show aims to prove that we couldn’t have today’s art were it not for Farber’s writing. Curated by Helen Molesworth, the exhibition includes more than 100 works by 30 artists, including Kahlil Joseph, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Rachel Rose, Lorna Simpson, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and many more. —A.G.

Carlos Puche, Objetografía n° 23 (Objectography No. 23), 1965, iron object and gelatin silver print on Masonite and wood. “Contesting Modernity,” Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

COLLECTION OF LUIS FELIPE FARÍAS, CARACAS

“Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955–1975”
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
October 28, 2018–January 21, 2019

The last few years have seen a resurgent interest in art from across Latin America, with mountains of scholarship looking to complicate and decentralize the traditional Western art-historical canon. This exhibition, curated by the ever-reliable Mari Carmen Ramírez and organized with the Colección Mercantil Arte y Cultura in Caracas, will look to add to modern and contemporary art history with a presentation of over 100 works related to the Informalist movement in Venezuela. The little-studied movement, like many contemporaneous ones around the world, was partly a response to the seismic political and social changes faced during the Cold War, including a shift to democracy and exploding wealth and socioeconomic inequality. The artists, many of them still relatively unknown in the United States, looked to reject the conventional forms of artistic production, instead opting for new forms of experimentation reliant upon geometric abstraction. —M.D.

“William Forsythe: Choreographic Objects”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
October 31, 2018–February 24, 2019

The first comprehensive U.S. exhibition of artwork by the famed choreographer, this show features interactive installations, sculptures, and environments with which viewers are meant to interact. The show’s title, “Choreographic Objects,” is the artist’s term for his kinetic creations, which encourage visitors to invent their own routines through improvised performances. Some works were made specifically for the ICA’s spaces, and this presentation of Forsythe’s large-scale artworks coincides with his five-year residency at the Boston Ballet. —C.S.

William Forsythe, Towards the Diagnostic Gaze, 2013, feather duster, locally sourced stone, and instructions (engraved).

DOMINIK MENTZOS/©WILLIAM FORSYTHE

November

“Martha Rosler: Irrespective”
Jewish Museum, New York
November 2, 2018–March 3, 2019

In her 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler, playing a housewife, assigns a letter to each object in her kitchen—a sly, ironic nod to the patriarchal system that structures the lives of women. It is one of Rosler’s best ways of visualizing the invisible racist, sexist, and xenophobic power systems that guide our daily lives, but it is hardly her only great one. This survey will include Semiotics of the Kitchen, as well as examples of Rosler’s installations, photographs, and videos, all of which smartly allude to the many ways mass media often carries hidden—and insidious—political images. —A.G.

Gordon Parks, Langston Hughes, Chicago, 1941, gelatin silver print.

©THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION/COURTESY THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION

“Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950”
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
November 4, 2018–February 18, 2019

Unquestionably one of the great photographers of the 20th century, Parks cultivated a signature aesthetic that, often through dramatic compositional elements, portrayed the political conditions facing black Americans. His images of civil-rights movement–era America are some of the most widely known pictures of the time, but what of his early work? The National Gallery of Art will bring together 150 pictures Parks took between 1940 and 1950 for this show, which includes books, magazines, family pictures, and more, illustrating the self-taught photographer’s work with the Farm Security Administration, Ralph Ellison, and the Office of War Information, among other people and organizations. —A.G.

“Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again”
Whitney Museum, New York
November 12, 2018–March 31, 2019

Can you ever have too much Warhol? We could easily spend another century meditating on the impact Warhol has had on American art—his 15-minute rule about fame not applying to himself in the least, if this mega-retrospective, his first in America in three decades, is any proof. Whitney curator Donna De Salvo attempts to comprehend the whole of Warhol’s immense oeuvre by starting at the very beginning of his career, during the 1950s, when he was a commercial illustrator, and then moving through his famous Pop paintings in the ’60s and his less widely recognized later work made shortly before his death, in 1987. If nothing else, the 350 pieces displayed will help us continue reckoning with his influence. —A.A.

Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe, Creation, n.d., oil on canvas.

COURTESY GERALD PETERS GALLERY

“Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow”
Dallas Museum of Art
November 18, 2018–February 24, 2019

Focusing on the artistic output of a lesser-known O’Keeffe, this show spotlights approximately 50 works—including paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings—by Georgia’s younger sister, Ida. “Escaping Georgia’s Shadow” boasts a special showcase of six of Ida’s lighthouse paintings, which reduce her subject’s form until it’s a series of metallic-looking shapes. Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia’s husband, will also be on display. —C.S.

INTERNATIONAL

September

Grupo Mira, Comunicado gráfico no. 1 (La Violencia en la ciudad de México), 1978, fragment of one of 48 heliographic prints from drawings, photomontages, and adhesive screens.

FRANCISCO KOCHEN/COLECCIÓN MUAC, UNAM

“Grupo Mira: Una contrahistoria de los setenta en México”
Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Through January 6

This exhibition—one of many this season dedicated to the legacy of activist movements led by students in 1968—will focus on Grupo Mira, an artist collective that included Arnulfo Aquino, Melecio Galván, Eduardo Garduño, Rebeca Hidalgo, Silvia Paz Paredes, and Jorge Pérez Vega. The group met at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City in 1965, and worked together under various names in the United States and throughout Mexico. Together, they founded Grupo Mira in 1977, and remained active as a collective until 1982. The MUAC exhibition will present a counter-history of the 1970s in artistic production in Mexico by looking at the ways in which Grupo Mira merged muralism and the graphic arts with the techniques and theories of the neo-avant-garde, Conceptualism, and institutional critique. —M.D.

Gwangju Biennale
Various venues, Gwangju, South Korea
September 7–November 11

This year’s Gwangju Biennale is titled “Imagined Borders,” and its focus will be the physical and emotional boundaries we humans set down between each other. Accordingly, there is not just one curator but many: the biennial takes the form of a series of mini-exhibitions organized by 11 curators. Included alongside them will be a site-specific presentation that offers a look at the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a large-scale demonstration against South Korea’s former militarized government that ultimately led to the creation of a democratic government in the country. Among the 150-plus artists set to participate are Dinh Q. Lê, Shezad Dawood, Shilpa Gupta, and Adrián Villar Rojas. —John Chiaverina

Lucia Nogueira, No Time for Commas, 1993, battery-operated toy, paper bag, and wood. Bienal de São Paulo.

COURTESY THE ARTIST/COLLECTION GEORGIA FLEURY REYNOLDS

Bienal de São Paulo
Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo, São Paulo
September 7–December 9

The 33rd Bienal de São Paulo has also gone the multi-curator route. Its title, “Affective Affinities,” refers not just to its artist participants, who share much in common, but also to the show’s curatorial structure: the biennial’s main organizer, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, has ceded most of his control to seven artists, who will each curate a show within a show. Those curators—Mamma Andersson, Antonio Ballester Moreno, Sofia Borges, Waltercio Caldas, Alejandro Cesarco, Claudia Fontes, and Wura-Natasha Ogunji—will organize group exhibitions intended to explore the many connections between artists around the world. And there’s more. Alongside all this, Pérez-Barreiro has organized 12 solo projects by such artists as Aníbal López, Alejandro Corujeira, Vânia Mignone, and Nelson Felix. —C.S.

Franz West
Centre Pompidou, Paris
September 12–December 10

This retrospective of the late Austrian sculptor and collage artist, who died in 2012 at the age of 85, will highlight his drawings, papier-mâché sculptures, and other work produced between 1972 and the year of his death. West was influenced by the Viennese performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, a style that placed an emphasis on the viewer’s interaction with everyday objects. His most famous pieces often take the form of bulbous papier-mâché structures that loosely resemble furniture; some will be on view here. After its run in Paris, the exhibition will travel to London’s Tate Modern starting in 2019. —Shirley Nwangwa

“Five Bhobh—Painting at the End of an Era”
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Cape Town, South Africa
September 12, 2018–March 31, 2019

“Five Bhobh” will feature 29 artists from Zimbabwe who are working to usher in a new style of contemporary painting. Each work will dispense a double commentary, one that focuses both on the restricting definitions of painting and the greater day-to-day issues currently facing Zimbabweans. The medium has proved an influential one for citizens of the country—writing earlier this year in Frieze, Sean O’Toole noted that “painting, especially of the human figure, has emerged as a preferred form” for artists in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital. This exhibition will likely offer some reasons why. —S.N.

Georges Méliès, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), still, 1902, hand-colored film. “The Moon,” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

COURTESY LOBSTER-FONDATION GROUPAMA GAN-FONDATION TECHNICOLOR AND MK2 FILMS

“The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space”
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark
September 13, 2018–January 20, 2019

How best to explore the role that the moon has played in the history of art, and the role it continues to play in visual culture today? To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art has boldly taken on the task of surveying all things lunar, from work by famous artists to objects related to scientific studies. Here are just a few things that will be included: Galileo’s moon map, George Méliès’s silent-film classic A Trip to the Moon (1902), Norman Foster’s plans for 3D-printed structures to exist on the moon, and works by Darren Almond, Camille Henrot, Hito Steyerl, Robert Rauschenberg, and many more. —S.N.

Jörg Immendorff, Selbstporträt nach dem letzten Selbstporträt (Self portrait after the last self portrait), 2007, oil on canvas.

©ESTATE OF JÖRG IMMENDORFF/COURTESY GALERIE MICHAEL WERNER MÄRKISCH WILMERSDORF, COLOGNE & NEW YORK/NATIONALGALERIE, BERLIN

“Jörg Immendorff: For all Beloved in the World”
Haus der Kunst, Munich
September 14, 2018–January 27, 2019

There’s a confrontational streak running through the work of the late German artist Jörg Immendorff. From his early history as a left-wing political agitator to his involvement in the radical late-1970s New Wilde movement, which also included the painter Martin Kippenberger, Immendorff never backed away from controversy. This retrospective will include close to 200 works, including selections from his famous “Café Deutschland” series, a group of 16 large paintings inspired by Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco that in part attempt to articulate the rift between East and West Germany. The show will follow a loose chronology that tries to outline, in chapter form, pivotal moments in the German Neo-Expressionist’s output. —J.C.

“Raoul De Keyser: oeuvre”
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium
September 22, 2018–January 27, 2019

One of the most highly regarded Belgian painters of the past half-century, the late artist Raoul De Keyser traded in works that balanced abstraction with more figurative tendencies. An air of ambivalence about his medium of choice itself often pervaded his work—his canvases, minimalist in their means, often appear to be anti-paintings that deny viewers easy visual pleasure. This survey is in part a look at De Keyser’s life and process. The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst show, which spans De Keyser’s full career, will feature 100 paintings and 50 watercolors and drawings. —J.C.

October

Dorothea Tanning, Étreinte (Embrace), 1969, flannel and fake fur stuffed with wool.

THE DESTINA FOUNDATION, NEW YORK

“Dorothea Tanning: Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door”
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
October 3, 2018–January 7, 2019

Crawling creatures, disembodied torsos, unnaturally large flowers, and animal-like women were frequent subjects for Tanning, who “wanted to lead the eye toward spaces that hid, revealed, transformed all at once,” as she said of her dreamy paintings, drawings, and installations. Though considered one of the most important female artists associated with the Surrealist movement, Tanning’s work has never been given an all-encompassing museum show—something that will be remedied with this full-career survey. —S.N.

Gillian Wearing, from the series “Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say,” 1992–93, C-print on aluminum. “Catastrophe and the Power of Art,” Mori Art Museum.

COURTESY MAUREEN PALEY, LONDON

“Catastrophe and the Power of Art”
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
October 6, 2018–January 20, 2019

This exhibition explores artists’ responses to various catastrophes—both natural and manmade—over the past few decades. Central to the show is an earthquake that shook Japan in 2011, killing nearly 16,000 people, as well as the 2008 financial crisis. The exhibition is split into two sections: one about how artists document catastrophe, the other focusing on the ways artists create meaning in their work in the wake of such tragedies. Work by some 40 international artists will be included, among them Thomas Hirschhorn, Hatakeyama Naoya, and Miyamoto Ryuji. —J.C.

“Carte Blanche to Tomás Saraceno”
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
October 17, 2018–January 6, 2019

The Palais de Tokyo has given carte blanche to Philippe Parreno, Camille Henrot, and Tino Sehgal to present shows in recent years; Saraceno is the artist chosen this time around to fill the entirety of the museum’s vast, cavernous spaces. No stranger to grandiose gestures and best known for his installations involving spiders and webs, the artist will once again return to arachnology, combining it here in his largest project to date with an interest in dust particles and what he’s called “cloud cities,” or utopian models for airy-looking metropolises. Bearing the subtitle “On Air,” the show will meditate on life forms from the smallest to the grandest in our world, as well as humanity’s place in the universe. —C.S.

