Art Galleries & Museums

Pittsburgh-based visual and performance artist Vanessa German, known for her activism as well sculptures incorporating found objects and female figurines, considers the experience of a vulnerable, underserved, and criminalized segment of America in the exhibition, Things Are Not Always What They Seem: A Phenomenology of Black Girlhood.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has all of their Vincent Van Gogh masterpieces under one roof for the first time in years. The Met owns sixteen Van Gogh's, the largest collection in North America. The works are frequently out on loan for exhibitions at other institutions around the world.

Opening Friday at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), Sara Cwynar: Image Model Muse uses film, collage, and composite photographs to examine how design and popular images impact our psyches, affect our social and political realities, and mold our conceptions of beauty.

A new retrospective of painter Liu Shuishi is christening Chase Contemporary’s new gallery space in New York City. The first retrospective of his fifteen-year career, the exhibition collects a large body of Shuishi’s work. Shuishi believes thought is the carrier of art, and his paintings are meditations on the isolation and instability of contemporary life. Influenced by German and Abstract Expressionism and traditional Chinese calligraphy, his brushstrokes are bold and gestural.

An extensive exhibition at the Met Breuer, "Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963–2017" introduces viewers to the acclaimed painter’s previously unknown sculpture. A groundbreaking innovator in abstract painting, Whitten also created striking sculpture, utilizing wood, nails, fish bones, and other materials.

Toyin Ojih Odutola has spent three years and four exhibitions telling the story of TH Lord Temitope Omodele and TMH Lord Jideofor Emeka. Now in a fifth exhibition, opening this week at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Ojih Odutola concludes her visual drama.

Vernacular photographs are the lifeblood of affirmative self (re)presentation. For African-Americans, whose relationship with photography has always been complicated—stemming from, among other things, the difficulty with which photographic technology registers melanated skin (see Shirley cards)—portraits are not only personal, but political. Until October 8, the exhibition, African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s will be on view at The Met Fifth Avenue.

Inspired by a 1989 Guerrilla Girls poster stating, “You’re seeing less than half the picture without the vision of women artists and artists of color,” a new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum helps viewers get woke. It examines major works, new acquisitions, and rediscoveries in the Museum’s collection through an intersectional feminist lens. Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection highlights over fifty artists who use their art to advocate for race, gender, and class equality.

Currently at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Empresses of China’s Forbidden City is the first ever international exhibition to explore female power and influence during China’s last dynasty.

The ecofeminist visions of artist Ana Mendieta and writer Rebecca Solnit guide this exhibition of works concerned with how the body relates to the earth. Drawn primarily from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s (MCA) permanent collection, a body measured against the earth shows how Land Art and the reclamation of and interest in the body found in Feminist Art intersect and converse.