Big, globe-leaping historical art shows are still scarce, post-pandemic. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art persists in doing them, and no one does big and global better. I have high expectations for “Africa and Byzantium” (Nov. 19-March 3, 2024), a roots-and-routes exhibition that promises to illuminate cultural exchanges made between medieval African kingdoms in Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia and the Byzantine Empire across the Mediterranean. There are sure to be surprises and beauties beyond compare.
Relatedly, I’ll be heading to Baltimore to catch “Ethiopia at the Crossroads” at the Walters Art Museum (Dec. 3-March 3), which has a superlative collection of Ethiopian religious art. When the Walters-organized exhibition “African Zion” appeared at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem in 1994 it blew me away. Three decades later, some of the same treasures will be supplemented by examples of outstanding work being made in Ethiopia today.
The fall will be rich in contemporary solo museum exhibitions. I’ve been waiting for someone to organize a survey of the photographer An-My Le, who was born in Vietnam and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. Her subtle images of a world soaked in militarism (Vietnam War re-enactments staged on what were once Confederate battlefields) will be included in the Museum of Modern Art’s “An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers” (Nov. 5-March 16), the two rivers of the title being the Mekong and the Mississippi.
“Charles Gaines: 1992-2023” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (Nov. 16-March 17) will pick up where an earlier Studio Museum in Harlem retrospective of this pioneering Conceptualist’s work left off. And his art — politically-charged, harmonically-infused — has become more varied and imaginative year by year into the present. (His monumental 2022-23 sculpture, “Moving Chains,” installed on Governors Island, Manhattan, was a stunner.)
Another protean, longstanding contemporary career in full flower will be documented in “María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold” at Brooklyn Museum (Sept. 15-Jan. 14). Born in Cuba in 1959, and educated there before coming to the United States, Campos-Pons’s experimental interweaving of photography, painting and performance filters references to the island’s colonial past and the living tradition of Afro-Cuban Santeria through the prism of her own life.
I look forward to “Michael Richards: Are You Down?” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (Sept. 8-Jan. 7), a survey of a Brooklyn-born artist of Jamaican and Costa Rican descent who died at 38 when he was trapped in his studio high in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He was a talent of tremendous promise and significant early accomplishment. His 1999 sculpture “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian,” a memorial to a Tuskegee airman — based on a cast of the artist’s body — pierced by small fighter planes, is a now-classic image of desire, death and…
2023-09-02 04:00:33
Link from www.nytimes.com
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