Here Are 23 Outstanding Museum Shows Across the US You Won’t Want to Miss This Fall

It’s back to school time in the art world. With September
officially upon us, a crush of big shows is set to open at museums
across the country.

There’s a lot to keep track of, so we’ve picked out some
highlights to look for in the next two months, from Boston and DC
to Denver and Portland. Enjoy!

 

“Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall”
at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

September 5, 2019–January 12, 2020

Preserving the history of Chicago’s historically African
American South Side has become an important part of Theaster
Gates’s practice as artist. At the Walker, he’ll present selections
from collections he’s acquired from the University of Chicago Glass
Lantern Slides Collection, the Johnson Publishing Company
Collection, and the Ana J. and Edward J. Williams Collection of
“negrobilia.” Gates will create four immersive installations in the
galleries, helping bring these old objects back to life.

The Walker is located at 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis,
Minnesota; general admission is $15.

 

“Susan Philipsz: Seven Tears”
at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis
September
6, 2019–February 2, 2020

Sound artist Susan Philipsz, known for creating works that
respond to their architectural environments, has been commissioned
to create a new installation, Too Much I Once
Lamented, for the central water court of the Pulitzer’s Tadao
Ando-designed building. The audio component, which will echo off
the reflecting pool, features the artist singing a 17th-century
lover’s lament.

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation is located at 3716
Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri; general admission is
free.

 

“Simon Dinnerstein: The
Fulbright Triptych” at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston

September 9–December 8, 2019

In 1971, Jewish American artist Simon Dinnerstein had a
Fulbright to study printmaking in Germany. That’s when he began
work on his monumental three-panel painting The Fulbright
Triptych (1971–74), which New York Times
critic Roberta Smith dubbed “an overlooked masterpiece of 1970s
realism.” On rare loan from the Palmer Museum of Art at
Pennsylvania State University, the painting, which has inspired a
2011 book of no less than 45 essays, is stunning in its attention
to detail, offering near-life-size portraits of the artist and his
wife and daughter.

The McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, is located
at 2101 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston,
Massachusetts; general admission is free.

 

“Hew Locke: Here’s the
Thing” at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary
Art, Kansas City
September 12, 2019–January
19, 2020

British artist Hew Locke’s biggest exhibition to date is making
its first stop in the US, after debuting at the Ikon Gallery in
Birmingham, England. (It was organized with the Colby College
Museum of Art in Maine where it will be on view February 20–June 7,
2020.) His work, which appropriates coats of arms and other regal
symbols, is inspired by British colonial influence in his childhood
home of Guyana, a former colony.

The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is located at 4420
Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri; general admission is
free.

 

“Jacolby Satterwhite: Room
for Living” at the Fabric Workshop and Museum,
Philadelphia
September 13, 2019–January 19, 2020

Following a two-year artist residency at the Fabric Workshop and
Museum, Jacolby Satterwhite will present new digital animation
works, a virtual reality experience, and multi-media installations
that give physical form to objects that featured in his six-video
piece Reifying Desire. Made using 3-D printers and
CNC routers, Satterwhite’s sculptures will include larger-than-life
figures inspired by The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
by Caravaggio (1601–02) and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon (1907). The artist also has an upcoming show at New
York’s Pioneer Works, “You’re at Home”
(October 4–November 24, 2019).

The Fabric Workshop and Museum is located at 1214 Arch
Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; general admission is $5
suggested donation.

 

“Elmgreen & Dragset:
Sculptures” at the Nasher Sculpture Center,
Dallas
September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020

Believe it or not, the Scandanavian duo Michael Elmgreen and
Ingar Dragset, better known as Elmgreen & Dragset, have never had a
major US museum show. The Nasher is bringing together a large
selection of their sculptures, which are known for their subversive
wit, but can touch on sensitive issues such as gay rights and
aging.

The Nasher Sculpture Center is located at 2001 Flora
Street, Dallas, Texas; general admission is $10.

 

“Alicja Kwade: Moving in
Glances” at the Dallas
Contemporary
September 15, 2019–December 22,
2020

As Alicja Kwade’s stunning rooftop installation at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art draws to a close, the Polish-German
artist is opening a pair of sister shows at Dallas Contemporary and
the List Visual Arts Center at MIT in
Cambridge, Massachusetts (October 18, 2019–January 5, 2020). The
artist’s sculptures present ordinary materials such as concrete,
glass, and steel in unusual settings.

Dallas Contemporary is located at 161 Glass Street, Dallas,
Texas; general admission is free. The List Visual Arts Center at
MIT is located at 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge,
Massachusetts;  admission is free.