Johann Heinrich Füssli, Die wahnsinnige Kate (The Crazy Kate), 1806–7, oil on canvas.

URSULA EDELMANN/©FREIES DEUTSCHES HOCHSTIFT AND FRANKFURTER GOETHE-MUSEUM

“Fuseli: Drama and Theater”
Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
October 20, 2018–February 10, 2019

This is the first major exhibition dedicated to Fuseli, one of the masters of Romanticism, in 13 years. The artist, who was based in Zurich, was a prominent voice during the late 18th century, creating work that blurred the line between the conservatism of Enlightenment-era classicism and the wild nightmares more often associated with the Romantics. The selection of his work in “Drama and Theater” draws upon the artist’s inspiration from stage works and literature, and features works on loan from the Kunsthaus in Zürich as well as private collections. —A.A.

FEMSA Biennial
Various venues, Zacatecas, Mexico
October 26, 2018–February 17, 2019

The 13th edition of the FEMSA Biennial will be the first curated edition of this affair in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Bearing the title “We Have Never Been Contemporary”—a reference to the 1991 book We Have Never Been Modern by the French philosopher Bruno Latour—the exhibition is part of an 18-month curatorial project that looks at the ways in which the city and state of Zacatecas are the result of a mingling of baroque, colonial, and modern influences, as well as an inquiry into the region’s distinctions between fine and popular arts. The program will culminate with the opening in October of what the organizers have termed “museological collaborations and public interventions” from 23 artists based in the city, Latin America, and beyond. —M.D.

Performance still of a pedagogical program, Original and copy workshop with Saúl Villa, 2018, for the “XIII Bienal FEMSA We Have Never Been Contemporary,” in Zacatecas, Mexico.

COURTESY XIII BIENAL FEMSA

“Lily van der Stokker: Friendly Good”
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
October 27, 2018–February 24, 2019

Van der Stokker’s first museum retrospective will present a selection of her wall paintings and drawings, dating from the 1980s to the present. The artist’s practice has often focused on feminist ideas—what van der Stokker has called “non-shouting feminism”—and domestic life, and she explores those subjects by way of her colorful, biomorphic, sometimes floral forms. Many of the works in “Friendly Good” have never before been exhibited in the Netherlands. —C.S.

November

Amal Kenawy, Non Stop Conversation, 2007, installation and performance.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

“Amal Kenawy: Frozen Memory”
Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates
November 3, 2018–January 30, 2019

The first-ever Kenawy retrospective will take a panoramic view of the artist’s full output, which grapples with social, political, and feminist issues, primarily from her home base in Egypt. (Kenawy died in 2012 before she even turned 40, though she was considered a force in her region’s art scene.) The show will include animations and paintings alongside video works, installations, performance documentation, and archival material. Notably included will be the video Silence of the Sheep (2009), one of Kenawy’s most critically acclaimed works, which documents a public performance that sees the artist herding a group of citizens through a Cairo street on their hands and knees. —J.C.

Shanghai Biennale
Various venues, Shanghai
November 10, 2018–March 10, 2019

Organized by a team led by Cuauhtémoc Medina, this year’s Shanghai Biennale is called “Proregress: Art in an Age of Historical Ambivalence,” an exploration of “art in the present as a poetic attempt to explore the combination of progress and regression in the global arena.” The always-ambitious Medina is taking on a range of large-scale ideas, including misogyny, political shifts in the face of various diasporas, and the fusion of technology and science. No artist list had been released as of press time, but the scope of the show is intriguing enough. —J.C.

Rubem Valentim, Composition 12, 1962, oil on canvas.

MASP COLLECTION

Rubem Valentim
Museu de Arte de São Paulo
November 13, 2018–March 10

This solo exhibition will showcase close to 100 of the Brazilian artist’s paintings, sculptures, and engravings. The self-taught artist’s work examined the political consciousness of modern-day Brazil, with an eye toward Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous religious history and symbolism, specifically as it existed in comparison to Valentim’s Christian, Westernized upbringing. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Fernando Oliva, the exhibition will offer a rare look at a central figure in the history of Brazilian modern art. —S.N.

“Qiu Zhijie: Mappa Mundi”
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
November 24, 2018–March 3, 2019

“Nowadays we get internet, and all this information is fragmented, so we need to have the whole sense to understand where we are,” Qiu once said in an interview. But even before the digital age, the Chinese artist was attempting to get a sense of his home country’s place in the world today with his map works, drawn in ink and often featuring hyper-globalized versions of Asia. (“Whitney Biennial 1993” and “Anticolonial Theory” are just two examples of the fictional Chinese provinces he’s depicted.) Perhaps this full survey of his work will help us figure out where we really are. —S.N.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of ARTnews on page 20 under the title “Editors’ Picks.”

Sam Gilliam with his 1973 painting Autumn Surf.

ART FRISCH/COURTESY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/©2018 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH

Sam Gilliam’s abstract canvases from the 1960 and ’70s, which often dramatically defy the oil-on-canvas-hung-on-a-wall formula, went largely unseen in many mainstream institutions and galleries for years. That began to change a few years ago. Now, some of his paintings sell for more than $1 million, and his work has become a staple in permanent-collection hangs. Gilliam’s paintings are currently the subject of “The Music of Color: Sam Gilliam, 1967-1973,” an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland that surveys the artist’s output during that time period. With that show in mind, below is an interview Sam Gilliam did with ARTnews, first published in this magazine’s January 1973 issue. Among the many topics addressed is the concept of “black art”—a label that continues to be divisive. Who, Gilliam is asked, is proud of the achievements of black artists in America? “I am,” he responds. The interview follows in full below. —Alex Greenberger

“Hanging loose: An interview with Sam Gilliam”
By Donald Miller
January 1973

Last summer the paintings of Sam Gilliam, together with work by Diane Arbus, Ron Davis, Richard Estes, James Nutt and Keith Sonnier, were selected by Walter Hopps, former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, to be shown in the American Pavilion of the 36th Venice Biennale. Gilliam lives in Washington, D.C. Born in Tupelo, Miss., in 1933, he grew up in Louisville, Ky. He attended the University of Louisville, earning a master’s degree in 1961. He taught at McKinley High School, Washington, D.C., and became associated with the Washington school of color-field painting. More recently he has produced unstretched as well as stretched paintings. They have been widely exhibited and are in more than 13 public collections. Gilliam was an artist fellow of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art Workshop Program, 1968. In 1971 he exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s Projects series and also received a Guggenheim Foundation Award.

Sam Gilliam, Rondo, 1971, acrylic on canvas on oak beam.

©2018 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/LEE THOMPSON/COURTESY THE ARTIST, KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL, AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

MILLER: How do you feel about Venice?

GILLIAM: I worked among friends. I did it my way. That’s the title of a new Gene Ammons tune.

What did your loose canvas and stick pieces come out of?

From several things I was thinking about doing in 1968. Then my first notions were verbal, as opposed to being acted upon. I’d seen Al Held; I’d seen Stella; I’d seen shape—what we’d call erratic shape. I’d seen Barney Newmans; I’d seen Pollocks. Blue Poles was sort of a reference. I’d been painting stripes and doing this very, very hard-edged thing—getting into Albers’ interaction and working very logically with masking tape and striping. But I realized that ideas I was dealing with were mostly someone else’s. But the prelude in pre-industrial art, from which these guys’ ideas came, was also in my mind . . . what was most personal to me were the things I saw in my own environment—such as clotheslines filled with clothes with so much weight that they had to be propped up . . . That was a pertinent clue.

Did you know Noland?

I met him but arrived in Washington too late for Morris Louis, who died shortly after I came. But at the time I saw the things in Louis—the veils, unfurleds, this kind of cloggy material process—I felt closer to Hofmann, who was a long-time favorite. Louis was anti all the things I was going through. And there was a way that Olitski was going, opposed to Noland, that made me self-critical enough to say, Why not take this? A dependence upon the material, upon paint as paint, which was a reverse way of dealing with something. If you frame something in contrast you are more able to understand.

Sam Gilliam, Crystal, 1963, acrylic on canvas.

©2018 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/FREDRIK NILSEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

You mean hunting for the area between the chevron and the unplanned softness?

Right. And trying to use that same kind of reference with an exactness that was much more a part of the 1960s than Hofmann could be. It led me to vertical folding, making a Rorschach. I heard a young artist, Peter Bradley, say, in 1971, To kill the hand was my most important move. I realized that years earlier I had thought that way in trying to free myself from the masking tape, the brush; to deal with the canvas as material by folding it, crushing it, using it as a means to a tactile way of making a painting.

How sculptural do you consider your work?

I don’t consider it sculpture. I know it’s painting. The lines are very narrow. I once heard Noland say there’s no difference between sculpture and painting once you know what you’re doing. But in formal thinking, painting is illusionistic; thus sculpture offers pictorial possibilities. I depend more upon pictorialism as a form, as an involved process delineated possibly into becoming a picture. The point you arrive at is merely transitional—there is now difference per se between painting and sculpture.

You regard folds as dimensional characteristics?

Yes, when I make the painting on the floor. If I want to stretch it on supports, it is illusionistic and is a painting. When I hang it, I am true to the process by which it is made. It is a relief—but it can be seen or moved around, depending on whether I paint bas-relief or high relief, in each case destroying illusion, lessening pictorial references.

What have you learned about form while using unstretched canvas?

You learn to open to other references. You can deal with historical substances much different. You become more interested in Dürer.

Really?

Oh, yes. Dürer is the most exciting reference in kinds of optical events, sculpturally and painterly. In front of a Dürer arch in which someone stands with a banner, the banner is blown by a breeze that immediately arcs and the banner perfectly, schematically, so that it is for me that illusion of a two-dimensional structure being pushed. I sort of have a thing for banners anyway. There were literal notions that I had when I did things called heralds. One day in the Metropolitan I realized that the relativeness of Louis’ unfurled to the unfurled means the unfurled flag and the approach to the stripes. The stripes’ sequence became, in terms of soft washes, similar to the rolling relationship in my work.

Sam Gilliam, Ruby Light, 1972, acrylic on canvas.

©2018 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/CATHY CARVER/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN, WASHINGTON, D.C./PHOTO COURTESY DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

Your technique of paint on canvas?

I pour to experience the effect of gravity. I find that when these effects have to operate within measured limits they must be precalculated at definite intervals along the horizontal length of the canvas. For example, in Carousel Merge, my piece for the Walker Art Center, the architectural problem was to put hooks freely along a wall six feet apart, diagonally under a skylight. On a 75-foot-long sheer, these were calculated to give a drop on a vertical wall of 14 feet. These became points at which everything operated. These were structural devices.

How much serendipity is there in the way folds fall?

There’s a hell of a lot.

How much do you force it or control it?

It’s planned in terms of a particular reference. With Sticks, a recent piece, there is the problem of getting it up. Using sticks placed against a ceiling that is nine-and-a-half feet high. Using 10-foot poles and a kind of rhythmic relationship that happens pleasantly within the space. I did Sticks for the Kingpitcher Gallery in Pittsburgh but just before that there was a dowel piece at the Museum of Modern Art in November, 1971. In the Projects series. It’s an environment. Downing and Mehring were strong painters dealing in environments. To return to Pollock’s Blue Poles, it works not as drips but as Marks, structurally as diagonals to the canvas edge. The angles have a sense of bending. The diagonals are part of an unfinished two-point perspective. They are also surface.

Have you worked with fluorescent paint from the beginning from the series?

With luminous qualities, such as aluminum powder. Fluorescent paint, when it was discovered, became an increment, the same as push and pull. I’m interested very much in impasto—even to the point where it escapes and cracks, when it really determines its total materiality and goes beyond the limit of what we would call control.

What fabrics do you like best next to canvas?

Silk and polypropylene. You can blow them with a fan. They are also translucent, which means you can go beyond. It’s experimental, but it becomes information that you can ride if someone says your work is “ambiguous” then you realize that quality as a component. One of the things that must be a part of art, now that artists are multimedia and art is so simultaneous it’s hard to stay on a problem, is to form one’s own problem and have tenacity.

During the time you have also worked with stretched canvases. What made you develop a beveled edge for the stretchers?

I remember that several artists were doing structured canvases very much like Lee Bontecou. William T. Williams, Neil Williams, Ron Davis all were working with ribbed stretchers and using a soft stripe. There was a kind of formless lock. If something is different as a reference we shouldn’t try to explain it completely with old rules. We should realize as we do in science that there are not only rights and wrongs but hypotheses. Therefore the substantiation of a new fact requires that we re-evaluate the hypothesis instead of rooting it out. The important thing is to create a reversal of conditions in order to allow things to exist. Of course, you can get too involved in the mental processes and not enough in making art.

