June 11-July 24 | The Whitney Museum of American Art

Today, the Whitney Museum announced its lineup of summer public programs featuring a hybrid schedule of digital and in-person events. The diverse range of programs kicks off on June 17 and includes conversations and film screenings hosted virtually and onsite. 

The Museum will also host a free Pride celebration on June 24 featuring DJ REBORN and offer guided walking tours throughout the summer that explore the queer histories of the neighborhood surrounding the Museum. On July 24, the Whitney will present its annual recognition of the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with a virtual program hosted by Bronx-based dance artist and educator Kayla Hamilton, who leads a conversation with peer artists to celebrate the contributions of disabled artists of color

All events are free with advance registration. For Museum hours, event updates, and registration details, please visit whitney.org.

June 18, 2021–September 21 | the Hudson River Museum

Wall Power: Quilts from the American Folk Art Collection
As an art form, quilts have deep roots in American life and experience. For more than three centuries, artists, primarily women, have created highly individualized expressions in this medium that are both yielding and unforgiving, challenging the maker to test the limits imposed by cutting and piecing bits of fabric. The very fine selection of quilts on view in this show range across time and place from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, from Alabama to Pennsylvania. The exhibition highlights early twentieth-century quilts from a period of craft revival, designs developed by Amish communities, examples by African American makers, and traditional nineteenth-century patterns that formed a foundation for generations of quiltmakers.

Save these dates: Saturday, July 10 & 24, August 7 & 21, September 4, September 18, 1-4pm for Community Sewing Circle events
On six Saturday afternoons, Village Squares Quilters Guild members will be on site to provide basic instruction on how to 

select fabric, stitch together small blocks, and create a quilt which will be donated to a local charity, People at all quilting levels are invited to come together and join in this creative process, learn a few basic sewing skills, and create the gift of a work of art. 

Wednesdays starting June 16 | Dumbo Drink and Draw, Free, in Person, under the Archway

June 16: Figure Drawing, 6-8 pm. Register

Get your creative juices flowing at these free Drink and Draw sessions, hosted by Creatively Wild Art Studio and Dumbo's best artists. These workshops are especially designed for adult artists; all levels are welcome. Drinks available for purchase from Dumbo Station.

If you don’t have your own art materials, they are provided for a $20 fee; easels supplied for use for all participants. Advance registration encouraged; walk-up slots will be available. Info Left: © Peggy Roalf, Riverhenge, 2019

June 26 at The Met Fifth Avenue

The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 will feature an outstanding group of portraits by renowned artists—from Raphael, Jacopo Pontormo, and Rosso Fiorentino to Benvenuto Cellini, Agnolo Bronzino, and Francesco Salviati—to introduce visitors to the various new and complex ways that artists portrayed the elite of Medicean Florence, representing the sitters’ political and cultural ambitions and conveying the changing sense of what it meant to be a Florentine at this defining moment in the city’s history.

The key figure in this transformation was Cosimo I de’ Medici, who became Duke of Florence in 1537. Cosimo shrewdly employed culture as a political tool in order to convert the mercantile city into the capital of a dynastic Medicean state, enlisting the leading intellectuals and artists of his time and promoting grand architectural, engineering, and artistic projects.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY Info

Opening June 26 | The High Museum of Art 

Calder-Picasso

Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso are two of the foremost figures in the history of 20th-century art. This touring exhibition, which debuted in 2019 at the Musée national Picasso-Paris, presents more than 100 paintings, sculptures and works on paper spanning Calder’s and Picasso’s careers that reveal the radical innovation and enduring influence of their art. Conceived by the artists’ grandsons, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and Alexander S. C. Rower, the exhibition focuses on the artists’ exploration of the void, or absence of space, which both defined from the figure through to abstraction.

Calder-Picasso, June 26 through Dec. 19 at The High Museum of Art Info Note: this exhibition sold out at its deYoung Museum debut. 

