October 19: Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney

The exhibition charts this iconic artist’s enduring fascination with the city he called home for nearly six decades through more than 200 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings. Although Hopper aspired to recognition as a painter, his first successes came in print through his illustrations and etchings, an important history featured in a section of the exhibition titled “The City in Print.” His artworks for illustrations and published commissions for magazines and advertisements often featured urban motifs inspired by New York—theaters, restaurants, offices, and city dwellers—that would become foundational to his art.

“As New York bounces back after two challenging years of global pandemic, this exhibition reconsiders the life and work of Edward Hopper, serves as a barometer of our times, and introduces a new generation of audiences to Hopper’s work by a new generation of scholars. This exhibition offers fresh perspectives and radical new insights,” says Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum.

Drawn from the Whitney’s preeminent collection of Hopper’s work, loans from public and private collections, and archival materials including printed ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and notebooks, the show features work from early sketches to paintings from late in his career. Edward Hopper’s New York reveals a vision of the metropolis that is as much a manifestation of Hopper himself as it is a record of a changing city, whose perpetual and sometimes tense reinvention feels particularly relevant today.

The exhibition catalogue, Edward Hopper’s New York, published by the Whitney and distributed by Yale University Press, features more than three hundred illustrations and fresh insights from authoritative and emerging scholars. Info

Through March 5, 2023 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY Info

September 14, 7:27am–8:06pm: Sarah Cameron Sunde | 36.5 / New York Estuary at Socrates

The culminating work in the series, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, and the culminating event in the Works on Water 2020-2022 Triennial, this event will be part of a large-scale global performance involving several hundreds of people around the world on September 14, 2022. The New York production will take place in the Cove on the East River where Astoria meets Long Island City in Queens, on Wed, Sept 14, 2022. The artist will stand in water for 12 hours, 39 minutes, a full tidal cycle, inviting the public to participate by joining her in water and/or marking the passing of hours from shore as “the human clock.” Artist collaborators will create interventions and installations to amplify the performance. Viewing stations around the Cove, on Roosevelt Island and Upper East Side, Manhattan will allow audiences to gather from various viewpoints.

For more details about 36.5/ New York Estuary and the eight international re-enactments taking place on the same day, please visit here

Socrates Sculpture Park, 32-01 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, New York Info  Directions

September 15: Hew Locke | Gilt, The Met Façade Commission

Hew Locke is creating a suite of new sculptures for The Met Fifth Avenue's facade niches, the third in a new series of site-specific commissions for the exterior of the Museum. The sculptures will present the likeness of trophies, two partial and two whole, that reference works of art in The Met collection. At once visually stunning and critically incisive, Locke’s practice relies on the strategy of appropriation and an aesthetic of excess and theatricality to deconstruct iconographies of power and to explore global histories of conquest, migration, and exchange.

Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959 and raised in Guyana, a multiracial, multicultural nation in South America that was formed in the crucible of indigeneity, European colonialism, the African slave trade, and Indian indentureship. He and his family arrived in Guyana in 1966, just as the country was establishing its independence from British rule. Locke returned to the United Kingdom in 1980, travelling alongside a wave of immigrants from Britain’s current and former colonies in the Caribbean. He completed a BA in Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art in 1988 and an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1994. He has resided full time in London since then.

Join Hew Locke for a conversation about the Façade Commission on Thursday, September 15 at 6:30 pm. Live and free, with registration

Through May 22, 2023 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

September 14-18, 8-10pm: Jenny Holzer | Speech Itself at Rockefeller Center

On five nights in September, the renowned artist Jenny Holzer will celebrate PEN America’s century-long defense of the written word and the fundamental rights that make free expression possible with a powerful new series of light projections that will illuminate three buildings in Manhattan’s iconic Rockefeller Center. 

Starting after sunset at 8pm on Wednesday, Sept. 14, and continuing until 10pm each evening through Sunday, Sept. 18, the facades of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and 610 and 620 Fifth Avenue will be lit with selected passages from writers and artists who have supported PEN America’s work to protect free expression.

The outdoor installation, titled SPEECH ITSELF, will include quotes from more than 60 authors in a visual tribute to the cherished freedoms to write, read, and speak. Among those whose words will be projected are Ayad Akhtar, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Margaret Atwood, Ron Chernow, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Joy Harjo, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yoon Ha Lee, Toni Morrison, and Alejandro Zambra.

Rockefeller Center Plaza is located between 49th and 50th Streets, midblock in the Rock Center campus. Info

October 6: Bruno Munari | The Child Within at CIMA

An exhibition exploring the work of the protean multidisciplinary Italian 20^th century designer through the lens of his innovative books for children, the exhibition features approximately 130 books, objects and artworks from archives, museums, galleries and private collections. Though the intended audience for Munari’s children’s books is, indeed, children, many of the experiments that Munari conducted with light, transparency, pierced surfaces and paper mechanics, that eventually resulted in some of his most iconic design objects, were first explored in the commercial and experimental books that he made. Munari was also an indefatigable teacher; his books, essays, workshops and lectures may be seen as giving corporeal form to his lessons.

