Category: Don’t Miss

Several museum shows are timed to close at the end of the holiday season; don’t let your chance to see Elizabeth Peyton’s and Mary Heilmann’s solo shows at the New Museum slip away.  To much publicity, Peyton added a portrait of Michele Obama to her exhibition after November 4th, but the artist’s best work comes when she indulges her obsession with wan and pretty men.  Plenty of female artists have depicted men in feminizing ways to in order to critique conventional portrayals of women, but Peyton doesn’t demean her subjects, instead giving them their own aura of exquisiteness.  Downstairs, forty years of painting, ceramics and furniture by Mary Heilmann refreshingly demonstrate this much admired artist’s ability to conjure a range of moods –  – electrifying, humorous, or serene – through her abstract canvases.  Highlights include ‘Lovejoy, Jr.,’ a day-glo grid inspired by the stained glass windows in the church on The Simpsons and a row of blue and white paintings in the lobby gallery, which riff on the meeting of land and sea.

Obama-mania has swept the art world this fall with myriad auctions and other fundraising events. At David Zwirner Gallery, you can do more than buy art or hobnob with politically like-minded art lovers. you can take home a piece of history from ‘The Voting Booth Project,’ an exhibition of artwork made from actual voting booths used in the 2000 election in Florida. If the memory of the faulty booths
makes you a little queasy, at least the lineup of participating artists promises to sex up the symbols of disenfranchisement by including the campy, carnivalesque assume astro vivid focus, Mickalene Thomas,
liberal user of rhinestones in her images, and Fred Tomaselli of drugs-as-collage-materials fame.

The Rema Hort Mann Foundation presents The Voting Booth Project at David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street, Oct 14 – 25 and at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 540 West 26th Street, November 7-8.

“If Ms Walker retired today she would leave behind one of the most trenchant and historically erudite bodies of art produced by any American in the last 15 years, only a portion of which is in the Whitney show,” wrote New York Times critic Holland Cotter of Kara Walker’s powerful survey show at the Whitney Museum. Pilloried by some prominent African American artists in the late 90s for trafficking in negative black imagery, Walker’s signature installations of black-paper silhouettes on white walls, drawings, projections and texts mine America’s past and present race relations in all their ugly complexity. For viewers unafraid to confront controversial issues head on, this is the show not to miss. (On through Feb 3rd).

For more information, visit the Whitney Museum’s website or read Holland Cotter’s review in the New York Times.

For many New Yorkers, Chris Ofili’s name will bring to mind the brou-ha-ha around his painting of the Virgin Mary supported by two clods of dried elephant dung, exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Ofili’s choice of materials aimed to beg the question of what kind of art he should make as a Caribbean-British artist, a topic that he revisits in a show of new work at David Zwirner Gallery. A recent move to Trinidad appears to have influenced the subject matter and style of his recent paintings, with languid characters, intense colors and tropical landscapes making references to European masters like Gauguin and Matisse, who ventured abroad in search of the exotic. With several standout paintings and sculptures, Ofili peels back another layer of his complicated identity, making this the ‘don’t miss’ show of the moment.

For more information on Chris Ofili’s ‘Devil’s Pie’ exhibition, visit David Zwirner Gallery.

Feminism is dead? Think again. Touted as, ‘The first international exhibition exclusively dedicated to feminist art from 1990 to the present,’ ‘Global Feminisms’ at the Brooklyn Museum proves that women around the world (with quite a few art stars among them) are making artwork about specifically female experience. The show opens the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, implying not only that feminism is here to stay, but that the artwork identified under that title will be continually worthy of a significant swathe of Brooklyn Museum real estate. Judge for yourself if this controversial investment is truly groundbreaking or ‘a false idea wrapped in confusion,’ as New York Times critic Roberta Smith recently put it. (Show closes July 1st.)

For more information on Global Feminisms and the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, visit The Brooklyn Museum’s website.