June 18–August 15, 2021 | Art Institute of Chicago 
August 27–October 24, 2021 | Brooklyn Museum of Art

From the moment of their unveiling at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., in February 2018, the official portraits of President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama have become iconic. Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald’s portrait of the former First Lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public.

This five-city tour travels the United States from June 2021 through May 2022 and is expected to reach millions of people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to view these portraits. This special presentation enhances the conversations surrounding the power of portraiture and its potential to engage communities. The Obama Portraits Tour is accompanied by a richly illustrated book published by National Portrait Gallery and Princeton University Press.

Other tour locations include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (November 5, 2021–January 2, 2022), High Museum of Art, Atlanta (January 14–March 13, 2022), and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 25–May 30, 2022). Info Images courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum 

June 30-October 3 | The New Museum

Ed Atkins: Get Life/Love’s Work
“Get Life/Love’s Work” will be the inaugural exhibition in a partnership between the New Museum and Nokia Bell Labs to develop a series of residencies and commissions aimed at fostering meaningful exchange between the fields of art and technology.

Over the past decade, Ed Atkins (b. 1982, Oxford, United Kingdom) has created a complex body of work that considers the relationship between the corporeal and the digital, the ordinary and the uncanny, through high-definition computer-generated (CG) animations, theatrical environments, elliptical writings, and syncopated sound montages.

Weaving together a variety of filmic and text-based artworks references, the exhibition composes what the artist describes as an “essay about distance.” The exhibition reflects on the ways in which technologies designed to facilitate connection and representation paradoxically expose loss and underscore separation, oftentimes amplifying corresponding feelings in a manner that—according to the artist—“mirrors the travesty of the representation.”

Ed Atkins: Get Life/Love’s Work, June 30-October 3 at The New Museum 235 Bowery, NY, NY, Info Save the date: June 30, for a conversation with the artist and curator Massimiliano Gioni Info Above: © Ed Atkins/archive image

El Museo del Barrio goes to Brooklyn | Saturday, June 19, 2021 | 2pm - 6pm 

Celebrate Afro Caribbean Joy + Resilience 

El Museo del Barrio is going to Brooklyn! This Juneteenth, in celebration of Afro-Caribbean joy and resilience, join us for our first in-person Super Sabado, featuring roller-skating presented by Butter Roll; art-making workshops inspired by La Trienal; and live music by DJ's Ultraviolet, Nina Vicious, and Bembona. Skate rentals will be provided by Skaterobics on a first come, first serve basis. FREE, In-person

Hope Gardens Community Center, 422 Central Ave, Brooklyn, NY RSVP, click here.

June 23-October 27 | Online Speakers Series on Surveillance and Drone Warfare

Organized by High Line Art and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, and co-hosted by the High Line, S.T.O.P., and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law, the speaker series will take place online biweekly from June through October 2021. This series brings together artists, activists, scholars, filmmakers, journalists, and more to demystify the twinned histories of surveillance and drone warfare in the US and examine routine examples of surveillance in our daily lives. 

The second High Line Plinth commission, Untitled (drone) is a large-scale fiberglass sculpture in the shape of an abstracted Predator drone, on view on the High Line through August 2022. Public engagement organized in conjunction with Untitled (drone) aims to spark conversations around drone warfare and surveillance, to make visible aspects of these technologies that are invisible to most people in the US, and to share the expertise and stories of individuals and organizations who are closest to these issues. Topics and Speakers here

Livestream Six Art Movies at 20th Tribeca Film Festival | Through June 23

This just in from Hyperallergic: Screenings are taking place across the city, at both indoor theaters and outdoor venues, from June 9 to June 20, and many selections are also streaming at home on demand.

We’ve scoured this year’s selections for films featuring art and artists, from a deep dive on Leonardo da Vinci’s infamous Salvator Mundi and how it became the world’s most expensive painting, to a new documentary from French street artist JR.

Here are six art-themed highlights from this year’s offerings, as well as where and when you can watch them. Info