Sam Gilliam, Whirlirama, 1970, acrylic on canvas.

©2018 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/FREDRIK NILSEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST; THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK; AND DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY, LOS ANGELES

Do you have an affinity with Ellsworth Kelly’s floor-and-wall paintings? They haven’t received sufficient attention.

They are important. Kelly helped to spark the movement to Minimalism, to my mind. At the time, I saw work by Sven Lukin, Andre, McCracken and Anne Truitt, who were equally important to Minimal conception. I recall Howard Mehring was doing T’s and E’s back-to-back, and even Albers with Homage to the Square is a point of take-off.

Do you see yourself changing in approach?

Yes . . . In work with canvas arranged over two sawhorses—when I take advantage of the fall of paint down the canvas, creating a trailing effect that moves. Once I have established this, and folded it back on itself to dry, I have the striations and the additive process that builds up to how it was painted. Then I go into another reference so that the actual composition takes place in the gallery. The problem is to apply a method of painting in order to let that impose any conditions upon it.

Have the unstretched works all been done in sections or as one piece?

I use sections and cut them out.

You cut them after you hang them?

I’ve done both—precut and not. I got into this nutty thing. It’s like taking a Rembrandt and cutting a Donald Duck out of the center, if you want to be that obscene. But that’s what happens when you get caught up in what something can do. If there is ambiguity in anything that is done in painting or sculpture, it becomes so if one takes too firm a position in what one does—instead of recognizing that this is a trap. Because when you realize that you are ordering too persistently you freeze your spontaneity level. You have to hang loose.

What is your position on black art? You are an artist, period. But there is a separate identity.

I think there has to be a black art because there is a white art.

Do you regard your work as black art?

Being black is a very important point of tension and self-discovery. To have a sense of self-acceptance we blacks have to throw of this dichotomy that has been forced on us by the white experience. For some there is a need to do this frontally and objectively. There are some who believe there is no threat. I think there is a need to live universally.

Are you frustrated by the lack of response by blacks to visual art as opposed to other arts?

I am, to a point. But then I realize why they aren’t and then I have to be part of that spur that gets them involved. I did teach art in a Louisville high school for nine years. You know, Italy must be damn proud of Galileo. But look how they treated the dude! We must have a framework for the conflict we want.

Who is proud of the black artist in America?

I am. Even just the phrase black art is the best thing that has happened for the condition for black artists in America. It really calls attention to the number of major galleries in New York and museums around the world that had not shown, were not showing, were not willing to show any art by any black artist. Yet everyone has not come aboard, you know that. And there’s the same kind of tokenism as before. There is still not a commitment showing. But there is nothing to suggest in the history of men that we would ever arrive at a utopia. The individual black will be able to be successful but en masse, no.

Julio César Morales, Boy in Suitcase, 2013, HD animation video with sound. “Home—So Different, So Appealing” at LACMA.

©JULIO CÉSAR MORALES/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY WENDI NORRIS, SAN FRANCISCO

With summer just around the corner, it’s time to start looking forward to the season’s museum shows and biennials. Below is a guide to upcoming offerings, from Documenta 14 to Skulptur Projekte Münster, and from Bill Viola and Markus Lüpertz retrospectives to major new commissions by Martine Syms, Yan Xing, and more.

NATIONAL

Markus Lüpertz, Arkadien – Der hohe Berg (Arcadia—The High Mountain), 2013, mixed media on canvas.

PRIVATE COLLECTION

May

Markus Lüpertz
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
May 24–September 10; May 27–September 20

German Neo-Expressionist painter, sculptor, writer, teacher, and jazz pianist Markus Lüpertz is the subject of these two simultaneous exhibitions. The 75-year-old flamboyant, tattoo-emblazoned artist’s intense painterly output appears in the Hirshhorn show, curated by Evelyn Hankins, which concentrates on Lüpertz’s formative years, from 1962 to 1975, when he reflected the turmoil of postwar Germany with a series of semi-figurative military paintings. At the Phillips Collection, a survey curated by the museum’s director, Dorothy Kosinski, traces his entire career from the 1960s through the present. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Martine Syms
Museum of Modern Art, New York
May 27–July 16

Martine Syms has had a relatively short career so far, but she’s already produced a classic—her 2015 video Notes on Gesture, in which a woman acts out various movements, all of which are repeated several times over, like GIFs. That work was about how we’re always performing in an age of constant surveillance. For the Los Angeles–based artist’s MoMA exhibition, part of the museum’s ongoing “Projects” series, Syms will continue exploring that theme with Incense, Sweaters, and Ice, a feature-length film that follows three characters who see, and get seen by, each other. Alongside the film will be a metal sculpture based on the Great Migration. —Alex Greenberger

Martine Syms, Incense, Sweaters, and Ice (still), 2017, film.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND BRIDGET DONAHUE, NEW YORK

June

“Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
June 6–September 24

Takashi Murakami has to be one of the world’s most visible artists—between his near-constant shows at outposts of Galerie Perrotin, Gagosian, and Blum & Poe, his loud appearances at various art happenings around the globe, and his wildly popular fashion collaborations, the always-peppy Japanese mischief-maker seems to be everywhere. Despite all this frenzied activity, Murakami hasn’t had a museum show in the United States since “©MURAKAMI” came to the Brooklyn Museum in 2008. That dry spell will end when “The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg” opens at the MCA Chicago this summer, bringing to the Windy City an exhibition that ranges from early works never before shown in the United States to outsize newer paintings that match the artist’s humongous personality. —Nate Freeman

Alexander Calder, Aluminum Leaves, Red Post, 1941, painted sheet metal.

JERRY L. THOMPSON/©2017 CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/THE LIPMAN FAMILY FOUNDATION, INC.

“Calder: Hypermobility”
Whitney Museum, New York
June 9–October 16

This show’s spin at the Whitney will include, according to the museum, “early motor-driven abstractions, sound-generating Gongs, and standing and hanging mobiles.” Organized by Whitney curator Jay Sanders with Greta Hartenstein, senior curatorial assistant, and Melinda Lang, curatorial assistant, “Hypermobility” includes a maquette, set in motion, of Dancers and Sphere (1936) from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Calder’s inspiration came from many sources, not least a childhood boat trip during which he saw “a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other,” and a trip to Mondrian’s studio, where he suggested the Dutch artist motorize his works. Mondrian didn’t; Calder did. —B.A.M.

“Home—So Different, So Appealing”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
June 11–October 15

Titled after British Pop artist Richard Hamilton’s iconic collage and organized for Pacific Standard Time, this exhibition will use the idea of “home,” taken broadly, to bring together work by U.S. Latino and Latin American artists from the 1950s to the present. In the spirit of Hamilton’s politically inflected Pop, the show will present an alternative, and likely provocative, history of art of the past seventy years through works by artists like “anarchitect” Gordon Matta-Clark, destruction artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and emerging installation artist Carmen Argote. —Anne Doran

Laura Aguilar, In Sandy’s Room, 1989, gelatin silver print. “Home—So Different, So Appealing.”

©LAURA AGUILAR/COURTESY UCLA CHICANO STUDIES RESEARCH CENTER AND LIBRARY & ARCHIVE

“Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive”
Museum of Modern Art, New York
June 12–October 1

It’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s 150th birthday, and the architect seems as vigorous and pugnacious as ever. For the occasion, MoMA is breaking into his jam-packed archives and showing some 450 works of unimaginable variety from the 1890s to the 1950s. According to the museum, there will be “architectural drawings, models, building fragments, films, television broadcasts, print media, furniture, tableware, textiles, paintings, photographs, and scrapbooks,” and more. At least at MoMA, unlike the Guggenheim, you can view them on flat terrain. —B.A.M.

“Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder”
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
June 16–October 29

Cuban artist Tania Bruguera makes artworks that challenge systems of power. Typically, these social practice projects involve Bruguera collaborating with groups and individuals to mess with existing power structures. As part of her often controversial practice, which includes running for president of Cuba in 2018, Bruguera will be set up a temporary school for this survey. The Escuela de Arte Útil, or the School of Useful Art, will see Bruguera and her fellow artist-educators delivering weekly classes about power to YCBA fellows and members of the public. —R.S.

“Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
June 24–October 9

Edvard Much, Sick Mood at Sunset. Despair, 1892, oil on canvas.

THIELSKA GALLERIET, STOCKHOLM

You may have assumed the work of Edvard Munch, a legendary purveyor of angst, was all somber and fraught with lamentation. However, the 45 works in this show tell a more nuanced story. Focusing on the latter part of the Norwegian artist’s career, it includes 12 lesser-known self-portraits that feature bright colors against a white ground. They recall Henri Matisse’s interiors and patterning, and look ahead to Jasper Johns with their hatch mark and geometric composition, suggesting Munch was a more modern artist than many think. —B.A.M.

July

Dana Schutz
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
July 26–November 26

In the Brooklyn-based painter’s impressive 2015 exhibition at Petzel gallery in New York, she showed paintings that were more abstract, and more intricate, than her previous works. That show’s standout was a painting of a crowded elevator—legs and hands and heads appear to be flying in every direction—reportedly inspired by the infamous tussle between Solange Knowles and Jay Z. That painting marks a transition in Schutz’s work, making it a perfect time for a museum like the ICA Boston to showcase her recent paintings. —Andrew Russeth

August

“Playing with Fire: Paintings by Carlos Almaraz”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
August 6–December 3

The Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA” initiative may just be the most hotly anticipated art event of the year, bringing together roughly 70 art institutions from around Southern California to stage exhibitions that look at the influences that Latin American and Latinx artists have had on Los Angeles. One of the earliest shows to open—most will open in mid-September and early October—“Playing with Fire” is the first major survey of Chicano artist Carlos Almaraz. His relationship with LACMA is complex, as it was the first museum to show Chicano art, with an exhibition in 1974 of art collective “Los Four,” of which Almaraz was a cofounder. (That exhibition came only after another Chicano collective, ASCO, spray-painted the exterior of the museum to protest a LACMA curator’s saying that Chicanos “don’t make art.” The museum would not engage with work by Chicano artists for another 15 years, when it hosted the traveling exhibition “Hispanic Art in the United States.”) LACMA did a solo show of works by Almaraz from the museum’s collection in 1992, three years after he died from AIDS-related complications. “Playing With Fire,” curated by Howard Fox, will look at Almaraz’s large-scale expressionistic canvases, showcasing his fascination with car crashes on LA’s freeways and dreamlike scenes of Echo Park. —Maximilíano Durón

Carlos Almaraz, Crash in Phthalo Green, 1984.

MUSEUM ASSOCIATES, LACMA/©THE CARLOS ALMARAZ ESTATE/LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART, GIFT OF THE 1992 COLLECTORS COMMITTEE

INTERNATIONAL

May

“Mexican Graphic Art”
Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich
May 19–August 27

Using the rhetorical question “Who said the Kunsthaus only holds Swiss art?” as a jumping-off point, this exhibition will draw from the 350 works donated by Swiss photographer Armin Haab in the 1980s. The works, produced using a variety of printmaking techniques between the late 19th century (prior to the country’s 1910 revolution) and the 1970s, will look at various overarching themes, including poverty and wealth, love, and everyday life. The show will feature work by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and José Guadalupe Posada, perhaps the country’s most influential artist working in the graphic arts. —M.D.

“Richard Serra: Films and Videotapes”
Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel
May 20–October 15

Before he made his mark on art history as a Minimalist sculptor, Richard Serra produced films and videos. Not unlike his sculptures, they are dry and repetitive—and also weirdly sublime—studies of power and the passage of time. Consider, for example, Hand Catching Lead (1968), a three-minute film of the artist repeatedly performing the title’s action. This exhibition will be the first-ever survey to assemble all of Serra’s moving-image works, which include collaborations with artists Joan Jonas and Babette Mangolte, who would later provide the cinematography for Chantal Akerman’s early films. —A.G.

Richard Serra, Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1974, black-and-white video.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Jana Euler
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
May 20–October 15

Is there anything that this Brussels-based artist cannot render on canvas in a manner that is at once ingenious and strange? She has painted portraits tinged with inimitable humor, spectral monsters, Whitney Houston alongside the Whitney Museum’s former Marcel Breuer–designed home, a hulking mug of beer, and gargantuan power sockets. Just 35 this year, she is a leader in her medium, her insouciant sensibilities suggesting a creative drive utterly uninterested in those who have, and would, declare her medium dead. —A.R.

Kerstin Brätsch, Machine of Light, 2008, from the “New Images / Unisex” series, oil on paper.

©KERSTIN BRÄTSCH/NINI BONAVOGLIA COLLECTION

“Kerstin Brätsch: Innovation”
Museum Brandhorst, Munich
May 25–September 17

A partner in the artist duos DAS INSTITUT (with Adele Rödera) and KAYA (with Debo Eilers), the protean painter and performance artist Kertin Brätsch is an indefatigable collaborator. On her own and with others, she has produced a bewildering variety of work in the past decade, from her own paintings evoking early modernist abstraction (and often presented as performers in a space rather than well-behaved artworks) to KAYA’s dense amalgamations of paint, plastic, and hardware. This, the first survey of Brätsch’s work, promises to reveal the method behind her wide-ranging approach to art. —A.D.

June

Peter Saul
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
June 2–September 3

Despite perhaps being one of today’s most influential artists, Peter Saul remains one of the unsung heroes of the Pop movement. Maybe it’s because his material tended to be darker, though no less funny, than that of his acolytes. Rather than focusing on celebrity culture and advertising, politics interested Saul, whose chaotic paintings are filled with inhumanly pink Ronald Reagans and caricatured Richard Nixons. Combining the unabashed weirdness of Surrealism and the formal refinement of Abstract Expressionism, the San Francisco–based artist has, for the past six decades, meditated on the absurdities of being an American. This show will be his first major retrospective in Europe. —A.G.

Yan Xing
Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
June 2–August 27

Last year, Yan Xing had 37 high school students attempt to hide in the Stedelijk Museum’s galleries. Everyone knows that concealing oneself in an exhibition space is virtually impossible, and so these students were, of course, found by audience members. The students relayed deeply personal stories, but it was hard to tell if what they were saying was true—this was, after all, a performance. Through glossy black-and-white photographs and performance, the young Chinese-born artist has reflected on the past, arguing that every history, whether visual or otherwise, is constructed for consumption. With this show, titled “Dangerous Afternoon,” Yan will fabricate a curator persona, and then create a installation that involves photography, performance, and film dedicated to his backstory. —A.G.

Yan Xing, The Aesthetics of Resistance, 2015, ink-jet print.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIE URS MEILE, BEIJING-LUCERNE

ARoS Triennial
Various venues, Aarhus, Denmark
June 3–July 30

In a post-industrial city about three hours northwest of Copenhagen, the ARoS Triennial takes nature as its theme and expands on notions of what nature could even mean in the past, present, and future. A centuries-spanning exhibition opened at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in April, but a two-month addendum in June and July sprawls across the cityscape to venture into urban spaces as well outposts in a forest and along the coastline. Artists enlisted in service of the theme, “The Garden—End of Times; Beginning of Times,” include Katarina Grosse, Fujiko Nakaya, Meg Webster, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Edvard Munch, Max Ernst, Robert Smithson, Olafur Eliasson, Mark Dion, and many more. —Andy Battaglia

“Grayson Perry The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!”
Serpentine Galleries, London
June 8–September 10

“The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!” boldly proclaims the title of Grayson Perry’s show of new work at Serpentine Gallery. Perry, who won the Turner Prize in 2003, describes contemporary art as a “communication business.” And so he goes about this business, depicting quotidian scenes on a variety of mediums, including ceramics, cast iron, printmaking, and tapestry. By drawing on his own experiences as a cross-dresser, as well as by focusing on marginalized groups, Perry explores how contemporary audiences relate to centuries-old styles and subjects. —Robin Scher

Andreas Angelidakis, Athinaiki Techniki (Unauthorized), 2017, installation view, Polytechniou 8, Athens, documenta 14. 

ANGELOS GIOTOPOULOS

Documenta 14
Various venues, Kassel, Germany
June 10–September 17

For “Learning from Athens,” the 14th edition of this quinquennial, artistic director Adam Szymczyk has added an Athens, Greece, outpost that opened in April, a full two months before the usual show at the Fridericianum (and other venues) in Kassel, Germany. (Szymczyk’s use of Athens and Kassel’s divergent socioeconomic circumstances as a jumping-off point for the show has already sparked controversy.) To pull it all off, Szymczyk assembled a team of 14 co-curators, and together they have amassed a list of more than 150 artists, including Synnøve Persen, Samson Young, Postcommodity, Hiwa K, Roee Rosen, Rosalind Nashashibi, Nasan Tur, Romuald Karmakar, Nandita Raman, Angelo Plessas, Andreas Angelidakis, Maria Hassabi, Banu Cennetoglu, Bouchra Khalili, Apostolos Georgiou, Irena Haiduk, Tracey Rose, Nairy Baghramian, Marta Minujín, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Mekas, and Pope.L. —Sarah Douglas

Skulptur Projekte Münster
Various venues, Münster, Germany
June 10–October 1

Thirty years ago, controversy stirred by George Rickey’s installation of one of his large kinetic sculptures in the city of Münster, Germany, led Westfälisches Landesmuseum director Klaus Bussmann and Museum Ludwig curator Kasper König to launch the first edition of the Münster Sculpture Project. Since then, the festival has taken place every ten years, with each artist choosing his or her own site, and with certain works inevitably coming to define each edition. In 1997, for instance, it was Ilya Kabakov’s Looking Up, Reading the Words, an antenna that spells out a poetic text, installed in a park, while 2007 is memorable for Bruce Nauman’s Square Depression, an inverted pyramid installed in front of the University of Münster’s Department of Nuclear Physics. As artistic director, König put together the 2017 edition with co-curators Britta Peters and Marianne Wagner. This year, the classic Münster questions—what will they make, and where will they place it—are especially intriguing with regard to Ei Arakawa, Jeremy Deller, Nicole Eisenman, Pierre Huyghe, Mika Rottenberg, Gregor Schneider, and Hito Steyerl. —S.D.

Mika Rottenberg, stills from work in progress, 2017. Skulptur Projekte Münster.

©MIKA ROTTENBERG/COURTESY ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY

Nick Mauss
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal
June 22–September 24

Nick Mauss’s work is rooted in drawing but has taken many forms throughout his accomplished career. His forthcoming exhibition at Serralves Museum in Porto will exist broadly in the spirit of recent projects, which have focused on indeterminacy and chaos. Taking place in the institution’s villa, Mauss will fuse painting, dance, and performance to create a singular whole, incorporating all three into a larger piece that resembles a stage. —John Chiaverina

August Sander, 
Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne, 1931 (printed 1992), gelatin silver print. “Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919–1933.”



©2017 DIE PHOTOGRAPHISCHE SAMMLUNG/SK STIFTUNG KULTUR – AUGUST SANDER ARCHIV, COLOGNE; DACS, LONDON/
ARTIST ROOMS TATE AND NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND, LENT BY ANTHONY D’OFFAY 2010

“Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919–1933”
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool
June 23–October 15

This two-person exhibition focuses on Neue Sachlichkeit painter Otto Dix and photographer August Sander. The focus, for both artists, was a Weimar Republic undergoing rapid changes between two world wars. Dix depicted the wealth and glamor of cabaret culture alongside the misery and brutality of warfare, while Sanders’ focus was everyday Germans, who he captured most vividly in his “People of the Twentieth Century” series. The show will include over 300 paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. —Robin Scher

“Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi”
Haus der Kunst, Munich
June 23–October 22

“It took a lot of integrity and a lot of courage for an African American artist to be an abstractionist in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s even,” gallerist Michael Rosenfeld told ARTnews in 2014. Abstractionists like Frank Bowling, Jack Whitten, Howardena Pindell, and Al Loving, who were political but resisted making explicitly sociopolitical art, have long been underappreciated. For the past decade, however, interest in work by these painters has grown apace. This overview of Guyanese-born Bowling’s canvases will be anchored by the large-scale “map paintings” he made between 1967 and 1971, in which liminal geographies painted on color field–like backgrounds conjure journeys he took and ones he imagined. —Anne Doran

Michael E. Smith
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium
June 24–January 10

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2016, baby jumpsuits, wood (28 parts).

LADISLAV ZAJAC/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KOW, BERLIN

Michael E. Smith’s sculptures defamiliarize the everyday, relying on industrial and just plain strange objects used in ways both pithy and morose. The Providence-based artist’s 2015 sculpture Fish, for example, consists of a whitewashed door balanced end-to-end on top of a can of whipped cream, while Sleep (2013) features the head of a taxidermy chicken stuffed into the end of an exhaust pipe. Smith also works in video, using found footage to a similarly bizarre effect. —Malaya Sadler

Bill Viola
Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain
June 30–November 9

As one of the first artists to work with video, in the early ’70s, Bill Viola worked with subjects very different from those of his colleagues, subjects like faith, transcendence, and renewal, all of which he approached without a smattering of irony. Since then, his videos have become grander and more complex—references to Renaissance painting and multi-screen allegories about the cycle of life and death abound—but they have lost none of their earnestness. The Guggenheim Bilbao’s retrospective will include everything from his early experiments to Tristan’s Ascension (2005), a reversed extreme-slow-motion long take of a man falling onto a plinth as water rains down. —A.G.

July

Ise, Study drawing for anOther story, 2017. “Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now.”

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MORI ART MUSEUM, TOKYO

“Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1980s to Now”
National Art Center and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
July 5-October 23

For the first exhibition held jointly between Tokyo’s National Art Center and the Mori Art Museum, the two institutions will present a survey of almost 30 years of Southeast Asian art, covering approximately 180 works from 85 artists spread over ten countries in the region. Korakrit Arunanondchai, Jompet Kuswidananto and Heri Dono are among the artists showcasing work in an exhibition that is sure to make a strong argument for the vitality of the Southeast Asian art scene. —J.C.

Alex Da Corte
Secession, Vienna
July 6–September 3

Da Corte’s triumphal 2016 exhibition “Free Roses” filled the expansive galleries of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art floor to ceiling and wall to wall with psychedelic color; such oddities as a pond filled with motorized plastic swans shared space with darker visions, including an early video starring cheap, readymade objects and set to Leonard Cohen’s song “Chelsea Hotel #2.” With his show at the Secession, the Philadelphia-based artist will bring new work and his intuitive understanding of the horrors and ecstasies of existence in late capitalist society to a city once famous for conspicuous consumption. —A.D.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Icon for my Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People-Bobby Seale), 1969, oil, acrylic, and aluminum leaf on linen canvas. “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.”

©BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

“Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”
Tate Modern, London
July 12–October 22

The pages of American art history are finally being rewritten to include the work of women, people of color, and other marginalized artists, thanks to superb books like, say, Darby English’s 1971: A Year in the Life of Color and exhibitions like this one, that examines debates around the notion of “Black Art” over a 20-year period, from 1963, the year that African American artists like Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff came together to form the Spiral group in New York, to 1983. Giants firmly ensconced in the canon, including Norman Lewis and Betye Saar, will hang alongside artists who are now making their way into it, such as the octogenarian painters Wadsworth Jarrell and Frank Bowling. —Andrew Russeth

August

Yokohama Triennale
Various venues, Yokohama, Japan
August 4–November 5

The sixth edition of this triennial, staged in the port city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, is called “Islands, Constellations and Galapagos.” The exhibition will “reexamine the state of global connectivity and isolation from various angles,” particularly looking at it from the point of view of archipelago regions and “the world that is generally growing conservative,” according to the show’s press release. The year 2017 also marks the 150th anniversary of Taisei Hōkan, which would eventually return power to the emperor of Japan, away from the feudal shogunates and toward Japan’s eventual modernization. Among the artists included in this year’s triennial are Ai Weiwei, Jenny Holzer, Wael Shawky, and the Propeller Group. —M.D.

Paola Pivi, I and I (must stand for the art), 2014. Yokohama Triennale 2017.

GUILLAUME ZICCARELLI/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PERROTIN

Cheryl Donegan
Kuntshalle Zurich, Zurich
August 26-November 19

This show is the first extensive European exhibition of work by the American artist Cheryl Donegan, who is perhaps best known for her videos, one being 1994’s iconic Kiss My Royal Irish Ass (K.M.R.I.A.). In that piece, the artist produces paintings of shamrocks by inserting her posterior into green paint and then applying it to paper. This video and others—including Head, in which Donegan catches milk in her mouth as it squirts from a container and then spitting it back into the receptacle—provide a poignant and at times humorous critique of the female body’s place in pop culture and art history. —J.C.

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States, 1932. “Paint the Revolution” at Philadelphia Museum of Art.

©BANCO DE MÉXICO DIEGO RIVERA FRIDA KAHLO MUSEUMS TRUST, MEXICO, D.F. AND ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COLECCIÓN MARIA Y MANUEL REYERO, NEW YORK

With fall on the horizon, it is time to preview the season’s major exhibitions and biennials around the world. Below is a guide to the months to come, including shows about museum collections, retrospectives for beloved Dadaists and Neo-Dadaists, and a great deal more.

