The Sunday Edit | Spring/Summer Art Exhibitions 2023
A dress from Chanel's Spring/Summer Haute Couture 2019 collection; a sketch of the same Chanel dress, both on display at the Costume Institute. Source: The Metropolitan Museum
This summer, be sure to catch a bounty of new exhibitions in The Big Apple's many museums and cultural institutions. Below are some highlights:
Karl Lagerfeld-A Line of Beauty
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 5-July 16, 2023
On the heels of the star-studded Met Gala, the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” opened to the public on Friday May 5. The exhibition examines the work of designer Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019). Focusing on Lagerfeld's stylistic vocabulary as expressed in aesthetic themes that appear time and again in his fashions from the 1950s to his final collection in 2019, the show will spotlight the German-born designer’s unique working methodology. Most of the approximately 150 pieces on display will be accompanied by Lagerfeld’s sketches, which underscore his complex creative process and the collaborative relationships with his premières, or head seamstresses. Lagerfeld’s fluid lines united his designs for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld, creating a diverse and prolific body of work unparalleled in the history of fashion. Each room presents contrasting lines of interest for Lagerfeld; artisanal versus mechanical, floral versus geometric, rococo versus classical.
Sanlé Sory, Je Vais Décolleris/Source: Brooklyn Museum
Africa Fashion
Brooklyn Museum
June 23-October 22, 2023
Making its North American debut in Brooklyn, Africa Fashion is the largest-ever presentation of the subject: more than 180 works, including standout pieces from the Museum’s collections. Organized thematically, this multi-sensory experience features immersive displays of haute couture and ready-to-wear apparel, as well as photographs, literature, sketches, music, film and catwalk footage, textiles, and jewelry. More than forty designers and artists from twenty African countries are represented, from the vanguards who first gained worldwide attention, such as Kofi Ansah (Ghana) and Shade Thomas-Fahm (Nigeria), to the newest generation of cutting-edge creatives, such as Thebe Magugu (South Africa) and Gouled Ahmed (Djibouti). Many of their works are on view for the first time in the United States. Showcasing a dazzling array of garments alongside music, visual art, and much more, Africa Fashion celebrates the ingenuity and global impact of African fashions from the 1950s to today. Works by iconic designers and artists illuminate fashion’s pivotal role in Africa’s cultural renaissance, which laid the foundation for an ongoing fashion revolution.
Installation view of Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time. Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Georgia O'Keeffe: To See Takes Time
Museum of Modern Art
April 9-August 12, 2023
“To see takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe once wrote. Best known for her flower paintings, O’Keeffe (1887-1986) also made extraordinary series of works in charcoal, pencil, watercolor, and pastel. Reuniting works on paper that are often seen individually, along with key paintings, this exhibition offers a rare glimpse of the artist’s working methods and invites us to take time to look. Over her long career, O’Keeffe revisited and reworked the same subjects, developing, repeating, and transforming motifs that lie between observation and abstraction. Between 1915 and 1918, a breakthrough period of experimentation, she made as many works on paper as she would during the next four decades, producing progressions of bold lines, organic landscapes, and frank nudes, as well as the radically abstract charcoals she called “specials.”
Installation shot of Young Picasso in Paris. Source/Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Young Picasso in Paris
Guggenheim Museum
May 12-August 6, 2023
Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death, the exhibition Young Picasso in Paris explores a critical juncture in his artistic development and highlight a defining work, Le Moulin de la Galette (ca. November 1900), which was recently the subject of a conservation analysis and treatment project. The famous dance hall—formerly a mill engaged in the production of a brown bread, or galette—had been depicted by such avant-gardists as Ramon Casas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh. In Picasso’s titillating version, a cross section of Paris society comingles under the electric lights. This painting and others demonstrate the young artist’s fascination with the unconventional aspects of modern life. Picasso’s early work presages the social disenfranchisement that he brought into sharper relief with his subsequent Blue Period (1901–04) through depictions of the exploited and vulnerable. This intimate exhibition includes a small group of paintings and drawings that show Picasso’s exercises in character study and demonstrate his evolution during this formative period of his life. All told, his forays into Paris left a strong impression; Picasso would settle there in 1904. On the precipice in 1900, the artist eventually surpassed his academic training to craft a singular practice reflective of his time.
Josh Kline. Source/Whitney Museum
Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century
Whitney Museum
April 19-August 13, 2023
Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century is the first U.S. museum survey of the artist's work. Kline often utilizes the technologies, practices, and forms he scrutinizes—digitization, data collection, image manipulation, 3D printing, commercial and political advertising, productivity-enhancing substances—aiming them back at themselves. Some of his most well-known videos use early deep fake software to speculate on the meaning of truth in a time of post-truth propaganda. At its core, Kline’s prescient practice is focused on work and class, exploring how today’s most urgent social and political issues—climate change, automation, disease, and the weakening of democracy—impact the people who make up the labor force. The exhibition surveys over a decade of the artist’s work, including new installations and moving image works that address the climate crisis. Presented for the first time at the Whitney, these new science-fiction works approach the hotter, more dangerous future on the horizon from the perspective of essential workers who will inevitably be left to pick up the pieces. In an era defined by escalating crises, Kline’s work offers a visceral warning and calls for a more human future.
Kara Walker, Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats, from the portfolio Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, Smithsonian American Art Museum. © 2005 Kara Walker
Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)
New York Historical Society
February 24-June 11, 2023
The New-York Historical Society, the city’s first museum, presents Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). Walker’s series of 15 prints responds to the two-volume anthology Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion first published in 1866. The acclaimed series exposes the omission of African Americans from the narrative and urges viewers to consider the continuing legacy of racial stereotyping and violence. Traveling from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition has been contextualized by the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical with images, objects, and documents from its collections. For over two decades, Kara Walker has created work that weaves together imagery from the antebellum South, the brutality of slavery, and racist stereotypes. Her works provoke controversy through their use of exaggerated caricatures that reflect long-standing racialized and gendered stereotypes and their lurid depictions of history. To create her prints, Walker enlarged select illustrations from Harper’s and overlaid them with large, stenciled figures. The silhouettes visually disrupt the original scenes and suffuse them with the painful history left out of these illustrations.
-Edited by Anne-Claire Regan, Appraisals & Client Liaison, Edited by Heather Zises, Marketing Director
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