NEW YORK, NY.- Another epochal election. Another horrific backdrop, from the nightmare in the Gaza Strip — however you analyze it — to Sudan, Congo and Ukraine. Another season of demagoguery and bad-faith argument gone global.
So ... go look at art? Yes, more than ever.
As always it falls to artists and curators to document and interpret the world and to propose possibilities for living in it — and living together in it — in ways that are rigorous and free. And beautiful too, please. All while negotiating institutional politics and the vagaries of the market, and for many, the rocky reality of their own economic precarity.
And here’s the good news: There’s loads to see. This fall I’m especially excited for two large undertakings — the Prospect. 6 triennial in New Orleans and a suite of exhibitions on the theme of “Panafrica” anchored by the Art Institute of Chicago — that promise fresh ideas and propose global connections. And if my picks tilt away from New York, consider that a nod to exhibition makers in the regions, where American creativity is constantly renewed.
It’s timely that Prospect New Orleans (Nov. 2-Feb. 2) comes at the crest of this high-intensity election year. First held in 2008, the triennial was founded after the Katrina disaster, which underscored the vulnerability of Black and poor Americans while shattering illusions about social progress and state competence. Now in its sixth edition, Prospect has cemented its place on the international circuit, even as it must continually negotiate its relationship with tourism and gentrification and the implications for local artists.
This year’s edition comes cloaked in a slightly gnomic title, “The Future Is Present, the Harbinger Is Home,” which sounds like a Zen koan but in fact is a proposition about the city. For its artistic directors — Miranda Lash, a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Ebony G. Patterson, a Jamaican-born artist — New Orleans is a laboratory of past and future, shaped by waves of colonialism, the slave trade and plantation economy, oil and gas extraction, and now extreme climate vulnerability.
Perhaps then, they posit, New Orleans is already living our impending future, and can offer lessons for negotiating it in a community celebration. It’s a compelling premise, around which they gather 49 artists — New Orleanian, American, international — including luminaries like Joan Jonas and Mel Chin and local collaborators from DJs to Vietnamese American fishers to high school football teams. There is a notable Caribbean tinge to the artist list: Christopher Cozier from Trinidad, Joiri Minaya, who grew up in the Dominican Republic, Ada M. Patterson from Barbados, Didier William, born in Haiti, and many more. It suggests a laudable effort to refresh connections between the city and the Caribbean basin.
While in New Orleans, don’t miss a major show of work by photographer Baldwin Lee at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (Oct. 5-Feb. 16). Lee grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown, quit engineering studies for photography, studied under Walker Evans at Yale in the early 1970s, then took a teaching job in Tennessee and made thoughtful, sensitive photographs across the Black South from 1983 to 1989, curtailing the project lest it become exploitative. Two hours north of the city, the Mississippi Museum of Art, in underrated Jackson, Mississippi, has a large show from its renowned quilt collection, “Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South” (Nov. 16-April 13) that will broaden the lens on this profound tradition with affinities, as the quilters of Gee’s Bend have shown, to both African roots and abstraction.
In New York but still in a Southern vein, the Center for Art, Research and Alliances is presenting “Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN,” an important retrospective of the Louisiana-born artist who died in 2020 (Sept. 20-Jan. 12). A SoHo scene figure in the 1970s who collaborated with Vito Acconci and Gordon Matta-Clark, Girouard exited the scene to return to the South at a time when this meant a withdrawal from view and opportunity. In fact she continued to work, notably in textile and sequin, including for several years in Haiti. This show, initiated by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and first presented earlier this year at the Ogden, stitches back her full story.
But it is the Art Institute of Chicago’s major project on the manifestations of Pan-Africanism in modern and contemporary arts and culture that has the potential to join paradigm-shifting exhibitions, like “Afro-Atlantic Histories” in Sao Paulo in 2018, or “The Short Century” in Munich in 2001 (and MoMA P.S. 1 in 2002).
“Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” (Dec. 15-March 30) at the Art Institute is just the anchor among a suite of shows at other institutions around Chicago that are being called the Panafrica Constellation. The three Art Institute shows alone gather over 175 artists. The forms range from painting and sculpture to magazine publishing and experimental film; the movements they represent include the Harlem Renaissance, Nigerian modernism and conceptual art; and the references run from liberation struggles to spiritual practices to self-determination approaches like Garveyism or Brazilian quilombismo.
Years in the making, the project is curated by Antawan I. Byrd and Matthew Witkovsky of the Art Institute, Adom Getachew of the University of Chicago, and Elvira Dyangani Ose of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, where it will travel. “Panafrica” — their coinage — is an evolving concept that goes beyond anti-colonial history and posits that African enslavement, resistance, migration and adaptation, shape the planet and thus our shared future. (I’m reminded of the Black Uhuru song, “Whole World Is Africa.”) How the “constellation” of shows illuminates this big idea, at once specific and universal, is both the curators’ challenge and opportunity.
Expanding and rethinking global Africanity is in the air: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced “Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st Century Art and Poetics” (Dec. 15-Aug. 3), with a focus on the last 24 years, and foregrounding artists working along the Pacific Rim.
Expect lots of noise, meanwhile, about the U.S.-Mexico border until the election. We might instead consider “Al río/To the River,” photographer Zoe Leonard’s six-year study of the Rio Grande and its social life, architectures and topography. A selection was shown at Hauser & Wirth in 2022; now the full series goes on view at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (Oct. 11 through June). It’s a charged location, at once art-world mecca and, just 60 miles from the river, squarely in the arid and militarized border zone.
In a related vein, in New York City, the Dia Art Foundation will stage “Echoes From the Borderlands,” a longform soundscape by Valeria Luiselli, Leonardo Heiblum and Ricardo Giraldo (Dec. 11-March 1.) And in Cleveland, “Picturing the Border,” an elegant and sensitive compilation of photographs by border residents and others since the 1970s, is already up at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where admission, by the way, is free (through Jan. 5).
Also in Ohio, photographer Ming Smith has not one but four concurrent shows: “August Moon” and “Transcendence,” at the Columbus Museum of Art (Sept. 19-Jan. 26); “Wind Chime” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, also in Columbus (Sept. 22-Jan. 5), and “Jazz Requiem — Notations in Blue” at The Gund, in Gambier (through Dec. 15).
This is partly a homecoming: Smith grew up in Columbus in the 1950s, making her earliest works there. You’ll find them at the Columbus Museum of Art and in Pittsburgh, where she delved into August Wilson’s world in the Hill District. The Gund show includes photographs from her early travels to Europe with musicians. The Wexner has new directions for the artist, with multimedia, color and collage works plus a soundscape by her son, Mingus Murray. It amounts to a kind of fractal retrospective — appropriate enough for this supremely poetic photographer with a gift for musicality, darkness and blur.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