CONTENTS

NATIONAL

SEPTEMBER

Doug Aitken, electric earth (still), 1999, video installation with eight channels of color-and-sound video, eight projections, and four­‐room architectural environment. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

COURTESY MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES

“Doug Aitken: Electric Earth”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
September 10–January 10
In Doug Aitken’s multi-room video installation electric earth (1999), a young man walks around a deserted Los Angeles at night. Along the way the man confronts a series of spectacles—some mundane, others surreal—that leave him harrowed. Though episodic, the installation has an odd narrative made of unlike, constantly shifting pieces. Six of Aitken’s other installations will be shown alongside signs, sculptures, photographic images, drawings, and altered furniture made by the California– and New York–based artist over the past two decades. This show will offer a chaotic, immersive environment that depicts the artist’s preoccupation with change and chance, specifically as they relate to our current information age. —Robin Scher

“Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975”
Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts
September 11–December 11
This show, curated by Katy Siegel and artist Christopher Wool, showcases a group of David Reed’s paintings from the mid-1970s that tell the story of their making. These “brushstroke” works are pictures of brushstrokes that explore the hows and whys of their medium. Relatively small, they are meant to be read closely and viewed at eye level. Reed has called them bedroom paintings, explaining them as “art you live with.” The drippy line creates a sense of continual motion, and that in turn suggests everything from travel to motion pictures to dreaming. —Barbara A. MacAdam

“Take Me (I’m Yours)”
Jewish Museum, New York
September 16–February 5
Would you like to try your hand at being Lawrence Weiner and stencil his messages ad infinitum, or “manage” your pills in the cascading heaps of capsules sent down by Carsten Höller? Or bring home one, or some, of the 400-plus artworks produced by 40 of today’s most renowned contemporary artists? If so, then come to the Jewish Museum this season and take your pick. This unusual exercise in democracy is a reprise of the show first mounted by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Christian Boltanksi in 1995 at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Everything on view here is free (after museum admission, of course), although you can spend some money and participate in a Kickstarter campaign designed to keep the works coming. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Kelley Walker, New York Times, National Section, Sunday June 25, 2015, 2016, Pantone 023u four-color process silkscreen with acrylic ink on MDF, 9 panels. Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis.

COURTESY THE ARTIST; PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK; THOMAS DANE GALLERY LONDON; GALERIE GISELA CAPITAIN, COLOGNE

“Kelley Walker: Direct Drive”
Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis
September 16–December 31
Using such technologies as 3-D modeling software and laser-cutting, Kelley Walker has explored pop culture’s consumption and reuse of images for the past two decades. This exhibition, the artist’s first solo museum show in America, will fill every part of the museum building, including its facade, project wall, courtyard, and mezzanine. In addition to new work made specifically for this show, Walker’s long-running series of screen-printed, collaged bricks and pieces from the “Black Star Press” series, featuring images of racial unrest digitally printed on canvas with silkscreened melted chocolate on them, will be on view here. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Carmen Herrera, Azul “Tres”, 1971, acrylic on wood. Whitney Museum.

©CARMEN HERRERA/PRIVATE COLLECTION

Carmen Herrera
Whitney Museum, New York
September 16–January 2
In what has to be one of the most glorious, feel-good stories of the year, Cuban-born painter Carmen Herrera, aged 101 and still hard at work, is getting a 50-work, three-decade survey of her ingenious hard-edge abstractions. It will be her first solo museum show in New York in nearly two decades, and Dana Miller, curator and director of the Whitney’s collection, is in charge. When the Whitney debuted its new building last year, it hung a Herrera alongside pieces by Ad Reinhardt, John McLaughlin, and Agnes Martin. The ensemble looked right. This show seems likely to secure Herrera’s place among her better-known contemporaries. —Andrew Russeth

Kai Althoff
Museum of Modern Art, New York
September 18–January 22
German artist and musician Kai Althoff is known for his immersive installations and spindly, memorable dynamic figures. With visual references to Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Édouard Vuillard, Althoff’s paintings and installations inhabit a darkly humorous world in which German history and contemporaneity are aesthetically alike. Because Althoff has had quite a few solo exhibitions (31, to be exact), his show at MoMA is sure to be characteristically introspective, provocative, and almost certainly a little morbid. Visitors can expect to be drawn into Althoff’s varied and twisted anecdotal paintings, which often deal with themes of sex, violence, and alienation, usually within the confines of dueling secularity and religion. —Tessa Goldsher

“Gustav Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918”
Neue Galerie, New York
September 22–January 16
Gustav Klimt’s portraits of society women are some of the finest examples of his work. They encompass his early Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite influences as well as his iconic “golden style” and his later Fauve-inflected pieces. They also represent an apotheosis of fin-de-siècle Viennese culture. The show will feature some of the finest examples of Klimt’s portraits, including Portrait of Serena Pulitzer Lederer (1899), Portrait of Gertha Loew (1902), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Portrait of Mäda Primavesi (1912), Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16), and Portrait of Ria Munk III (1917–18). Preparatory sketches, along with mannequins dressed in corresponding period style (designed by one of Klimt’s muses, his sister-in-law, the fashion designer Emilie Flöge), will accompany these works. —Hannah Ghorashi

Anthony Hernandez, Discarded #50, 2014, ink-jet print. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

©ANTHONY HERNANDEZ/COURTESY THE ARTIST

Anthony Hernandez
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
September 24–January 1
Anthony Hernandez’s intimate photographs of Los Angeles and its surrounding area are some of the most important images of Southern California ever taken, so it’s surprising that this show is the self-taught artist’s first retrospective. His “Landscapes for the Homeless” (1988–2007) and “Discarded” (2012–15) series are almost picturesque handlings of the dystopian-looking aftermath of urban sprawl. Likewise, his dreamy photos of pedestrians on Rodeo Drive show the flip side of L.A.’s glamor. Although Hernandez is best known for these subjects, this 45-year career retrospective, the first show in the museum’s newly revamped Pritzker Center of Photography, will also showcase his less-often-exhibited recent work, such as abstract, colorful close-ups of tunnels and glass around L.A. —Tessa Goldsher

“The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium”
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
September 24–January 2
It’s almost hard now to imagine a time when photographs didn’t always have a political agenda, but in the late ’60s, when a new community of artists and academics was forming at the University of California San Diego, photographers were still breaking away from their medium’s formalist legacy. These Californian artists, among them John Baldessari and Eleanor Antin, wanted to learn about the politics hidden away in photographic images. What would it mean to put a woman or a person or color before a camera? Could photography be used as a tool for fighting against power structures? This show will take a rare in-depth look at the artists who studied and worked in California during the ’70s and ’80s, and who led to a new, more socially engaged kind of photography. —Alex Greenberger

Toba Khedoori, Untitled (hole), detail, 2013, oil on linen. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

BRIAN FORREST/©TOBA KHEDOORI/COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK AND LONDON/EMANUEL HOFFMANN FOUNDATION, PERMANENT LOAN TO THE ÖFFENTLICHE KUNSTSAMMLUNG BASEL

Toba Khedoori
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
September 25–January 2
Toba Khedoori’s paintings and drawings of faded, empty rooms are quietly beautiful. They cause viewers to inevitably wonder, Are these enigmatic visions of minimalist objects, or could they represent a larger sterile environment? In the past, Khedoori’s ghostly architectural and household forms have earned her critical praise and a MacArthur Foundation Grant. Now, an exhibition at LACMA will survey the Iraqi-Australian artist’s newer work, which combines abstraction and detailed realism to creepy, arresting effect, in addition to work that she has previously shown at the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, among other places. —Tessa Goldsher

“Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
September 26–January 8
On its website for “Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,” the Met notes that the Holy City was, during those years, about the size of midtown Manhattan. It is pretty remarkable, then, that it nurtured our three global religions and became the fulcrum of the world’s most powerful trade routes. The Met’s show will explore the four centuries in which a rapidly shifting global landscape allowed for the creation of new kinds of artworks, with over 200 pieces gleaned from 60 lenders, some of which are religious institutions loaning out the works for the first time. Taking the subway uptown is certainly easier than flying to Israel. —Nate Freeman

OCTOBER

Hélio Oiticica with B11 Box Bólide 9, 1964. Carnegie Museum of Art.

DESDÉMONE BARDIN/COURTESY CÉSAR AND CLAUDIO OITICICA AND THE FAMILY OF DESDÉMONE BARDIN

“Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium”
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
October 1–January 2
A member of Brazil’s Neo-Concrete group in the late 1950s, Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) relentlessly pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art. This, the first comprehensive survey of Oiticica’s work in the United States, will follow his career trajectory as he moved from making colorful abstract paintings and spatial constructions to creating increasingly participatory artworks: walk-in environments that immersed the viewer in the shapes, textures, sounds, and tastes of Brazil; local billiard halls designated as art; and costumes for the famed samba dancers of Rio de Janeiro’s Mangueira favela. A highlight of the exhibition is sure to be Oiticica’s rarely shown Eden (1969), a massive installation equipped with tents and beds designed for sleeping, listening to music, or reading—a piece that is, like much of Oiticica’s joyous work, created anew by each person who inhabits it. —Anne Doran

Edgar Arceneaux
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 14–January 8
Los Angeles–based artist Edgar Arceneaux will present a trilogy of interconnected works at the contemporary-art outpost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his practice, Arcenaeux weaves together a disparate stream of materials and references, drawing from sources as varied as pop culture, literature, architecture, and politics. Through this work, the artist highlights the complexities of narrative, history, memory, and identity. The MIT exhibition will premiere Arceneaux’s 2016 work Until, Until, Until…, which takes a look at Ben Vereen’s career-disrupting performance at Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural celebration. —John Chiaverina

Ragnar Kjartansson
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
October 14–January 8
Ragnar Kjartansson’s primary contribution to contemporary art has been to slow it down. He first came to prominence in the United States with a 2011 work at New York’s Performa biennial in which he and a group of Icelandic opera singers sang the final aria of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro on a live loop for 12 hours. In 2013 he had the rock band The National play its three-minute-thirty-second song “Sorrow” for six hours straight at MoMA PS1. (That piece was called, appropriately, A Lot of Sorrow.) In Kjartansson’s first museum retrospective, his feats of endurance will appear alongside his work in other mediums—photography, painting, and video. —M. H. Miller

Ragnar Kjartansson, Scenes from Western Culture, 2015. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

COURTESY THE ARTIST, LUHRING AUGUSTINE, NEW YORK, AND I8 GALLERY, REYKJAVÍK

“R. H. Quaytman, Morning: Chapter 30”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
October 16–February 6
A member of the legendary artist-run collective gallery Orchard, R. H. Quaytman combines abstract forms and found photographic images culled from art history, the news, and her personal life in modestly scaled, oil-and-silk-screen panel paintings. The artist (who is the daughter of poet Susan Howe and abstract painter Harvey Quaytman) brings a conceptual depth and obliquely narrative dimension to these pieces by arranging them into site-specific groupings she calls chapters. Each chapter relates in some way to the place in which it is exhibited. Quaytman’s quiet work has been making a lot of noise of late—she was a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize, awarded each year by the Ludwig Museum. This show will be her first museum retrospective. —Anne Doran

“Monet: The Early Years”
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
October 16–January 29
A century before the arrival of the Allied Forces, there was another significant landing on Normandy’s beaches: that of Claude Monet. There, under the mentorship of Eugène Boudin, Monet first encountered oil painting and the plein-air technique. The period also saw the young artist, together with his contemporaries Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley, take his rst steps toward Impressionism. This chapter of Monet’s life and art is finally getting its due in this 60-painting exhibition. —Robin Scher

Mark Leckey
MoMA PS1, New York
October 23–March 5
After a leisurely start (nine years of his career passed before he made the widely acclaimed 1999 video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a druggy montage of clips of club kids dancing), British artist Mark Leckey has earned an international reputation—and a Turner Prize—for his hard-to-pin-down yet influential oeuvre. This show, the largest survey of his work to date, includes Fiorucci, as well as such works as GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010), in which the artist channels the thoughts and feelings of a black Samsung bottom-freezer fridge, and Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD (2015), an autobiography told through archival television clips and YouTube videos. Leckey’s work speaks of ecstasy and oblivion in the language of contemporary pop culture and digital technology. Call it a Romantic sublime for the 21st century. —Anne Doran

Rufino Tamayo, Homage to the Indian Race, 1952. “Paint the Revolution” at Philadelphia Museum of Art.

