Back to school arrives in the art world this fall, too, as museums line up exhibitions on canonical figures such as Abstract Expressionists Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and modernist Constantin Brancusi at The Met, the Whitney, and MoMA, respectively. Alongside those textbook names are shows shaping the syllabi of the future: surveys of artist-filmmaker Arthur Jafa, whose work remixes and reconfigures Black visual culture; photographer Taryn Simon, who investigates American myths and institutions; and conceptual artist and pathologist Teresa Margolles, who confronts death, that cruelest of subjects.
But this season is about more than marquee exhibitions. There is something for everyone. For the girlies, a presentation at the American Folk Art Museum looks at what art history can reveal about girlhood, that fraught and euphoric stage of life. If dolls are more your thing, Hopi Kachina dolls embodying fertility and rain spirits are coming to the Brooklyn Museum, while doll fashion at the Museum at FIT shows that creativity can live in the smallest details. And if you are a telenovela fan, well, there is a show for you, too.
These exhibitions will take you to school, to church — or at least to a Gothic chapel — and to the streets. New York’s habit of staging shows about itself is hardly self-regard if the city remains the best place on earth to do it. Just look to a love letter to the Bowery at the New Museum, Masao Gozu’s five-decade commitment to photographing fellow New Yorkers at MoMA PS1, and an exhibition on the art of graffiti at the New York Historical, among others.
Elsewhere, artists from Stephanie Dinkins to Arakawa and Madeline Gins reflect on the posthuman, the transhuman, and the biohacked human. But there are also plenty of artists this season who stay grounded in the enduring question of what it means to be, simply, human. — Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor
