Art News

For nearly five decades, Cindy Sherman has been playing hide and seek with her audience. Always not quite herself, her self-portraits in elaborate disguises have offered poignant commentary with humor and mystery. Now the evolution of her practice is on full display in a retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

All heads turned and smiles lit up the room as two athletic Weimaraners, Flo and Topper, bounded excitedly through the crowd followed by their guru, famed artist/photographer, William Wegman. The occasion was the opening reception for Outside In, a mind-expanding exhibition spanning over four decades in the prolific career of one of America’s most beloved artists.

You’ll find works from some of the most influential contemporary Chinese artists, such as Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing, and Yin Xiuzhen at the  Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) this summer. Although well-known in the Chinese contemporary art scene, most of these artists are still little-known in the United States.

The beautiful Ardabil Carpet is one of the most important objects in the V&A’s Middle Eastern Collection, and the centrepiece of our Jameel Gallery of Islamic art. As the world’s oldest dated carpet, it is incredibly delicate and needs careful preservation. How is such a large and precious object preserved?

For generations, children have been transported to a magical world of monsters and raucous parties by Maurice Sendak’s classic book Where the Wild Things Are. His fun romp through main character Max’s imagination has delighted readers since its publication in 1963, and it remains a classic, still voted by contemporary audiences as one of the greatest children’s books of all time.

If you plan to see Au Naturel, the current survey of Sarah Lucas at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum, best leave your penis at home. The show has plenty to spare, whether it’s the feminist artist’s Penetralia pieces from 2008, a series of phallus-shaped sculptures made mainly from plaster and wood, or 2013’s Eros, featuring a nine-foot concrete appendage lying atop a compacted car (below). It makes an ideal complement to her Soap wallpaper (above) from 1989 featuring uncircumcised penis heads staring back at viewers like alien cyclopes.

Posters, in all their various forms and purposes, are a ubiquitous and often over-looked art form. This week in New York, a new museum is opening devoted to their conservation and study. The Poster House, located in Chelsea at 119 West 23rd Street, is the first museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to posters.

His murals have graced walls from Paris to Israel and Ellis Island. Now the world-renowned muralist JR has left his mark on San Francisco for the first time.

Michelle Finamore, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts, explores the rich history of gender in fashion in a tradition-disrupting exhibition, now on view. For a museum whose first curator of contemporary art was not appointed until the 1970s, the MFA’s trajectory into 21st-century collecting has been rocket-like. Gender Bending Fashion seeks to continue this modernization by drawing the interest of communities not usually found wandering the galleries of this august institution.

Artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby discusses Janded (2012), her spare portrayal of a young Nigerian woman. She describes the figure’s complex backstory and the meaning of the Nigerian slang term that gave the canvas its name.