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The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022 by Peter Schjeldahl
Image Credit: Courtesy Abrams Books, New York; Few who read Peter Schjeldahl’s essay “The Art of Dying” when it was published in the New Yorker in late 2019 will ever forget its gimlet-eyed stare-down with death, but even more stirring was the fact that the fabled art critic managed to keep writing for nearly three years more. This book starts with the namesake masterpiece and collects all the rest of his words for the magazine until the end.
On sale May 14 -
“Hilary Heron: A Retrospective” at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
Image Credit: Courtesy Hilary Heron Estate In her 1949 sculpture Flight into Egypt, the Irish modernist Hilary Heron represented an episode from the book of Matthew as a highly abstracted form riding a barely visible horse on the march. The sculpture was, for her, a way of bringing the past into the present, and was intended to encompass the existentialist themes broached by others around her, including a distant relative, the playwright Samuel Beckett. The first Heron retrospective in decades will be mounted in Dublin, the city where she was born. May 24–Nov. 3
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“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” at the The Broad
Image Credit: ©Mickalene Thomas In mixed-media paintings, installations, photographs, and more, Mickalene Thomas has foregrounded strong Black women in states of searching and selfassuredness. This survey—opening at the Broad in Los Angeles before moving on to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Hayward Gallery in London— features 80 works made over the past 20 years, all assembled under an exhibition title borrowed from feminist writer bell hooks.
May 25–Sept. 29 -
“In the House of the Trembling Eye: an exhibition staged by Allison Katz” at the Aspen Art Museum
Image Credit: Photo Eva Herzog At the 2022 Venice Biennale, Allison Katz exhibited a painting of two roosters dropping feed into a vessel; its style recalled that of mosaics found throughout Italy. Katz will return to ancient subject matter with this museum-filling show in Colorado rooted in her research into Pompeii, the Roman city famously buried in ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted. The rising Canadian painter has teased borrowing fresco fragments and other centuries-old objects for this exhibition, the details of which have been kept under wraps.
May 29–Sept. 29 -
“Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works” at the Museum of Cycladic Art
Image Credit: Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, New York/©Cindy Sherman Though not nearly as old as the works most commonly shown at this Athens institution, the formative offerings of photographer Cindy Sherman still mark the beginning of an era of sorts. More than 100 works from the 1970s and ’80s will feature in what’s being touted as Sherman’s first Athenian museum show, including photos from her epochal early series “Untitled Film Stills,” “Rear Screen Projections,” “Centerfolds,” and “Color Studies,” which helped expand the purview of self-portraiture in new narrative ways.
May 30–Nov. 4 -
Arooj Aftab, Night Reign
Image Credit: Courtesy Motormouthmedia On the rise as a singersongwriter of otherworldly talent, Arooj Aftab was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani expatriates who returned to their homeland in the ’90s. Since she moved to the United States to go to the Berklee College of Music, she has collaborated with musicians who have coursed in and around the art scene, including adventurous jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, poet/ singer Moor Mother, and DJ/composer Jace Clayton, among others. This gorgeous new album stands to expand her audience even further.
On sale May 31 -
“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” at the Art Institute of Chicago
Image Credit: ©Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy New Jersey State Museum Collection With a wide-ranging array of themed shows—from a regrettable consideration of her sartorial style at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 to a striking survey of her works on paper at MoMA last year—Georgia O’Keeffe has not lacked for attention of late. The most recent addition to her exhibition annals takes inspiration from the artist’s visions of New York City starting with her move into a Manhattan skyscraper in 1924. It will also include other paintings, drawings, and pastels from the ’20s and ’30s, all with a mind to expand conceptions of O’Keeffe, who is still most closely aligned with her flower paintings.
June 2–Sept. 22 -
Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern
Image Credit: Courtesy Yancey Richardson, New York/©Zanele Muholi More than 260 photographs will feature in this comprehensive survey of the self-described “visual activist” who serves as a sharp-eyed chronicler of life in South Africa. Zanele Muholi often photographs LGBTQIA+ people, but the artist is most famous for self-portraits in which they project real power from their eyes, staring down their viewers and inviting them in at the same time.
June 6–Jan. 26 -
Parade by Rachel Cusk
Image Credit: Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York Writer Rachel Cusk is an art world favorite for her lucid meditations on artists and their work: her 2019 essay on painter Celia Paul’s tumultuous relationship with Lucian Freud, for example, tackled gendered power imbalances with her usual directness. In this new novel, she delves into the lives of artists in a much more abstract manner. Her focus is G, a male artist whose prismatic life involves instances of violence, both metaphorical and not.