 

“The Shape of Abstraction: Selections From the Ollie
Collection” at the Saint Louis Art Museum

September 17, 2019–March 8, 2020

In 2017, arts patron and Saint Louis native Ronald Ollie and his
wife Monique gifted 81 works by black abstract artists to the St.
Louis Art Museum, including examples by Norman Lewis, Sam Gilliam,
Chakaia Booker, James Little, and others. The works, while focused
on contemporary art, date back to the 1940s, when a generational
shift in abstraction was afoot.

The Saint Louis Art Museum is located at One Fine Arts
Drive, Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri; general admission is
free.

 

“Antonio: The Fine Art of Fashion
Illustration” at the Phoenix Art
Museum
September 21, 2019–January 5, 2020

The Phoenix Art Museum has brought together over 100 drawings,
photographs, and magazines featuring the work of fashion
illustrator Antonio Lopez (1943–1987) and his friend and business
partner, Juan Ramos. In addition to 12 never-before-exhibited,
large-scale drawings created in 1973 at the Condé Nast offices in
New York City for Vogue, the show includes 20 of
Lopez’s drawings from Richard Burton’s illustrated
English-language edition of Tales from the Thousand and
One Nights (1985).

The Phoenix Art Museum is located at 1625 North Central
Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona; general admission is $21.

 

“LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze” at the
Renaissance Society, Chicago
September 24–December 1,
2019

After chronicling the lives of working class residents in her
hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and in Flint, Michigan, LaToya
Ruby Frazier has turned her lens on the Rust Belt town of
Lordstown, Ohio. Her latest series documents the economic crisis
that unfolded after General Motors shut down the local plant,
ceasing production of Chevrolet Cruzes.

The Renaissance Society is located at the University of
Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois; general
admission is free.

 

“Yayoi Kusama: Love Is
Calling” at the Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston
September 24, 2019–February 7, 2020

The ICA Boston will present Yayoi
Kusama’s LOVE IS CALLING (2013), its recently acquired Infinity Room. The
installation is the largest Infinity Room by the Japanese
nonagenarian owned by a North American museum and features colorful
inflated tentacles with the artist’s signature polka dot motif
reflected in the mirrored walls, floor, and ceiling in the darkened
chamber. The museum will also present work from its collection that
shows Kusama’s influence on other contemporary artists in the
accompanying presentation “Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After
Kusama.”

The ICA Boston is located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston,
Massachusetts; general admission is $15.

 

“Rirkrit Tiravanija: Fear Eats the Soul” at
Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland
Opens September 26,
2019

If you haven’t made a pilgrimage yet to the temple of
contemporary art that is the new Glenstone Museum, now’s your
chance. Beyond the gigantic Jeff Koons half-rocker topiary,
the new autumn show of Rirkrit Tiravanija is certainly worth
traveling for. The exhibition draws on the “relational aesthetics”
guru’s best-known works, and will include a work spray-painted
directly on a gallery wall, a soup kitchen, and a T-shirt
silkscreen station, plus a series of wall frames installed in
unlikely places around the museum.

Glenstone is located at 12100 Glen Road, Potomac, Maryland;
general admission is free, appointments are required.

 

“Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence” at
the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
September 29 2019–January 5, 2020

Los Angeles-based painter Lari Pittman is being feted with his
most sprawling retrospective in the last two decades, bringing a
cache of 80 paintings and 50 works on paper that show the breadth
of his interests in collage and mixed media.

The Hammer Museum is located at 10899 Wilshire
Boulevard, Los Angeles, California; general admission is
free.

 

“Hanks Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal…”
at the Portland Art Museum

October 12, 2019–January 12, 2020

Hank Willis Thomas gets a major traveling museum survey, kicking
off in Portland, Maine, before heading to Crystal Bridges in
Arkansas and the Cincinnati Museum of Art. In addition to
showcasing some 100 works including photographs, sculptures, video
installations, and quilts made from prison uniforms and sports
jerseys, the exhibition will include a new work commissioned by the
museum that uses the US flag as a jumping off point for addressing
deaths by gun violence in the country in 2018.

The Portland Art Museum is located at 1219 Southwest Park
Avenue in Portland, Oregon; general admission is $20.

 

“Liu Wei: Invisible Cities” at the Cleveland Art Museum
October
13, 2019–February 16, 2020

This marks the first solo US show for Chinese artist Liu Wei,
despite his international renown (he was featured in the 2019
Venice Biennale). Suggesting his major stature, it is hosted
jointly at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (September 13,
2019–January 5, 2020) and the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
The show takes its name from Italian writer Italo Calvino’s
novella, a series of vignettes about fantastical fictional cities.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is located at 11150 East
Boulevard in Cleveland, Ohio; general admission is free. MOCA
Cleveland is located at 11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio;
general admission is free.

