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.
For a list of the most noteworthy art and design fairs happening this week, and throughout the month of May, see our guide.
NEW YORK
Carl Emil Jacobsen “Don’t Know What Shape I’m In”
Patrick Parrish Gallery
50 Lispenard Street
OPENS: May 17
For his first solo exhibition in the United States, the Danish artist presents new works that address sculpture’s compositional and sensory properties. These 10 site-specific works see the artist experiment with color and material—deriving rich tones from natural pigments and introducing iron into his variety of surfaces—illustrating fresh approaches to form and tactility.
Jean Dubuffet “Théâtres de mémoire”
Pace Gallery
510 W 25th Street
OPENS: May 18
This exhibition highlights one of the French painter’s most significant series, “Théâtres de mémoire” (1975), which is composed of vast canvases, each created with smaller scenes and segments to illustrate the abstract and jumbled landscapes that characterize the memory.
Seven on Seven 2018
New Museum
235 Bowery
OPENS: May 19
Spearheaded by arts organization Rhizome in collaboration with the New Museum, the 10th iteration of this annual conference once again pairs artists and technologists for a simple challenge: to “make something.” Unveiled here, these projects see the seven duos—including artist Petra Cortright and engineer Carl Tashian, Sean Raspet and developer Francis Tseng, and Avery Singer and Matt Liston, founding member of Gnosis—explore new approaches to communicating and organizing through technology and digital culture.
Cecilia Vicuña “La India Contaminada”
Lehmann Maupin
536 W 22nd Street
OPENS: May 19
The gallery presents the first comprehensive survey of Chilean-born activist and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s work in New York. Spanning five decades of her career, the exhibition displays pieces from her Quipu, a series of raw wool installations and sculptures; Lo Precario, mixed-media sculptures; as well as video and painting works, all made between 1969 and 2017. Simultaneously, the Brooklyn Museum will show her “Disappeared Quipu” and early performance and photographic work in a solo show and in the traveling exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, respectively.
“Indicators: Artists on Climate Change”
Storm King Art Center
1 Museum Road, New Windsor, NY
OPENS: May 19
Tackling the effects of climate change on biological, personal, and cultural levels, this multimedia group show includes artists such as Maya Lin, Jenny Kendler, and Tavares Strachan, whose site-specific works offer myriad perspectives on and approaches to the environmental threat.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i”
New York Botanical Gardens
2900 Southern Boulevard
OPENS: May 19
Exhibited at the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Art Gallery are more than 15 of the artist’s Hawaiian paintings, created during a nine-week trip to the Islands in 1939, commissioned by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Not seen together since they debuted at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in 1940, these canvases may be lesser known than O’Keeffe’s New Mexico or New York scenes, but in form, scale, and color, reveal a remarkable sense of place and her appreciation for Hawaii’s exotic landscape.
(Opening image: Georgia O’Keeffe “Heliconia, Crab’s Claw Ginger,” 1939. Copyright 2018 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.)
“Peter Hujar: Speed of Life”
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave
CLOSES: May 20
This retrospective tracks the evolution of the influential New York–based photographer with 140 of his black-and-white photographs spanning his early magazine work in the 1950s to his chronicles of 1970s downtown culture, and beyond, showcasing the artist’s direct and honest, albeit sympathetic eye toward his subjects.