On sale June 18 -
“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Kunsthalle Basel
Image Credit: ©Toyin Ojih Odutola/Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York The striking figurative works of Nigerian-born Toyin Ojih Odutola have become extraordinarily familiar without losing any of their power and poise. For her first solo institutional show in Switzerland, the artist—who favors materials including charcoal, pastel, and pencil—is showing all new works under a title that translates as “House of Abundance.”
June 7–Sept. 1 -
“David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos” at the Hammer Museum
Image Credit: Photo MM Yu/Courtesy Collection Paulino and Hetty Que How does one curate an institutional survey for an artist whose work resists being shown in museums? That is a question that guides this Los Angeles show for David Medalla, a Filipino artist whose most memorable work, A Stitch in Time (1968), began with his offering romantic partners handkerchiefs on which they could sew whatever they liked. Several decades before the rise of relational aesthetics in the ’90s, Medalla produced art whose essence was conversation and interpersonal exchange. The challenge for the Hammer will be whether those artworks still come alive, even when exhibited as mere objects. June 9–Sept. 15
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Shara Hughes at Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Image Credit: Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber One of the highlights of Zurich Art Weekend—just a one-hour train ride from the buzz of Art Basel, which opens a few days later—will be the next gallery show for the ascendant New York–based painter Shara Hughes, whose abstracted landscapes blaze with color. For her fifth solo show with Eva Presenhuber, the artist will fill the gallery’s Waldmannstrasse location with new large-scale paintings of trees, with a mind toward creating a forest of sorts.
June 7–July 20 -
Art Basel
Image Credit: Courtesy Art Basel The fairest of all the art fairs will host 287 galleries from 40 countries this year, with 22 new enterprises joining the ranks. It will also be the first edition fully under the direction of Maike Cruse, whom former Art Basel Miami Beach director Noah Horowitz hired after assuming his role as the fair’s chief executive in 2022. Also of note: this year’s Parcours section, which adopts Basel itself as a canvas and exhibition space, will be organized by Stefanie Hessler, director of New York’s Swiss Institute.
June 13–16 -
“The Deep West Assembly: Cauleen Smith” at the Astrup Fearnley Museum
Image Credit: Courtesy Cauleen Smith “The Wanda Coleman Songbook,” Cauleen Smith’s recent show at 52 Walker gallery in New York, was a tender tribute to the Los Angeles poet that contained very few of her words spoken aloud. Instead, Smith alluded to Coleman’s writings through commissioned music and an expansive video installation filled with images of LA freeways. That work, like many other films by Smith, reflected on the multitude of ways that Black history is all around us. This show in Oslo will include a new film installation commissioned for the occasion, plus screenings of other films in her oeuvre.
June 14–Sept. 15 -
“Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture” at the Seattle Art Museum
Image Credit: ©Patti Warashina/Photo Scott Leen While the New York avant-garde was a spirited community in the 1960s and ’70s, the scene on the West Coast was at least as restless—and often in wilder and weirder ways. The description of this show refers to “senselessness, absurdity, and fun,” as cited from writing around the antiestablishment Funk art movement in the Bay Area, and it promises works drawn from up and down the coast.
June 21–Sept. 2 -
“Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger” at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art
Image Credit: Courtesy Ho Tzu Nyen Between 2012 and 2017, Ho Tzu Nyen created five videos about tigers that take up aspects of Southeast Asian history, mulling the painful legacy of colonialism in the region through a mix of fact and fiction. The powerful stories about loss told through these videos—British colonizers nearly hunted Malayan tigers out of existence—have made Ho one of Singapore’s most celebrated artists. Now, this midcareer survey at Bard College in Upstate New York allows US audiences to see why.
June 22–Dec. 1 -
Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy by Simon Wu
Image Credit: Courtesy HarperCollins Publishers, New York Taking his title from an anthem of steely defiance by the Swedish pop star Robyn, Simon Wu offers writings on art (from the mind of a critic, curator, and Art in America contributor) and such other topics as “the complicated sensation of the Telfar bag” and “clutter in his mother’s suburban garage and its meaning for himself and his family.”
On sale June 25 -
“Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao” at the National Gallery of Australia
Image Credit: ©Musée d'Orsay, Paris/RMN-Grand Palais/Patrice Schmidt As Paul Gauguin’s legacy continues to be reevaluated and revised, this show in the Australian capital of Canberra draws on some 140 of the artist’s best-known works, and promises new readings of them by way of contemporary perspectives. Noting that “in today’s context, Gauguin’s interactions in Polynesia in the later part of the 19th Century would not be accepted,” the show—curated by former Louvre Museum and Musée d’Orsay director Henri Loyrette—will delve beneath the surface of his paintings, viewing his art against the backdrop of colonialism. (The show travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, later in 2024.)
