San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, California
Richard Mosse: Incoming | Oct. 26, 2019 – Feb. 17, 2020
From 2014 to 2016, artist Richard Mosse documented the mass migration and displacement of people unfolding across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in an attempt to find “adequate images” for today’s society. Filmed with a military-grade camera that detects and images body heat across great distances, these powerful scenes are on view in the exhibition Richard Mosse: Incoming. Epic in scope and by turns lyrical and vivid, and harrowing and violent, the three-channel video projection Incoming depicts major flows of migrants from regions in Africa and the Middle East to emergency shelters in Europe. The heat-vision camera used creates otherworldly footage that renders covert viewing visible and implicates us — the audience — in seeing our fellow humans as others. This immersive video installation will be accompanied by panoramic photographs from The Castle, a series of “heat maps” or digital composites of refugee camps.
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/richard-mosse-incoming/
Museum of Modern Art
New York, New York
Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window | Oct. 21, 2019 – Jan. 21, 2020
After nearly a decade of focused work in printmaking, artist Betye Saar created her autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window in 1969. This exhibition explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days. Celebrating the recent acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this is the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as a printmaker.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5060
member: Pope.L, 1978-2001 | Oct. 21, 2019 – Jan. 21, 2020
Referring to himself as “a fisherman of social absurdity,” Pope.L has developed a body of work that poses provocative questions about a culture consumed with success yet riven by social, racial, and economic conflict. Resisting easy categorization, his career encompasses theatrical performances, street actions, language, painting, video, drawing, installation, and sculpture. Pope.L’s work explores the fraught connection between prosperity and what he calls “have-not-ness.” This tension is heightened by the presentation of these subversive artworks within a major art museum.
member: Pope.L, 1978–2001 focuses on a group of landmark performances that have defined the artist as a consummate agitator and humorist who has used his body to examine division and inequality on the streets and stages of New York City and in the more rustic environs of Maine, where he taught for 20 years.
The title member ponders the terms and stakes of membership for a provocateur who constantly strives “to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from,” making material out of categories of race, gender, and citizenship that are intimately entwined.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5059
Sur modermo: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift | Oct. 21, 2019 – Mar. 21, 2020
Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift is drawn primarily from the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper donated to the Museum by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. This extraordinarily comprehensive collection provides the foundation for a journey through the history of abstract and concrete art from South America at mid-century. The exhibition explores the transformative power of abstraction in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay, focusing on both the way that artists reinvented the art object itself and the role of art in the renewal of the social environment. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5061
Musée du Louvre
Paris, France
Leonardo da Vinci | Oct. 24, 2019 – Feb. 24, 2020
An exceptional exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci will be presented at the Musée du Louvre in the fall of 2019. A unique group of artworks that only the Louvre could bring together, in addition to its outstanding collection of paintings and drawings by the Italian master.
The year 2019 has a special significance for the Louvre, as it will mark the fifth centenary of the artist’s death at Amboise, in the Loire Valley. When his patron Giuliano de’ Medici died, Leonardo da Vinci left Italy for France at the invitation of the new French king, François I. Probably around November 1516, he arrived at the Château du Clos Lucé, a stone’s throw from the king’s residence at Amboise.
This château was the splendid home provided by François I for Leonardo, whom he appointed “First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King,” a position for which the artist received a princely allowance. This is where he spent the last three years of his life, compiling notes on various scientific and artistic subjects with a view to publishing treatises, and working on the paintings he had brought with him to France, such as Saint Anne, the Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist. Some remarkable drawings from this period, done on French-made paper, illustrate his work on hydraulic projects, festivities for the king and a monumental equestrian sculpture.
https://www.louvre.fr/en/leonardo-da-vinci
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Richmond, Virginia
Edward Hopper and the American Hotel | Oct. 26, 2019 – Feb. 23, 2020
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts presents the premiere of Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, the first in-depth study of hospitality settings depicted in the works of one of the most celebrated American artists. Edward Hopper (1882–1967) found artistic value and cultural significance in the most commonplace sites and settings. Hopper’s spare depictions of familiar public and private spaces are often understood within the contexts of isolation, loneliness, and ennui of early and mid-20th-century America. As this exhibition shows, however, Hopper’s immersion in the world of hotels, motels, hospitality services, and mobility in general presents a new framework for understanding the artist’s work.