ACERVO CONACULTA–INBA, MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO

“Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910–1950”
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
October 25–January 8
From massive mural cycles in public buildings to intimate canvases in private collections, Mexican modernist art is tied inextricably to the country’s revolution, which lasted from 1910 to 1920. Mexican artists sought to articulate the sweeping changes taking place in their society; mixing a range of sources—including European, colonial, and indigenous cultures—they shaped a new national identity. This exhibition will bring together a wealth of objects, including mural sketches, paintings, prints, photographs, broadsheets, and books by the likes of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, and Rufino Tamayo, as well as the less famous artists who contributed to this cultural renaissance, including Dr. Atl, María Izquierdo, Roberto Montenegro, Carlos Mérida, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. —Maximilíano Durón

“Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest”
New Museum, New York
October 26–January 8
Pipilotti Rist was the talk of the town earlier this year when a Beyoncé video paid homage to Rist’s two-projection installation Ever Is Over All (1997), in which she dances down a street, bashing in car windows with a hammer. Something about the allusion felt at home with Beyoncé’s music, where empowered-looking women appear on beaches and in forests. Rist’s colorful, trippy work, like Beyoncé’s music, situates viewers in natural environments dotted with video screens that play footage of flowers, bodies, and trees. In this multi-floor show, the Swiss artist’s most comprehensive survey in New York to date, older work will be presented alongside a new installation that looks at the evolution of technology and shows how it has affected the way we see both nature and women. —Alex Greenberger

“Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016”
October 28–February 5
Whitney Museum, New York
There have been moments in the past year when it seemed that every other New York City gallery was exhibiting a film or video installation. As the line between artist and filmmaker becomes ever less distinct and new technologies ever more accessible, a show devoted to artist’s films seems not only timely but overdue. Organized by the Whitney’s redoubtable Chrissie Iles, this survey of moving-image art from 1905 to 2016 will include work by such pioneers of the form as Oskar Schlemmer, Joseph Cornell, and Stan VanDerBeek as well as by emerging artists like Ian Cheng and Alex Da Corte. In between, look for masterpieces, both celluloid and digital, by Hito Steyerl, Philippe Parreno, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and many more. —Anne Doran

NOVEMBER

John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919, oil on canvas. “World War I and American Art” at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

©IWM IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS, LONDON

“World War I and American Art”
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
November 4–April 9
When we think of the impact World War I had on art, we tend to consider it in terms of the Europeans—Der Blaue Reiter painter August Macke was felled on the front in Champagne, France; the French poet Apollinaire suffered a head wound, as documented in a drawing by his friend Picasso. After all, that’s where the front was. The subject of the war’s impact on American artists has not, to date, been explored. The PAFA is rectifying that, with a substantial show—160 works by 80 artists, including Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Georgia O’Keeffe, Horace Pippin, and Norman Rockwell—that will chart how the war changed aesthetic perspectives and produced some tough artworks, not least John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918–19), on loan from the Imperial War Museums in London. The horrors of war are writ large in this grisly—note the dead bodies—20-foot-long tableau, which shows the aftermath of a mustard-gas attack. At around this time, war documentation began falling into the domain of photography, while more recently film and the Internet have been assuming the mantle. Paintings, however, convey equally powerful representations of suffering, as shown here. —Sarah Douglas

Sara VanDerBeek, Ziggurat, 2006, chromogenic color print. “The Artist’s Museum” at Institute of Contemporary Art.

©2016 SARA VANDERBEEK/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK

“The Artist’s Museum”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
November 16–March 26
The men and women on ARTnews’s annual Top 200 Collectors list will likely be pleased to learn that collecting can be interpreted as a creative impulse, closely related to the process of artistic creation. ICA senior curator Dan Byers (with help from curatorial assistant Jeffrey De Blois) has assembled works from 12 American and European artists—Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Rachel Harrison, Louise Lawler, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, Christian Marclay, Rosemarie Trockel, Xaviera Simmons, and Sara VanDerBeek—that use methods of museum display to draw out relationships between artworks of the past and issues of the present. The “artist’s museum” must be understood conceptually: in their museum-minds, these artists remix art history in order to process how the world works today. A highlight of what promises to be an intellectually stimulating exhibition is Anna Craycroft’s The Earth is a Magnet, commissioned by the ICA; in it, the work of photographer Berenice Abbott meets pieces by Craycroft’s artist peers. —Sarah Douglas

“Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction”
Museum of Modern Art, New York
November 20–March 19
The godhead of so much that is outrageous, outré, and wildly fun in contemporary art, the painter, poet, publisher, and all-around gadabout Francis Picabia (1879–1953), will receive what is being billed as the “the first major exhibition in the U.S. to encompass the full range of the artist’s audacious, provocative, and profoundly influential career.” (Earlier efforts left out the Dadaist’s sexy, long-reviled, now-beloved, late pinup paintings.) MoMA curator Anne Umland is at the helm, along with Cathérine Hug, curator at the Kunsthaus Zurich, where the show originated earlier this year, and MoMA curatorial assistant Talia Kwartler. With some 200 works on offer, this is easily one of the season’s most anticipated exhibitions. —Andrew Russeth

Rosemarie Trockel, As far as possible, 2012, mixed media, installation view. “Question the Wall Itself” at Walker Art Center.

©2016 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK AND VG BILD-KUNST, BONN/COURTESY SPRUETH MAGERS

“Question the Wall Itself”
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
November 20–May 21
Taking Marcel Broodthaers’s wily exhibition strategies as an inspiration, this show, organized by the Walker’s artistic director, Fionn Meade, and curatorial fellow Jordan Carter, will examine how artists have engaged the architecture and decor of places where they were showing work. The artist list is heady and multigenerational, ranging from contemporary giants, like Rosemarie Trockel, Walid Raad, and Theaster Gates, to the late, great dealer and curator of conceptual art and textiles Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) to the inimitable Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944), who showed her spry paintings of soirées and family in a studio amidst luscious furniture and cellophane curtains of her own design. —Andrew Russeth

Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of Bernhard von Reesen, 1521. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

©ELKE ESTEL, HANS-PETER KLUT, ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK/STAATLICHE KUNSTSAMMLUNGEN DRESDEN, GEMÄLDEGALERIE ALTE MEISTER

“Renaissance and Reformation: German Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
November 20–March 26
It’s a rare opportunity to be regaled with such a rich show of works from the German Renaissance and Reformation period, dating from 1460 to 1580. The more than 100 pieces on view will include paintings, drawings, sculptures, arms and armor, and decorative arts coinciding with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. An all-star cast of artists, led by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Mathias Grünwald, Tilman Riemenschneider, and Peter Vischer, among others, will reveal the historic, scientific, political, and intellectual complexity of the time as well as the sophisticated state of art- and craft-making that prevailed. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Thomas Bayrle
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
November 29–March 26
For decades the legendary 78-year-old German artist Thomas Bayrle has been blazing a path through new media, pop, and conceptual art to achieve a singular style centered on his self-coined “superforms,” which involve collaging together thousands of pictures to create a new image. His upcoming survey show at ICA Miami is his first major solo institutional exhibition in the United States and will feature close to 50 years’ worth of paintings, sculpture, and video, much of it examining the influence of contemporary technology on culture and humanity. There will also be new work on display, most notably a site-specific installation created for ICA’s Atrium Gallery. —John Chiaverina

DECEMBER

“Basim Magdy: The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
December 10–March 19
Basim Magdy’s photographs often come in rich shades of red-orange and emerald green, but a dark reality underlies their damaged, pretty surfaces. Through a process he calls “pickling,” Magdy puts chemicals on photographs and celluloid, causing them to turn psychedelic colors. While ostensibly depicting visions of colorful utopias, they are actually quite ugly—what is ideal can, in fact, be toxic. Now, after being named Artist of the Year by Deutsche Bank, and after being featured in the 2015 editions of the New Museum Triennial and MoMA’s “New Photography,” the Egyptian artist will have his first U.S. solo museum show. He’s warned viewers that the issues he’s interested in with this show—potentially harmful political situations—are “not pleasant,” but then again, beauty isn’t what Magdy aims for. —Alex Greenberger

Basim Magdy, An Apology to a Love Story that Crashed into a Whale (detail), 2016. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

COURTESY GYPSUM GALLERY, CAIRO; HUNT KASTNER, PRAGUE; AND ARTSÜMER, ISTANBUL

INTERNATIONAL

SEPTEMBER

Gwangju Biennale
Various venues, Gwangju, Korea
September 2–November 6
In the 12th century, Persian mystic and philosopher Sohravardi came up with the idea of an “eighth climate,” the concept that beyond the seven physical climates identified by the ancient Greeks, there’s an extra atmosphere imperceptible to the senses where matter and spirit coexist—a place where, for instance, inspiration might come from. In keeping with that idea, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, which is titled “The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?),” will ponder whether contemporary art can reveal anything at all to future audiences. With a range of artists spanning from Philippe Parreno to Raqs Media Collective, the biennial is about artists who conjure a sense of tomorrow for contemporary viewers. “Art is a form of understanding with a special ability to deal with contemporary reality,” artistic director Maria Lind, together with curator Binna Choi, said in an interview. “As such it helps us make the simplified more nuanced, the incomprehensible possible to grasp and the unknown imagined.” —Robin Scher

Laure Prouvost
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
September 3–November 6
French-born, Antwerp-based artist Laure Prouvost was the surprise winner of the 2013 Turner Prize for her video Wantee. The piece was part of an installation that combined found objects and video to stage a tea party of sorts, centered around a film depicting the fictional relationship between Prouvost’s pretend grandfather and the artist Kurt Schwitters. For her first major German exhibition, the artist’s film work will be front and center, contained within large installations that incorporate a variety of collaged mediums. The show will also serve as a continuation of the Wantee narrative, which has so far seen Prouvost’s grandfather dig a tunnel from his living room to North Africa for an art project, fully disappearing in the process. —John Chiaverina

René Magritte, Le Double Secret, 1927, oil on canvas. Centre Pompidou.

GEORGES MEGUERDITCHIAN/©2016 ADAGP, PARIS/CENTRE POMPIDOU, MUSÉE NATIONAL D’ART MODERNE, PARIS

“René Magritte: The Betrayal of Images”
Centre Pompidou, Paris
September 8–January 9
The canvas depicts a serene, androgynous-looking woman from the shoulders up, her back to a dull gray sea. At the center of the woman’s likeness is a jagged void, like a hole in a broken window. A corresponding shape, containing the missing features, has been placed to the left of the original figure, while within the void, sleigh bells drift down the face of a rocky chasm as if by some biomechanical process. This perturbing image is by René Magritte, known for works that question the viewer’s perception of reality. A new exhibition dedicated to the Belgian Surrealist will comprise over 200 of Magritte’s paintings, drawings, and objects, and will be divided in five parts, each exploring one of the artist’s recurring motifs: fire, shadows, curtains, words, and the fragmented body. —Maximilíano Durón

Bienal de São Paulo
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo
September 10–December 12
With global warming, political uprisings, and immigration crises in the news almost every day, it would be safe to say we live in an age of uncertainty. Taking this fact as its inspiration, the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo will reflect on today’s unpredictable political and social climate. Curated by German historian Jochen Volz, along with Lars Bang Larsen, Gabi Ngcobo, Sofía Olascoaga, and Júlia Rebouças, this biennial, titled “Incerteza viva” (“Live Uncertainty”), will bring together 81 artists and collectives from around the world. Without being overly prescriptive or descriptive, their work addresses the inability to know what’s next. Likewise, Volz’s goal for himself and his cocurators is to reflect our unstable global situation without offering any easy answers. —Robin Scher

“Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer”
Fondazione Prada, Milan
September 15–January 8
In 1972, for an assemblage called The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, Betye Saar famously armed a mammy figurine with a tiny broom and a small rifle. Even by today’s standards, the work is potent—it’s a symbol of black history, in particular black women’s history, fighting back. For the past five decades, Saar, a key member of the Black Arts Movement in the ’60s and ’70s, and one of the most under-appreciated American contemporary artists working today, has brought viewers face to face with America’s ugly past, evoking slave ships, confederate flags, and minstrelsy with her assemblages. History, as Saar shows, never disappears—it resurfaces at unexpected, particularly political moments. Likewise, Saar, who recently celebrated her 90th birthday, is becoming a late-career hit, and is sure to continue to gain international recognition with this show, her first exhibition in Italy and her second-ever solo museum show abroad. —Alex Greenberger

Betye Saar, Record for Hattie, 1975, mixed media assemblage. Fondazione Prada.

TIM LANTERMAN/COURTESY SCOTTSDALE MUSEUM OF ART

William Kentridge
Whitechapel Gallery, London
September 21–January 15
South African artist, filmmaker, and opera director William Kentridge will bring to Whitechapel Gallery his stop-animation films based on large-scale drawn, erased, and reworked charcoal drawings, the drawings themselves, and an assortment of large-scale installations, all addressing the human condition. Highlights of the show, curated by Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel director, will include Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012), based on the work of science historian Peter Galison; the set-design model for his 2015 production of the Alban Berg opera Lulu; and O Sentimental Machine (2015), a video-and-sound work, featuring a pair of megaphone-headed creatures, whose title derives from Leon Trotsky’s idea that people are “sentimental but programmable machines.” —Barbara A. MacAdam

Donna Huanca, MAENAD CYMBALS, 2013, performance view. Zabludowicz Collection.