June 29–Oct. 7 -
“I.M. Pei: Life Is Architecture” at M+
Image Credit: Photo Mohamed Somji/Courtesy M+, Hong Kong Billed as the first major retrospective for one of the 20th century’s most famous architects, this show in Hong Kong will feature drawings, sketches, videos, models, photographs, and documentation related to I.M. Pei’s many high-profile projects around the world. It will also include newly commissioned photographs of his buildings by seven “new generation” photographers, and models of built and unbuilt projects made in collaboration with local architecture schools.
Opens June 29 -
“Samia Halaby: Eye Witness” at the MSU Broad Art Museum
Image Credit: Courtesy Samia Halaby This exhibition became an unexpected cause célèbre earlier this year when Indiana University, whose museum was meant to debut it, abruptly canceled the show, fueling speculation about what role Samia Halaby’s Palestinian nationality played in the decision. Now, the show at least has the benefit of opening at the artist’s alma mater, Michigan State University, during the Venice Biennale, where her lush abstractions are also currently on display. Expect the surge in interest in the 87-year-old painter, whose art has explicitly addressed forms of Palestinian resistance, to garner attention for this modest survey. June 29–Dec. 15
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Rencontres d’Arles
Image Credit: Photo Adrien Limousin Those making a summertime pilgrimage to Arles, the French city most closely associated with Vincent van Gogh, to toast Impressionism’s 150th anniversary will want to extend their stay for this photography festival, widely regarded as one of the best of its kind worldwide. The show offers many notable photography surveys, both well-known and not. See them all here, in one place, before they travel the globe.
July 1–Sept. 29 -
Tokyo Gendai
Image Credit: Courtesy Tokyo Gendai During the inaugural edition of this fair last year, cofounder Magnus Renfrew called it “the beginning of a new chapter for the art scene in Japan.” The fair will now have a chance to bear that out in its second go-round, with sales generated by its mix of international blue-chip galleries and Tokyo-based enterprises likely acting as a litmus test for the Japanese art world’s strength.
July 5–7 -
“Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson” at SITE Santa Fe
Image Credit: ©Holt/Smithson Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York This artist-driven exhibition curated by Teresita Fernández and Holt/Smithson Foundation director Lisa Le Feuvre will focus on two intergenerational artists’ “shared desire to recontextualize the complexities of art addressing the land.” Fernández and the late Robert Smithson—who helped define Land art in the 1960s and ’70s—will each be represented by some 30 works, and there’s good reason to think those works will take on new resonance in relation to each other.
July 5–Oct. 28 -
“Martha Diamond: Deep Time” at the Colby College Museum of Art
Image Credit: Courtesy Martha Diamond Studio Opening in Maine before making its way to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut this fall, this Martha Diamond survey covers five decades of a career devoted to painting pitched in the fertile middle of a lot of different movements. Diamond rendered her native New York City in forms that are both concrete and abstract, and enough of both to make the notion of choosing one or the other a fool’s errand. Diamond died this past December at the age of 79, and her first major monograph accompanies the show.
July 13–Oct. 13 -
“Walter Price: Pearl Lines” at the Walker Art Center
Image Credit: Photo Elisabeth Bernstein/Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York American painter Walter Price creates large canvases that verge on inscrutability. They feature Black figures that fade in and out of focus, traversing vague landscapes that melt into abstraction. The sense of mystery these works convey extends even to Price’s shows themselves—he has titled nearly all his solo outings “Pearl Lines,” suggesting they are all related in ways that are not immediately obvious. This biggest of the artist’s surveys to date—in Minneapolis, and also called “Pearl Lines”—may enable viewers to crack Price’s code.
Aug. 8–Dec. 8 -
A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda by Carrie Rickey
Image Credit: Courtesy W. W. Norton & Company, New York Five years on from her death, photographer and filmmaker Agnès Varda is inscribed in both film and art history, with the Criterion Collection releasing her entire filmography, and museums in France and Spain staging shows of her installations. Varda mania has fully arrived—and stands to continue with this new biography from Carrie Rickey, a former film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who shows how the French New Wave filmmaker’s life inspired her deceptively light meditations on the passage of time, women’s rights, and more.
On sale Aug. 13 -
“Leonilson: Now and Opportunity” at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Image Credit: Photo Eduardo Ortega/Courtesy São Paulo Art Museum Leonilson had a habit of associating Portuguese words with the wrong gender, a small act of rule-breaking that was mirrored by purposeful infractions in his art, which explicitly addressed his HIV diagnosis at a time when doing so was still taboo. Although he died at 36, the Brazilian artist left behind a formidable store of paintings, embroidered works, and installations that addressed fragile bodies and marginalization. His final years form the basis of this 150-work show, which is being staged amid a yearlong series of exhibitions about queerness at MASP.
Aug. 23–Nov. 17