From unsung abstraction to Afrofuturism at the Met.
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Most have had to postpone major shows.
Some may be closer to the edge than we know.
Galleries are hurting too, but museums are more fragile ecosystems than you might think.
Weve always needed museums to help us commune with our artistic ancestors and listen in on the group mind.
1.Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 19301950
1.
Art history was rewritten.
The modest show Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction is a much-needed step toward setting the record straight.
Here is an exhibition of mostly smaller works on paper made in America by women.
Other names may be new to you: Blanche Lazzell, Alice Trumbull Mason, Charmion von Wiegand.
These artists seeded the pluralism that began in the 1970s and that has never stopped adding to arts multiplicity.
2.Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror
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Artist Ed Ruscha described Johns, who is now 91, as the atomic bomb of my education.
Let Johnss sensual, strange, almost indefinable images and sculptures relight your visual-cerebral wick.
Feel the train of art history starting to jump the tracks.
3.Ways of Seeing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection
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Get as close to never-before-seen masterpieces as one dog may to another.
4.Greater New York
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It also almost always packs a handful of great work.
5.Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room
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Even if it fizzles as a show, itll fizzle in fabulous ways.
6.Bronx Calling: The Fifth AIM Biennial
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Its wild how prescient this show can be, which means its a dont-miss.
7.2021 Triennial: Soft Water Hard Stone
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While its boxy space is also the most claustrophobic, its great curators almost always transcend it.
Fall brings a building-filling international exhibition of younger artists worth watching.
The word soft in the title is telling.
8.Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing
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Her touch is luscious, her vision complex, her colors kaleidoscopic.
Packers compositions are tricky: The space in her paintings is mysterious and shifting.
The overall effect is seductive.
9.Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw
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Witness the world as never quite seen before.
10.Etel Adnan: Lights New Measure
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