Curated by Dr. Leo G. Mazow, the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at VMFA, assisted by Dr. Sarah G. Powers, the exhibition features Hopper’s depictions of hotels, motels, tourist homes, boardinghouses, and apartment hotels. These images of hospitality settings both challenge and expand the themes of loneliness and fragmentation usually attributed to his work. They inform our understanding of a shifting American landscape and America’s fascination with the new possibilities of automobile travel and the attendant flourishing of hotels, motels, and tourist homes. Hopper was not only a frequent traveler and guest of all variety of accommodations, but worked as an illustrator for hotel trade magazines early in his career. Thus, his work offers an insider’s perspective into the hospitality services industry during a pivotal moment in its evolution. Exhibition visitors will recognize how hotels and motels—as figurative or metaphorical destinations—have fixed themselves in our experiences and permeated our collective psyche.
Denver Art Museum
Denver, Colorado
Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature | Oct. 21, 2019 – Feb. 2, 2020
The Denver Art Museum will be home to the most comprehensive U.S. exhibition of Monet paintings in more than two decades. The exhibition will feature more than 120 paintings spanning Monet’s entire career and will focus on the celebrated French impressionist artist’s enduring relationship with nature and his response to the varied and distinct places in which he worked.
Monet traveled more extensively than any other impressionist artist in search of new motifs. His journeys to varied places including the rugged Normandy coast, the sunny Mediterranean, London, the Netherlands, and Norway inspired artworks that will be featured in the presentation. The exhibition will uncover Monet’s continuous dialogue with nature and its places through a thematic and chronological arrangement, from the first examples of artworks still indebted to the landscape tradition to the revolutionary compositions and series of his late years.
https://denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/claude-monet
Museo Nacional del Prado
Madrid, Spain
Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana | Oct. 22, 2019 – Feb. 2, 2020
The exhibition will reveal the artistic personality of two of the most outstanding women artists in western art. Through a total of 60 works and for the first time, the Museo del Prado will jointly present the most important paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola (ca.1535-1625) and Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). The two artists achieved recognition and fame among their contemporaries for and despite their status as female painters. Both were able to break away from the prevailing stereotypes assigned to women in relation to artistic practice and the deep-rooted scepticism regarding women’s creative and artistic abilities.
The exhibition will present the work of these two women, whose artistic personalities were to some extent obscured over the course of time but who in the last thirty years have once again aroused the interest of specialists and the general public.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Washington, DC
Pat Steir: Color Wheel | Oct. 24, 2019 – Sept. 7, 2020
The Hirshhorn will host the largest painting installation to date by the acclaimed abstract painter Pat Steir. The exhibition is an expansive new suite of paintings by the artist, spanning the entire perimeter of the Museum’s second-floor inner-circle galleries, extending nearly four hundred linear feet. These immersive works will transform the Museum into a vibrant spectrum of color. The thirty large-scale paintings, when presented together as a group, will create an immense color wheel that shifts hues with each painting, with the pours on each canvas often appearing in the complementary hue of the monochrome background.
Over the past four decades, Steir has produced a commanding body of abstract paintings that draw on the artist’s distinctive method of combining meticulous brushwork with multiple layers of drips and pours, simultaneously carefully calibrated and apparently random. Drawing on motifs from Chinese ink painting and gestural abstraction, Steir’s paintings are formed by brushing and pouring multiple layers of paint, allowing gravity to guide the cascading forms. Her signature technique echoes the metaphysical ideas of harmony with nature expressed in Zen Buddhist and Daoist thought, even as it redefines the conventional flat picture plane to sculpt deep, transcendent space. At the Hirshhorn, this commission will activate the entire gallery as visitors walk around the space, exploring the wheel’s spectrums. Moreover, Steir’s paintings will create a dialogue with the Gordon Bunshaft-designed outdoor fountain and seasonal changes visible through the Museum’s windows.
https://hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/pat-steir/
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Houston, Texas
Monet to Picasso: A Very Private Collection | Oct. 20, 2019 – Jan. 12, 2020
Monet to Picasso: A Very Private Collection features paintings by the pivotal artists who sparked the major art movements of the late-19th through mid-20th century. This significant private collection has never been presented as a whole.