PERFORMED AT OPEN FORUM, BERLIN; PRZEMEK PYZCZEK/COURTESY PERES PROJECTS, BERLIN

“Abstract Expressionism”
Royal Academy of Arts, London
September 24–January 2
Providing a modern art movement the United States could call its own and shifting the art world’s center of gravity from Paris to New York, first-generation Abstract Expressionism is indelibly associated with the post–World War II American nationalism of the 1950s. It is often viewed in monolithic terms, defined solely by the monumentally scaled, emotionally charged work of the giants of the New York School—among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. This, the first survey of Ab Ex painting to be mounted in London since 1959, will examine the multigenerational and multifaceted movement in its entirety, through the inclusion of such West Coast artists as Sam Francis and significant women players such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. —Hannah Ghorashi

Donna Huanca
Zabludowicz Collection, London
September 29–December 18
When the Zabludowicz Collection announced that Donna Huanca would do its first performance commission, it seemed like strange news for a museum that typically funds projects involved with the digital, like recent video installations by Jon Rafman and Ryan Trecartin. Though very different in its approach, Huanca’s work is also about how humans act in spaces like the Internet, where users take on personas—in a sense putting on new skins. This is literally what Huanca’s performers often do in her pieces, which involve them covering themselves in colorful paint and then gradually removing it by touching their surroundings. For her commission, Huanca’s performers will respond to a three-story glass structure that suggests screens, dirtied over time like the surfaces of iPads. —Alex Greenberger

OCTOBER

Roni Horn
Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland
October 2–January 1
Employing a variety of mediums, American artist Roni Horn addresses the fluidity of identity and experience—particularly the viewer’s experience of a work of art. Much of her output over the past four decades has been inspired by the weather and geography of Iceland, a country which she has visited frequently over the years. But the real connective tissue throughout has been Horn’s notion of the contingent relationship. This idea will be celebrated in her upcoming solo show at Foundation Beyeler, which, in addition to photographs, works on paper, and glass sculptures, will feature a first-of-its-kind “multipartite work” created just for the exhibition. —Robin Scher

“The Figurative Pollock”
Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
October 2–January 22
Jackson Pollock’s name is a byword for abstraction, thanks to the allover drip paintings that he made between 1947 and 1950. However, few know that Pollock’s drip period was in fact bracketed by bodies of figurative work. Following the lead of last year’s enormously successful traveling show “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” which featured the rarely seen, semi-figurative black enamel paintings Pollock produced between 1951 and 1953, this exhibition—comprising approximately 100 paintings and works on paper made between the mid-1930s and the 1950s—will be the first ever dedicated to these significant chapters of the artist’s career. —Hannah Ghorashi

Zeng Fanzhi, Portrait, 2004, oil on canvas. Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

©ZENG FANZHI STUDIO

Zeng Fanzhi
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
October 9–November 13
Prolific Beijing-based painter Zeng Fanzhi comes to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art this fall for his largest exhibition in China to date. Zeng is known for applying Western historical styles like German Expressionism to personal or speci cally Chinese subjects in his “Hospital” and “Mask” series of the 1990s, as well as in later large-scale portraits and nocturnes. This survey will include a recent series of works on paper that show the artist adopting a dialectical approach to Eastern and Western painting traditions. In so doing, the exhibition will highlight Zeng’s bridging of social, historical, and geographic divides in his art. —Robin Scher

Ulay
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
October 13–January 8
Poor Ulay! He’s basically known only for his 1970s and ’80s collaborations with former romantic partner Marina Abramović, whom he recently sued for back payments from sales. Abramović became a pop culture icon in 2010 for a performance in which she sat in a chair and stared down museum visitors in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but she was at her most transgressive and downright weird with Ulay (born Frank Uwe Laysiepen in 1943). Their work together included the two of them holding a drawn bow and arrow to Abramović’s heart, and the couple breaking up on the Great Wall of China. In recent years, Ulay has been trying to step out of Abramović’s long shadow. The artist’s first major survey should further his efforts. —M. H. Miller

“Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence: The Cells”
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
October 13–February 26
“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” the late Louise Bourgeois once said. Begun in 1989, her “Cells” series marked an important progression in the latter part of her 70-year career. Continuing her exploration of physical, emotional, and psychological trauma—from her own childhood unhappiness, inflicted by a philandering father, to, more generally, the distress caused by an imbalance of power between the sexes—the “Cells” are large-scale structures built from salvaged architectural materials and filled with everyday objects like mirrors, articles of clothing, and furniture, as well as the artist’s sculptures. Most of the 20-plus “Cells” included in this show cannot be entered; visitors peer into them, witnesses—and perhaps voyeurs—to suffering. —Maximilíano Durón

Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1997, steel, tapestry, wood, glass, fabric, rubber, silver, gold, and bone. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

FRÉDÉRIC DELPECH/©THE EASTON FOUNDATION, LICENSED BY COPYDAN/COLLECTION THE EASTON FOUNDATION

Michael Krebber
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal
October 15–January 15
Don’t expect fireworks from this survey of Michael Krebber’s paintings and drawings from the 1980s until now. A member of the Cologne art scene of the 1980s and ’90s (and a former assistant of its provocateur-in-chief Martin Kippenberger), Michael Krebber was perhaps the most dedicated proponent of the group’s anti-market stance. While appearing to have been made by someone too exhausted to take them any further, his works on paper and canvas—or stretched cotton gingham—consisting of a few marks, a patch of color, or a childlike doodle represented a deeply felt commitment to upending the conventions of art production and consumption, materials and technique, beauty and artistry. Though slacker painting may be overplayed these days, Krebber’s version of it distinguishes itself by its politics and brilliance. —Anne Doran

Tino Sehgal
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
October 16–December 12
When the Palais de Tokyo gave free rein over its entire building to Philippe Parreno in 2013, it was the first such arrangement in the institution’s history. Now, Tino Sehgal—who makes what he calls “constructed situations”—is being granted the same access. Little was known in advance about what Sehgal was planning, but since he eschews the creation of physical objects, it will be interesting to see how he fills the venue’s monumental space. Just don’t expect to take in this show via Instagram, as might be possible with other exhibitions—Sehgal doesn’t allow any documentation of his work. —Nate Freeman

La Biennale de Montréal 2016
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal
October 19–January 15
Canada, America’s weird and likely goateed cousin, is known for a lot of things: beautiful landscapes, long winters, moose, Leonard Cohen. The contemporary Canadian art scene, however, remains something of a mystery outside the provinces. This biennial exhibition, which has been running since 1998, has been quietly expanding in recent years, forging a path to show where Canada fits in today’s global art world. Artists participating in the 2016 edition, which is inspired in part by Jean Genet, include Canadians Nadia Belerique, Moyra Davey, Brian Jungen, and Luis Jacob, alongside international superstars like Thomas Bayrle, Nicole Eisenman, Kerry James Marshall, and Luc Tuymans. —M. H. Miller

Yves Klein, Untitled blue monochrome, (IKB 79), 1959, paint on canvas on plywood. Tate Liverpool.

©2016 YVES KLEIN, ADAGP, PARIS, AND DACS, LONDON

Yves Klein
Tate Liverpool, England
October 21–March 5
Legend has it that the trauma of having one of his artworks included in the 1962 shockumentary Mondo Cane contributed to Yves Klein’s death at 34. Nevertheless, Klein himself was not averse to a kind of refined sensationalism; the piece in question was one of his “Anthropometry” performances, in which nude women, slathered in the artist’s signature International Klein Blue, pressed themselves against canvases in front of an audience. In fact much of Klein’s work—which anticipates Conceptual, Minimalist, and Pop art—is an admixture of the sublime and the spectacular. In this retrospective, expect to see, in addition to the Anthropometries, fire paintings made with blowtorches, plaster casts of classical sculptures painted ultramarine blue, and plans for buildings made of air. —Anne Doran

NOVEMBER

Lawrence Weiner
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
November 12–January 15
A member of the first generation of American Conceptual artists, who questioned both what a work of art is and whether it has to take material form, Lawrence Weiner, in 1968, drew up a manifesto, whose basic tenets are: “The artist may construct the piece,” “The piece may be fabricated,” and “The piece need not be built.” Each of these conditions, he wrote, would be consistent with the artist’s intent. Since then, Weiner, with elegance and wit, has been sculpting ideas using words as his medium. This exhibition, a comprehensive survey of Weiner’s work, will include a typographic “sculpture” mounted on the exterior of the building, as well as Weiner’s designs for playing cards, wristwatches, books, posters, graffiti, and even tattoos. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Avery Singer, Untitled, 2015, acrylic on canvas. Secession.

THOMAS MUELLER/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER, BERLIN

Avery Singer
Secession, Vienna
November 18–January 22
There is something strangely funny about Avery Singer’s paintings, in which robot-like artists create art for the digital age. Often rendered in flat black-and-white blocks, Singer’s paintings are made using a David Salle–like technique: she projects designs created in the 3-D modeling program SketchUp onto canvases and then paints them in acrylic. These works suggest that, in a post-Photoshop world, painting has become flat, in both senses of the word—the medium has lost depth and originality. In this show, the young New York–based painter will show recent work that has become even more abstract, as though it were made by a computer algorithm smashing together shapes on a digital canvas. —Alex Greenberger

Cy Twombly
Centre Pompidou, Paris
November 30–April 24
This survey of the work of Cy Twombly at the Centre Pompidou is set to be the largest ever staged in Europe, and it’s the first Twombly retrospective anywhere since the artist’s death, in 2011. The show will trace the painter, sculptor, and photographer’s career from his studies at the Art Students League of New York and at Black Mountain College to his life in Rome, where he made his home after first visiting in the 1950s. The press release for the exhibition also mentions “the strong relationship maintained by the artist with the city of Paris”—because of course the French would try to claim a Lexington, Virginia–born artist who lived in Italy as one of their own. —Nate Freeman

DECEMBER

Robert Rauschenberg, Almanac 1962, oil paint, acrylic paint and screenprint on canvas. Tate Modern.

©ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION/PRESENTED BY THE FRIENDS OF THE TATE GALLERY, 1969

Robert Rauschenberg
Tate Modern, London
December 1–April 2
Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, is justly famous for collapsing the divisions between traditional mediums in his 1954 to 1964 series “Combines,” which wedded gestural painting with collage and such objects as his own bed and a stuffed goat. His experimentations, however, extended far beyond that; decades before the Pictures Generation and the Internet, Rauschenberg was making revolutionary work about the boundary between art and life, reproduced images, globalization, and technology—the same concerns addressed by many young artists today. The most comprehensive Rauschenberg show since the Guggenheim’s 1997 blowout, this retrospective will bring to light just how far ahead of his time the artist was—and how far emerging artists have to go before they catch up to him. —Alex Greenberger

Loretta Fahrenholz
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
December 11–March 5
In Loretta Fahrenholz’s photographs and videos, there are a lot of performers, and a lot of screens within screens. Her film Ditch Plains (2013) alternates recorded video messages seen on cracked iPhones with shots of street performers flex dancing through vacant New York apartments in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In fact, iPhones show up often in Fahrenholz’s fake documentary photos and her video reenactments of Kathy Acker plays. This show, one of Fahrenholz’s first institutional outings, brings together Ditch Plains and some of her recent photography. How, Fahrenholz asks, will technology continue to alter our behavior? As the digital becomes an increasingly essential part of everyday life, her work keeps us up to date. —Alex Greenberger

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 32 under the title “Editors’ Picks.”

Installation view of “Sculpture on the Move 1946–2016,” 2016, showing works by, from left, Henry Moore, Eduardo Chillida, and David Smith. Kunstmuseum.

GINA FOLLY/COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL

In mid-June, during the annual art fair here, an enormous banner hung opposite Basel’s convention center. The banner listed the current exhibitions in the canton’s museums as if to say, “Remember us?”

Art fairs, with their frothy nimbus of money and celebrity, have lately been stealing fire from museums. But this year was different for Basel’s cornerstone institution, the 80-year-old Kunstmuseum, which had just completed an ambitious expansion in April. The elegant extension, designed by Basel-based architects Christ & Gatenbein, lacks the flexible room dividers so ubiquitous in other new museum buildings such as the Whitney. But as art historian Mechtild Widrich points out in her essay for a book devoted to the new building, the real contrast here is with the art fair, that most ephemeral of exhibition spaces. Couldn’t our jittery, pack-up-and-go-to-the-next-place art world use a dash of permanence?