The exhibition will create a dialogue between the various areas of Munari’s creative practice and draw links among diverse areas of his work, which includes lighting and furniture design, collage, sculpture and various print technologies, such as photography, xerography and book making. Munari delighted in using unconventional materials in his books: metal, thread, plastic, various textiles and found objects, for example, and he didn’t limit himself to any one style or formal language. The exhibition aims to facilitate conversations among artists and designers from across disciplines and cultural contexts.

Bruno Munari: The Child Within is curated by Steven Guarnaccia, professor Emeritus at Parsons School of Design and an author and illustrator of books for adults and children focusing on design and culture. Guarnaccia lectures widely on experimental children’s books and has contributed to international design publications including Domus and Abitare, as well as regularly collaborating with Corraini Edizioni, the principal publisher of Bruno Munari’s books.

Through January 14, 2023 at the Center for Italian Modern Art, 421 Broome Street, FL 4, New York, NY Info

October 17-23: National Design Week at the Cooper Hewitt

In celebration of this year’s National Design Awards, Cooper Hewitt will offer free admission to museum visitors during National Design Week to make design accessible to all. “This year’s National Design Award winners reflect the central role that design can play in addressing some of the most urgent needs of our time,” said Maria Nicanor, director of the museum. “Attuned to increasing social and planetary challenges, all awardees, regardless of their category, have a regenerative approach to design work that takes into account our shared future. [Deliberations of the jury] revealed that behind each winner is a philosophy of work that expertly weaves together technological innovation while elevating traditional craft, or that prioritizes preservation and reparation processes, ultimately designing for citizens, and not consumers—a reason for hope in today’s complex world if there ever was one.” National Design Week also marks Cooper Hewitt’s return to an operating schedule of seven days a week, following a modified schedule due to COVID-19. 

Through May 7, 2023 at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, 2 East 91^st Street, New York, NY Info

October 21: Alex Katz | Gathering at the Guggenheim

This career retrospective staged in the city where Katz has lived and worked his entire life, and prepared with the close collaboration of the artist, will fill the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda and an adjacent Tower Gallery. Encompassing over 200 paintings, oil sketches, collages, drawings, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works, the show will open with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from his student days in the 1940s and culminate in the rapturous and immersive landscapes that have dominated his output in recent years.

Writing in 1961, Katz noted that “Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness. Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.” Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a vivid burst of optical perception.

Emerging as an artist in the mid-20th century, Katz forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the energy and distillation of Abstract Expressionist canvases with the American vernaculars of the magazine, billboard, and movie screen. He has turned to his direct surroundings in downtown New York City and coastal Maine as his primary subject matter throughout his career, engaging the traditional painterly subjects of portraiture, genre scenes of everyday life, and landscape.

Together with the comprehensive exhibition catalogue, a series of digital productions will complement the retrospective, including a newly captured and intimate video portrait of the artist at work; an audio guide featuring observations by Guggenheim curators and notable sitters who appear in Katz’s paintings, including Vincent Katz, Bill T. Jones, Meredith Monk, and Anne Waldman; and a collaboration with the music house West Channel featuring original compositions inspired by Katz’s paintings by Rena Anakwe, Peter Bayne, Oli Chang, Elori Saxl, Michael Sempert, and Hoshiko Yamane. Note: Image above is from the catalogue, courtesy Artbook DAP

Through February 20, 2023 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Info

November 18: Thierry Mugler: Couturissime at The Brooklyn Museum

From haute couture designs to stage costumes, photographs, films, and unpublished archives, Thierry Mugler: Couturissime is the first retrospective to explore the fascinating, edgy universe of French designer and creator of iconic perfumes. A fashion visionary, Mugler established himself as one of the most daring and innovative designers of the late twentieth century. In the 1970s, Mugler defined trends by creating his acclaimed “glamazon” (a conflation of “glamour” and “Amazon”), a chic, modern woman whose style evolved from the flower power, hippie fashions of the 1960s. Throughout Mugler’s career, his bold silhouettes and use of avant-garde fabrication techniques and materials—including glass, Plexiglas, PVC, faux fur, vinyl, latex, and chrome—made their mark on fashion history. Showcasing nearly 130 outfits, most on view for the first time, the exhibition will also include accessories, videos, photographs, sketches, and a special gallery dedicated to fragrances. Already seen by more than one million visitors in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and France since its launch in 2019, the exhibition concludes its international tour in Brooklyn. Above: Installation at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris

Mugler’s sensational presentations and sleek aesthetic have been immortalized through his direction and designs for George Michael’s music video “Too Funky” (released in 1992) and his costume designs for Cirque du Soleil (Zumanity, 2003) and Beyoncé’s acclaimed world tour I Am . . . (2009). Celebrities continue to be drawn to Mugler’s designs: his classic gowns have recently been worn by Beyoncé, Cardi B, and Kim Kardashian. Couturissime also explores the significance of fashion photography, with works by numerous artists and Mugler collaborators including Lillian Bassman, Guy Bourdin, David LaChapelle, Karl Lagerfeld, Sarah Moon, Pierre et Gilles, Herb Ritts, and Ellen von Unwerth. 

Through May 7, 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY Info