Assembled over decades, these paintings chronicle key moments in the development of modern art in Paris: the evolution of Impressionism from its roots in the work of artists, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and represented by the work of Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley; the emergence of the Post-Impressionist painters, including Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh; and the leading figures of 20th-century abstraction, including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.
https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/impressionist-autumn
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, New York
Order and Ornament: Roy Lichtenstein’s Entablatures | Sept. 27, 2019 – Sept. 27, 2020
This exhibition will present a diverse array of works on paper by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) related to his Entablatures series from the 1970s. Inspired by the architectural facades and ornamental motifs he encountered around Wall Street and elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, the series addresses many of Lichtenstein’s central artistic themes while demonstrating a unique emphasis on texture, surface, relief, and reflectivity.
Named after the horizontal structures that sit atop the columns in Classical Greek architecture, Lichtenstein’s Entablatures represent a distinctly American derivative, one based in revivalist, industrialized architectural imitations that were built en masse in the early twentieth century. By isolating clichéd symbols of—in the artist’s words—“imperial power” and “the establishment,” Lichtenstein traces the effect of mass production and replication on cultural forms. A sustained investigation into pattern and repetition, the Entablatures also underscore the echoes of Classical order embedded within Minimalist sculpture and Color Field painting.
The first exhibition at the Whitney devoted to Lichtenstein’s work since the transformative gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, this capsule presentation provides a focused look at a single pivotal series, highlighting the artist’s inventive processes and techniques across drawings, collages, prints, photographs, and archival materials.
https://www.whitney.org/exhibitions/roy-lichtenstein-entablatures
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland, Ohio
Michelangelo: Mind of the Master | Sept. 22, 2019 – Jan. 5, 2020
The name of the Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, and architect Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) is synonymous with creative genius and virtuosity. The exhibition Michelangelo: Mind of the Master presents an unprecedented opportunity for museum visitors to experience the brilliance of Michelangelo’s achievements on an intimate scale through more than two dozen original drawings. Michelangelo’s genius is especially evident through his breathtaking draftsmanship on sheets filled with multiple figures and close studies of human anatomy. These working sketches invite us to look over the shoulder of one of Western art history’s most influential masters and to experience firsthand his boundless creativity and extraordinary mastery of the human form. These drawings demonstrate Michelangelo’s inventive preparations for his most important and groundbreaking commissions, including the Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, sculptures for the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, and the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica.
Michelangelo: Mind of the Master brings to the United States for the first time a group of drawings by Michelangelo from the remarkable collection of the Teylers Museum (Haarlem, The Netherlands), which was formed in the 18th century in part from the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689). Additional drawings from the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum round out the display. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes essays by Emily J. Peters (Cleveland Museum of Art), Julian Brooks (J. Paul Getty Museum), and Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken (Teylers Museum) that explore Michelangelo’s working methods and major projects, as well as the fascinating history of the ownership of his drawings after his death.
https://www.clevelandart.org/exhibitions/michelangelo-mind-master
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Boston, Massachusetts
Yayoi Kusama: LOVE IS CALLING | Sept. 24, 2019 – Feb. 7, 2020
An icon of contemporary art, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) has interwoven ideas of pop art, minimalism, and psychedelia throughout her work in paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films, design, and architectural interventions over her long and influential career. LOVE IS CALLING, which premiered in Japan in 2013, is the most immersive and kaleidoscopic of the artist’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Representing the culmination of her artistic achievements, it exemplifies the breadth of her visual vocabulary—from her signature polka dots and soft sculptures to brilliant colors, the spoken word, and most importantly, endless reflections and the illusion of space. It is composed of a darkened, mirrored room illuminated by inflatable, tentacle-like forms—covered in the artist’s characteristic polka dots—that extend from the floor and ceiling, gradually changing colors. As visitors walk throughout the installation, a sound recording of Kusama reciting a love poem in Japanese plays continuously. Written by the artist, the poem’s title translates to Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears in English. Exploring enduring themes including life and death, the poem poignantly expresses Kusama’s hope to spread a universal message of love through her art. LOVE IS CALLING will be accompanied by a focused presentation drawn from the ICA’s collection titled Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama that will offer insight into Kusama’s influences and her important legacy on contemporary art.
Kusama is one of today’s most recognized and celebrated artists. In addition to her widely popular Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama creates vibrant paintings, works on paper, and sculpture with abstract imagery. In 1966, the ICA exhibited an Infinity Mirror Room, now titled Endless Love Show, in the ICA exhibition Multiplicity; the museum also owns a 1953 drawing by the artist, titled A Flower (No. 14). LOVE IS CALLING is the largest of Kusama’s existing Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the first one held in the permanent collection of a New England museum.
https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/yayoi-kusama-love-calling