Aptly, the first exhibition within the Kunstmuseum’s unbudgeable walls was a survey of sculpture, the medium that, due to space limitations and shipping costs, you are least likely to encounter in great quantity at art fairs. A sequel to the Kunstmuseum’s 2002 show “Painting on the Move,” “Sculpture on the Move 1946–2016” followed sculpture as it came off the pedestal, abandoned the museum, and finally embraced materials and techniques that rendered the term “sculpture” itself insufficient to describe it.

Giacometti’s small 1950 bronze L’homme qui chaivre (Falling Man), a figure that seems about to tumble off its base, made a clever start to the exhibition. Nearby is the artist’s La jambe (The Leg) from 1958, which sits squarely on its pedestal but hints that sculpture will soon be standing on its own two feet. Answering it, past a room of Arp and Calder, was Louise Bourgeois’s 1949 Pillar, a totem in blue-and-white painted wood whose support has shrunk to a small metal plate; the piece appears to rise directly from the floor.

In an appropriately transitional space—a stairwell gallery presided over by Christ & Gatenbein’s huge oculus, perhaps a nod to the one gracing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York—followed a quick segue to the 1960s. Here were two key sculptural disruptions: A film by D. A. Pennebaker captures Jean Tinguely’s sculpture-as-performance Homage to New York (1960), in which a jury-rigged machine violently self-destructs in MoMA’s sculpture garden; in a photograph of Allan Kaprow’s 1961 Yard, a riotous pile of rubber tires in the backyard of Betty Parsons’s gallery that famously blurred art and life, Kaprow’s jubilant expression as he shows it off to a colleague is worth the price of admission. Nearby sat an impassive stack of 1964 Warhol Brillo boxes, the very same ones that had a tough time passing through Canadian customs for a Warhol show in 1965 because the Canadian National Gallery’s director refused to grant them the status of “sculpture.”

Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Red Rocker, 1963, painted aluminum, 72⅞” x 39¾” x 61″.

©ESTATE OF ELLSWORTH KELLY/COLLECTION STEDELIJK MUSEUM AMSTERDAM

The 1960s and ’70s, the decades that saw sculpture get its groove on, were the heart of this show. The street came into the museum: a wall was given over to George Segal’s ghostlike 1970 plaster figures of Bowery bums, one leaning against a section of boarded-up storefront, smoking, the other passed out in front of it. So did the supermarket: over in a corner, Claes Oldenburg’s colorful 1961–62 Stove with its droopy groceries played the funk to Segal’s folk. In the show’s most arresting juxtaposition, Duane Hanson’s hyperrealistic 1975 Man With Hand Cart shared space with Ellsworth Kelly’s elegant 1963 fold of painted metal, Blue Red Rocker—proof that in these decades anything went, from the sublimely abstract to the incontrovertibly gritty.

And what would such a survey be without the jaunty movements of Gilbert & George (who introduced neo-Dada song and dance in their Signing Sculpture, 1970) or the broad sweeps of Robert Smithson (whose Spiral Jetty of the same year represented Land Art’s adieu to the museum)? Trumping all of it, though, was Eva Hesse’s Untitled (1970), a group of translucent fiberglass and resin shapes that rose like alien life-forms higher than a human.

The unnerving corporeality of Hesse’s work found more definitive expression in a gallery devoted to sculpture from the 1980s. Aside from some small Franz Wests and Jeff Koons’s classic stainless steel Rabbit (1986), the exhibition largely focused on the latter part of the decade and its concern with identity politics and the body. Standing sentinel in the middle of the room, Charles Ray’s life-size Male Mannequin (1990) appeared to be a perfectly ordinary store mannequin save, crucially, for its genitals, which are modeled—meticulously—on Ray’s own. Where, the piece asks, does stock imagery of bodies end and real bodies begin?

Two works in this section of the show took advantage of the corner, usually sculpture’s dead space. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1990 pile of candies—taken by visitors and continuously replenished by museum staff—is the exact weight of his late lover’s body at the time of his death from AIDS. Martin Kippenberger’s 1989 self-portrait has the artist facing the junction of two walls as if in shame, his face hidden from view.

Katharina Fritsch, Dolls, 2016, epoxy resin, polyurethane, and acrylic, overall dimensions variable, installation view. Schaulager.

TOM BISIG, BASEL/©2016 PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

A short walk down to the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart (formerly known as the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, it was rechristened when the expansion opened) the show moved into the ’90s and beyond. Beyond, indeed. Sculpture is now so thoroughly unmoored from its base that Rirkrit Tiravanija can park a car in the museum and show, next to it, a film made by sticking a camcorder out one of its windows during a journey.

Taking center stage at the Gegenwart was Cellule no. 5 (1992), one of the live-in sculptures that the Israeli-born French artist Absalon completed a few years before he died of AIDS at age 28. A cylindrical bunker with narrow windows—he intended to dwell in these himself, in various cities—it resonates with today’s interest in tiny houses. Concerned with architecture in a different way was Monika Sosnowska’s insect-like handrail toying with the conventions of Soviet-era buildings, a piece that brings me to my one real complaint about “Sculpture on the Move.” Out of 59 artists in the show, only 7 were women: 12 percent is a poor grade in 2016. Any number of women could have had a place here, from Niki de Saint Phalle, Louise Nevelson, Lee Bontecou, Alice Aycock, and Barbara Hepworth to Roni Horn, Doris Salcedo, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Lynda Benglis, Lygia Clark, Marisol, and Meret Oppenheim. Whenever sculpture’s on the move, women do a lot of the moving.

Danh Vo’s 2011–14 We the People was as good a note as any on which to end. Here was a re-created actual-size fragment of the Statue of Liberty. One imagines Lady Liberty in full, exploding out of the room, out of the museum, out onto the street, tipping toward the Rhine, heavy, both physically and symbolically, too expansive to fit in any space. Where does sculpture go from here? What’s its next move?

Yngve Holen, Hater Headlight, 2016, autobus headlight and powder-coated steel, 15¾” x 37¾” x 35½”. Kunsthalle Basel.

PHILIPP HÄNGER/COURTESY THE ARTIST; GALERIE NEU, BERLIN; MODERN ART, LONDON; AND NEUE ALTE BRÜCKE, FRANKFURT

Perhaps sculpture’s next move is applying the ’80s interest in the body to our interactions with technology, as in the work of Yngve Holen. The 34-year-old German made a splash at the Kunsthalle Basel with abstract pieces constructed from items with which our bodies regularly interact: sections of fencing, parts of MRI machines, scooter headlights. A Porsche Panamera sliced in four, while impressive, was somehow less affecting than the sliced teakettles—called Parasagittal Brains—Holen has shown in the past. But truly new for the artist was an actual representation of the human body, a collaboration with the musician who has renamed himself Aedrhlsomrs Othryutupt Lauecehrofn (AOL), which consisted of 3-D digital prints of the artists’ faces and vocal chords lining a small room and emitting long, dissonant “A” and “O” sounds.

If sculpture’s next move is a reconsideration of 20th-century history, then it’s being made by German sculptor Katharina Fritsch and Belarusian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Alexej Koschkarow, who teamed up a third time for an exhibition at the Schaulager consisting of just five sculptures and a few drawings installed in a specially designed structure. Fritsch’s Day-Glo coffin and maidens (the latter based on traditional corn husk dolls) met Koschkarow’s ceramic stove (which doubled as an exploding grenade), as well as one sculpture evoking a Nazi guard tower and another, smaller, one of a Jewish ghetto that seemed to limp away on rickety legs.

Alexander Calder, Self-Portrait, 1907, crayon on paper, 5⅞” x 9″. Fondation Beyeler.

PHOTO: CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK/ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK; ART: ©2016 CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK AND PROLITTERIS, ZURICH/CALDER FOUNDATION, NEW YORK, MARY CALDER ROWER BEQUEST, 2011

Or maybe forget about whose move it is, and just savor the pairing of Fischli/Weiss with Alexander Calder in the marvelous, why-didn’t-someone-think-of-this-earlier exhibition “Alexander Calder & Fischli/Weiss” at the Fondation Beyeler. Beyeler curator Theodora Vischer has given these artists, as familiar and beloved as good books, an entirely fresh reading. The underlying theme was precarious balance, whether in Calder’s delicate hanging arrangements of wood, metal, and wire or in Fischli/Weiss’s photograph of a warty carrot atop two others, the whole propped up by two forks and a cheese grater.

Snoozing outside the first gallery were Fischli/Weiss’s recumbent Rat and Bear, stuffed costumes (worn for a film) equipped with animatronic technology so that they appear to sleep, their tummies rising and falling. Above them drifted a Calder mobile. The last time many of us saw Rat and Bear, they were lying in the atrium of the Guggenheim as part of the recent Fischli/Weiss retrospective there. They looked more comfortable at the Beyeler; Calder’s gently fluttering mobile could as easily have been the breeze-rustled branches of a tree as the motion of the cosmos.

Next, a group of Fischli/Weiss’s 2009–12 “Walls, Corners, Tubes” (exactly those shapes, made of unfired clay or cast black rubber and mounted on plinths) led, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to Calder’s spindly 1936 sculpture Tightrope, a wire supporting four vaguely anthropomorphic metal forms. Beckoning one onward was Fischli/Weiss’s tiny, pedestal-mounted sculpture of a drunken mouse leaning against a streetlight, the one example here from their celebrated series “Suddenly This Overview,” and a friendly warning that this show was going to be more than a little tipsy.

Tightrope was a clue that the circus had rolled into town, and there it was in the next gallery, where a film showed Calder manipulating the tiny wire-and-cloth performers he made for his tabletop Circus, 1926–1931 (sadly, the real thing is too fragile to leave its permanent home at the Whitney Museum). A few of the little figures, including a dog with a clothespin body, shared space with a crude crayon drawing Calder made at age nine of himself surrounded by tools—a coping saw, a hammer, a brace, a pair of pincers. The artists came from different worlds and eras—Calder, born at the tail end of the 19th century, earned an engineering degree and worked as a fireman in a ship’s boiler room before becoming an artist; Fischli and Weiss met in the late 1970s Zurich punk rock scene, when they were both around 30 years old—but they shared a tinkering sensibility, and a sense of the studio as a workshop or laboratory.

Peter Fischli/David Weiss, The Way Things Go (still), 1987, color video transferred from 16mm color film, with sound, 30 minutes. Fondation Beyeler.

©PETER FISCHLI/DAVID WEISS

This sensibility is perhaps best exemplified in Calder’s work by his Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere (1932/33), in which displacing the larger, iron sphere causes the smaller, wooden one to move around the space, banging up against the objects arrayed around it (including a box, several bottles, a can, and a gong), and in Fischli/Weiss’s by The Way Things Go, their 1987 film of a massive Rube Goldberg–style chain-reaction contraption they set up in their studio (a sparkler sets fire to a fuse and releases a tire, which rolls down a ramp and knocks over a ladder before hitting an oil drum, setting in motion a toy car with a candle on it, which burns through a fuse—and so on).

All that tinkering had to lead somewhere, though, and the artists, in their different ways, pondered humans’ place in the universe. Calder collected bits of wood and other materials to create what Marcel Duchamp and James Johnson Sweeney called “constellations.” Fischli/Weiss projected hundreds of questions (“What good is the moon?”, “Are my feelings correct?”) in white against a black backdrop in a dark room. The exhibition concluded at its most its sublime. In Fischli/Weiss’s Rat and Bear (Mobile video), 2009, Rat and Bear have effectively become a Calder: they drift through the air, silhouetted against dust motes that approximate stars.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 138 under the title “Around Basel.”

Niki Johnson, Eggs Benedict, 2013, latex condoms.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Niki Johnson’s portrait of Pope Benedict XVI made of condoms is naturally sparking controversy. [TIME]

Josef Helfenstein, the director of the Menil Collection, will leave his position at the Houston museum to become the director of the Kunstmuseum Basel. [The New York Times]

A year-long series of art events, featuring films by Liam Gillick and Zineb Sedira, has been announced for the London Underground. [The Art Newspaper]

Photographs of artists’ private lives, including one snapshot of a possibly drunk George Tooker. [Hyperallergic]

ArtsWave is awarding $10.4 million in grants to various arts institutions in or around Cincinnati, Ohio. Among them is the Cincinnati Art Museum, which will receive $1.6 million. [Arforum]

Sam Hodge has been making prints based on the screens of broken phones. [The Telegraph]

Sean Scully works have been installed in the Monastery of Santa Cecília, in Montserrat, Spain, in what the painter calls the “most significant exhibition probably [he’s] ever done.” [The New York Times]

Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Artists in Dubai are recycling materials to create work that questions identity. [The National UAE]