 

“Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models,
Democratic Principles and the Conflict of Ideals ” at
the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

October 19, 2019–January 19, 2020

Thomas Jefferson—an architect of American history who penned the
Declaration of Independence and created a new visual identity with
his symmetrical Palladian buildings—also owned hundreds of
slaves. This show explores the fractured nature of his conflicted
ideals and how to reckon with his contributions to the country with
the knowledge of his failings.

The Chrysler Museum of Art is located at One Memorial Place,
Norfolk, Virginia; general admission is free.

 

“Anila Quayyum Agha’s Between Light and Shadow”
at the Toledo Museum of Art
Opens October 19,
2019

Pakistani-American artist Anila Quayyum Agha presents three
immersive, gallery-swallowing installations that throw shadows of
intricate patterns onto visitors and their surroundings in this new
exhibition. The cut-out motifs are often inspired by Islamic
architectural motifs and comment on domestic and international
social and political issues.

The Toledo Museum of Art is located at 2445 Monroe Street,
Toledo, Ohio; general admission is free.

 

“Claude Monet: The Truth of
Nature” at the Denver Art Museum

October 21, 2019–February 2, 2020

Co-organized with Germany’s Museum Barberini in Potsdam, “Claude Monet:
The Truth of Nature” is being billed as the most comprehensive US
exhibition dedicated to the pioneering Impressionist in 20 years.
More than 120 paintings offer a record of Monet’s extensive travels
throughout the Mediterranean, London, the Netherlands, and Norway,
seeking new subjects even as he returned time and again to familiar
motifs such as haystacks, poplars, and, of course, the waterlilies
and Japanese bridge in his beloved home garden at Giverny.

The Denver Art Museum is located at 100 West 14th Avenue
Parkway, Denver, Colorado; general admission is $10.

 

“Pat Steir: Color Wheel” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, DC
October 24, 2019–September 7, 2020

For her largest site-specific exhibition to date, Pat Steir will
hang 28 large-scale paintings, each seven feet by nine feet, in the
Hirshhorn’s circular second floor galleries. Together, the
canvases, each featuring Steir’s unique drip-work technique, will
form a massive color wheel, blending red, orange, yellow, green,
and blue to surround the viewer in the a spectrum of color.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is located at
Independence Avenue and 7th Street, Washington, DC; general
admission is free.

 

“Edward Hopper and the
American Hotel” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
Richmond
October 26, 2019–February 23, 2020

The VMFA takes a deep dive into Edward Hopper’s works depicting
hotel rooms, celebrating the romance and anonymity of temporary
lodgings. The show offers museum-goers a chance to stay the
night in a recreation of the room in his
painting Western Motel (1965), while the show
also explores the larger history of hotels in American culture
through thematically similar works by 27 other
artists.

The VMFA is located at 200 North Arthur Ashe
Boulevard, Richmond, Virginia; general admission is
free.

 

“North Forest Lights” at
the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville,
Arkansas
October 26, 2019–February 16, 2020

The multimedia studio SuperReal is
headed to Crystal Bridges for a nighttime exhibition in the Ozark
woods, for which it will create five light- and sound-art
installations designed to encourage visitors to reconnect with
nature. The group will cover the museum’s bridge in colored fog,
let visitors gather around a digital fire pit, and present a forest
orchestra featuring bluegrass, ragtime, and other regional musical
styles.

The Crystal Bridges Museum is located at 600 Museum
Way, Bentonville, Arkansas; general admission is
free.

 

“Richard Mosse: Incoming” at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art
October 26, 2019–February 17, 2020

Over the course of two years, Richard Mosse turned his lens onto
the mass migration of people as they fled the Middle East, Africa,
and beyond. Armed with a thermal military camera, he sought to
produce what he calls “adequate images” to reflect displacement
across the world. The resulting photos are equally harrowing,
beautiful, and unsettling.

SFMOMA is located at 151 Third Street, San Francisco,
California; general admission is $25.

 

“Julie Mehretu” at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art
November 3, 2019–May 17, 2020

A mid-career survey for Julie Mehretu will showcase some 36
paintings and 41 works on paper from 1996 to the present by the
Ethiopian-born artist, highlighting her considerable printmaking
skills in addition to her large-scale canvases. The show was
co-organized with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where
it will head next year (June 26–September 20,2020).

LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los
Angeles, California; general admission is $25.

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You Won’t Want to Miss This Fall appeared first on artnet
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