New York may never sleep, but summer feels like nap time. At least in the world of art. culture is recovering from the post-Labor Day slump and heading into fall, its busiest time of year.
The highlight of the season resembles the birthday party of artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (b. 1931, Rogers, Texas; d. 1989, New York, NY) at the Whitney Museum of American Arts. “Edges of Ailey” marks the first big party. A large-scale museum exhibit that celebrates her life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy.
The historic show combines visual arts, live performances, music, a variety of archival materials, and a multi-screen video installation drawn from recordings of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre’s repertoire to explore the full diversity of his art and personal experience. life. The exhibition focuses on man himself, capturing the full diversity of his passions, curiosities, and creativity, revealed in his archives, through his dances, and within an ongoing series of other artists spanning nearly two centuries.
Those other artists include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Thornton Dial, Rashid Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Glenn Ligon, Loïs Mailou Jones, Archibald Motley, Jr., Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Alma Thomas, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems. Not bad.
A dynamic montage of Ailey’s life and dances will play in an 18-channel video installation, created by filmmakers Josh Begley and Kya Lou, and curator Adrienne Edwards. This film is made up of documentation of recently digitized performances, dances performed for the camera, animated footage, television broadcasts, and contextual photographs of cultural, social, political, and social events of the time. Visitors also delight in intimate displays of never-before-seen choices from Ailey’s private archives, which offer a foundation for understanding everything from her regimen and artistic thought to the demands of travel and her struggle with homosexuality.
Ailey’s presence, via the video surroundings and her embedded non-public effects, contextualizes the variety of works of art from more than 80 artists addressing the parallel, relevant, and inseparable considerations of black creativity in the United States, from before the Civil War till today. Array
“Edges of Ailey” affirms the artist’s place as one of the most culturally and historically significant artistic figures in the United States and the world.
Throughout the presentation, a powerful program of performances physically in the museum’s third theater will accompany the gallery component.
The exhibition opens on September 25 and will be open until February 9, 2025.
Before that, there are wonderful works of art to see, from galleries to museums and fairs.
The Armory Show, which bills itself as “New York’s art fair,” once again occupies the Javits Center from five to eight with the largest art galleries and novelties from around the world. That same weekend, Independent 20th Century opened its store in the historic Battery Maritime Building on Cipriani South Street at 10 South Street.
Presented in 2022 to champion foreign avant-garde artists and movements spanning from 1900 to 2000, it should be prevented through Nahmad Contemporary’s installation showcasing the Riviera’s captivating French seascape painter, Raoul Dufy. Paintings and works on paper produced between 1920 and 1948 show the artist at the height of his career.
RYAN LEE, for his part, will offer an intergenerational exhibition through two artists who share a preference for celebrating the humanity, strength and good looks of the black body. Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé created intimate, refined, and romantic depictions of black figures that reference classical sculpture. Her paintings are joined by recently published pieces through Emma Amos from the 1980s. During this period, Amos was inspired by newspaper photographs of black athletes such as Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan and Jackie Joyner-Kersee to create her acclaimed “Athletes” series. and Animals”.
Try finding a way to Native artist Brad Kahlhamer’s talk at the fair Friday at 5:00.
The New York VOLTA Art Fair will also be held from September 4 to 8 at Chelsea Industrial with the global addition of a Ukrainian pavilion that will showcase artists and galleries that are there in the face of the attempted Russian invasion.
Defying categorization, the first week of September additionally finds the Great Elephant Migration arriving in Gansevoort Plaza in the Meat Packing District. Even non-art lovers will get a kick out of this!
Place Fotografiska’s presentation of Vivian Maier’s photographs in the most sensible place in your fall arts calendar, as the exhibition closes on September 29, in conjunction with the museum’s move to a larger location. “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” marks the first major retrospective in the United States of “invisible” artist Vivian Maier.
Maier (1926-2009) spent her early years in the Bronx, experimenting with photography, capturing likely mundane street scenes and other people while working as a nanny. He then moved to Chicago, continuing this practice until the late 1990s, with a frame of paintings amounting to more than 100,000 negatives.
Maier has made no effort to publicly display his photographs. His glowing eye was not discovered until 2007, following an auction of one of his garage lockers due to late payments. Inside was a stunning visual record of 20th-century life, an artist the world didn’t know it needed, along with tens of thousands of negatives.
“Vivian Maier: Unseen Work” explores Maier’s entire career from the early fifties to the mid-eighties through approximately two hundred works: old and trendy prints, color, black and white, Super 8 films and soundtracks.
Manny Vega (b. Bronx, 1956) is no stranger to New York’s street life. His mosaics and murals adorn walls, subway stations, cultural centers, and business facades throughout East Harlem. Many of these works celebrate important figures—particularly women—in the history of the Puerto Rican and Latinx communities.
The Museum of the City of New York celebrates Vega during “Byzantine Bembé: New York by Manny Vega,” through December 8. Vega’s style has been dubbed “Byzantine Hip-Hop” for his uncompromising technical command encompassing ancient Mediterranean mosaic-making and the electrifying lines of hyper-detailed Sharpie pen-and-ink drawings.
The museum describes the artist’s worldview as, “colorful, danceable, passionately spiritual, and complex-yet-accessible.”
