Art Galleries & Museums

La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) celebrates the artistic journey of Ren Hang (1987-2017), one of the most influential Chinese photographers of his generation. The exhibition Love, Ren Hang is a luscious, melancholic, and provocative journey through bold colors, animals, naked bodies, and nocturnal shots.

Pioneering photographer Oscar Gustaf Rejlander wrote, “It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials, which makes his production a work of art.”

The photographer behind one of the most iconic images of the 20th century, Dorothea Lange’s images remain as powerful and relevant as they were 80 years ago.

Through May 12 at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Paris 1900: City of Entertainment introduces visitors to Paris during the Belle Époque (“Beautiful Era”) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Few cities have the allure of Paris. Known as the City of Light, it has attracted tourists, artists and free thinkers for hundreds of years.

Later this year, the long-awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will open its doors on Miracle Mile in Los Angeles. Situated next door to LACMA in a city that happens to be the number two tourist destination in the country, the new museum should draw plenty of traffic, but beyond a screening series and a few old props and posters under glass, the script has yet to be written on what a motion picture museum should be. 

Opening this week at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago is the first major survey of acclaimed photographer Laurie Simmons. Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera encompasses four decades of her work, including film and sculpture, in addition to her photographs. Known for her close-up images of the world of dolls, Simmons has long used her lens to critique gender roles and idealized visions of American prosperity and domesticity.

Since his death in 2005, attention to the minimalist painter Robert Duran has been, well, minimal. Duran was well-known in his liftime, having participated in a pair of Whitney Biennials (1969 and 1973). He mounted a number of solo exhibitions at New York’s Bykert Gallery, and his work was reviewed in Artforum, ArtNews and the New York Times as part of the vanguard of minimalist artists in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Four thousand photos is almost too many, but Annie Leibovitz The Early Years, 1970-1983: Archive Project No. 1, at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, through April 14, has more than that. In fact, there are so many that some are placed at ankle height, requiring young knees for viewing, while others sit six feet and above. High or low, they’re all worth seeing. 

Haunting is the word that the press and the public are using to describe the retrospective dedicated to Sir Don McCullin on view at the Tate Museum in London through May 6. McCullin, born in London in 1935, has spent his life behind a camera, covering some of the most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century: Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Biafra, and Cambodia, just to cite a few.

Sculptor Nari Ward brings his perspective on the American experience to the New Museum this week. Ward, who was born in Jamaica, has lived and worked in Harlem for much of his twenty-five-year career. We The People is the first museum survey of his work and brings together over thirty sculptures, paintings, videos, and large-scale installations from throughout his career.