A short list of the can’t-miss new exhibition openings (and closings) this week, by city. See last week’s list for other recent openings, and for a more comprehensive guide, see our Itinerary.
NEW YORK
Fred Wilson “Afro Kismet”
Pace Gallery
510 W 25th Street
OPENS: July 10
Fred Wilson’s new exhibition at Pace is a meditation on the cultural and artistic legacy of the Turkish city of Istanbul. Bringing together the American artist’s most recent work from the 15th Istanbul Biennial last fall, the exhibition, which was shown at Pace’s gallery in London earlier this year, features contemporary pieces made by Wilson—including chandeliers that combine black Murano glass with Ottoman details and monumental Iznik tile walls with Arabic calligraphy—juxtaposed with Orientalist paintings from the 19th century, on loan from private collections.
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“Liquid to Air: Pneumatic Objects”
Patrick Parrish
50 Lispenard Street
OPENS: July 10
MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab has come together with Swiss designer Christophe Guberan to produce a series of large-scale, inflatable works for this new exhibition at Patrick Parrish. Utilizing Rapid Liquid Printing, a 3D-printing process developed by Self-Assembly Lab that allows for the production of complex and customized objects in minutes, the objects in the exhibition reconfigure the relationship between artistic production and manufacturing.
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David Wojnarowicz “History Keeps Me Awake at Night”
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
OPENS: July 13
The most comprehensive survey thus far of the American artist and activist’s oeuvre, this retrospective arrays more than 100 of Wojnarowicz’s visual and literary works. Put together, his early collage experiments, studio paintings, essays, film, and photographs—including his seminal “Rimbaud in New York” series from 1978—illustrate how he fused the personal and political, while celebrating the spirit and idiosyncrasies of outsider cultures.
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“Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia”
Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53rd Street
OPENS: July 15
This survey presents more than 400 models, photographs, drawings, and film reels that chronicle how urbanization, consumerism, memorialization, and technology shaped the former Yugoslavia’s postwar construction efforts. Featuring projects from International Style skyscrapers to Brutalist structures to modernist buildings such as Bosnia’s White Mosque, the exhibition examines a wide range of modes and forms undertaken by its local architects, including Bogdan Bogdanović, Juraj Neidhardt, and Milica Šterić.
(Opening image: Bogdan Bogdanović, Jasenovac Memorial, 1959–66, Jasenovac, Croatia. Photo: Valentin Jeck, 2016, courtesy the Museum of Modern Art)
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SAN FRANCISCO
Donald Judd “Specific Furniture”
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 3rd Street
San Francisco
OPENS: July 14
Pooling together furniture the minimalist artist owned with pieces that he designed, this exhibition features some 30 items that typify his philosophy of furniture’s unambiguous use and utility. Viewers can additionally interact with eight original Judd designs (chairs, benches, a stool), newly produced by Donald Judd Furniture with the same fabricators and materials the artist used during his lifetime.
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Ranu Mukherjee “A Bright Stage”
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
San Francisco
OPENS: July 14
As part of the fine art museum’s Contemporary Projects series, the San Francisco–based artist unveils a site-specific installation that blends wall painting and printed fabric with video animation. Evoking a banyan tree grove—which, in the tree’s native India, offers canopies friendly to social gatherings—the work, situated in the building’s atrium, reflects on the space’s qualities as a free and accessible place for public action and interaction.
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ELSEWHERE
Tom Wesselmann “Wesselmann 1963–1983”
Gagosian Beverly Hills
456 North Camden Drive
Los Angeles
OPENS: July 12
Presented here are seven of the pop artist’s seminal canvases, created over a span of two decades. Monumental in scale and ambition, these paintings—including “Still Life #29” (1963) and “Still Life with Blue Jar and Smoking Cigarette” (1981)—exemplify his pictorial innovations and clever recontextualization of the advertising vernacular through chromatic colors, anomalous compositions, and fetishism of everyday objects.
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Alison Knowles “Proposition #2: Make a Salad (Plein air variation)”
Aspen Art Museum
637 E Hyman Avenue
Aspen
OPENS: July 15
As part of the Aspen Art Museum’s year-long, multi-artist exhibition, “Ritual,” Alison Knowles will perform her “Proposition #2: Make a Salad (Plein air variation)” this weekend. First performed in London in 1962, Knowles’s piece invites participants to join her in elevating and transforming the seemingly mundane task of making a salad into a heightened and ritualized work of art.
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“Sense of Humor”
National Gallery of Art
6th & Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, D.C.
OPENS: July 15
This gathering of prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century until today traces the history and persistence of humor in art. From Renaissance caricatures by European artists Jacques Callot and Francesco Melzi, to comic etchings by satirist William Hogarth, to droll cultural critiques by R. Crumb and Guerilla Girls, these works on paper illustrate how humor has been wielded by artists to reveal truths, offer commentary, or simply make us laugh.
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