Also in Harlem, take advantage of pleasant fall weather by exploring Harlem Sculpture Gardens, the neighborhood’s first large scale outdoor sculpture exhibition on view through the end of September at three locations.
Tina Girouard (1946–2020) became a central figure in the avant-garde art scene in 1970s New York alongside peers like Gordon Matta-Clark, Lynda Benglis, and Mary Heilmann. The Center for Art Research and Alliances presents the first comprehensive retrospective in New York for the artist September 20 through January 12, 2025. The artist’s first NYC gallery exhibition since 2012 simultaneously takes place at Magenta Plains.
When New York began to move towards the commodification of art in the 1980s, Girouard left the city to safeguard the integrity of his artistic practice. He returned to his home state of Louisiana and later opened a studio in Haiti, working with local artists. For this reason, many of his later works have not gone unnoticed and Girouard, highly influential on generations of artists to come, has remained unknown.
The free exhibition features films, performances, drawings, sequins, textiles and installations, as well as archival photographs, scores and preparatory notes.
At The Met, it’s not a blockbuster show for a famous artist, but a demure display from an almost totally unknown artist most deserving attention.
Born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, Mary Sully (1896-1963), a reclusive Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, produced very unique works, encouraged by her ancestors Native Americans and settlers. This first solo exhibition of Sully’s groundbreaking production highlights the Met’s recent acquisitions and loans from the Mary Sully Foundation, works that challenge classical notions of Native American and fashionable art.
Working without patronage in near obscurity, and largely self-taught, Sully produced approximately 200 intricately designed and vividly colored drawings in colored pencil, graphite, and ink on paper that captured meaningful aspects of her Dakota community mixed with visual elements observed from other Native nations and the aesthetics of urban life. Euro-American celebrities from popular culture, politics, and religion inspired some of her most striking works, which she called “personality prints”—abstract portraits arranged as vertical triptychs.
Indigenous artmaking also takes center stage at the Asia Society Museum where from September 17 through January 5, 2025, an exhibition showcasing the rich history of Aboriginal Australian bark painting, curated by the Yolŋu people of northeastern Arnhem Land, Australia, will be held.
For millennia, the Yolŋu have painted their sacred clan designs, known as miny’tji, on their bodies and ceremonial objects. Those designs embody both the sacred and the beautiful, reflecting patterns of the ancestral land.
In the early 20th century, the Yolŋu began painting on eucalyptus bark, ocher, and fine human hair brushes, creating designs related to trade, identity, and international relations. Today, they continue to innovate, transforming old extended family designs into fresh art.
Led through possessors of Yolŋu wisdom, the performance provides a rare opportunity for American audiences to revel in this evocative and enduring art movement. It features works from the world’s leading collections of Aboriginal bark paintings, and adds 33 new pieces commissioned for this exhibition.
Lastly, Gen X dudes will go nuts for Poster House’s “Just Frame It” display of Nike-endorsed sports superstar posters. Nostalgia for days from the childhood bedrooms of 1980s America.
Berry Campbell Gallery will offer the first New York solo exhibition of Bernice Bing (1936-1998), an influential figure among Bay Area abstract expressionists who is beginning to gain the praise she deserves. As an independent, queer Asian-American woman, Bing conveys the global art norms of her time.
Growing up among an orphanage and foster homes in San Francisco and experiencing the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Bing struggled to assimilate into American life while seeking a connection to his Chinese cultural heritage. In the midst of the Beat scene in San Francisco in the 1960s, Bing absorbed the strategies of his professors at the California College of Arts and Crafts, adding Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell and Saburō Hasegawa. He worked to acquire wisdom. of Chinese and Asian artistic practices, giving rise to an exclusive taste that she called “calligraphy-inspired abstraction. “
Through painting, Bing has discovered a language to explore the complexity of identity. This research exhibition (September 12 to October 12) will feature works from the artist’s estate that have not been noticed in decades, as well as pieces from his career.
Opening on September 19, Alabama-based textile artist Yvonne Wells is hosting her second solo exhibition at Fort Gansevoort. Wells is a self-taught artist who lives and works near Gee’s Bend’s outstanding quilting network.
She began quilting in the winter of 1979 without any sewing experience, with the intention of keeping her family warm. Yesterday and today he reused scraps of fabric. Wells’s summary quilts stand out, made in atypical shapes.
On September 12, Venus Over Manhattan premiers the first US-based solo exhibition of artist and poet John Pule. From the small island nation of Niue in the South Pacific Ocean, Pule has risen to become one of the region’s most celebrated and important artists and is increasingly gaining notoriety across the world. His intricate paintings and drawings offer distinct meditations on the history, natural environs, and iconography of his home island and Polynesia more broadly.
“Objects: USA 2024” will debut on the R
Bring home a piece of New York’s global art with two books premiering this fall. “Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art” offers a revealing account of MoMA’s early years, told through the recently commissioned profiles of 14 women who were instrumental in the institution’s formation and development.
“Elevated: Art on the High Line” examines the rich, multifaceted offerings of The High Line’s public art program, showcasing projects from the past decade through a roster of artists from around the world. Through voluminous photographs and conversations with engaging artists, this e-book examines the dozens of outdoor installations, billboards, murals, video projects, and participatory occasions that demonstrate High Line Art’s unique cultural programming and dynamics.
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