LAST CHANCE
The Rains Are Changing Fast: New Acquisitions in Context
Only on view until September 1
This exhibtion highlights artwork recently acquired by The Heckscher Museum of Art alongside a selection of key works long held in the Museum's collection. For over a century, the Heckscher has been collecting and presenting art that explores the landscapes and social issues of its place and time.
This exhibition, which takes its title from a 2021 video by Christine Sciulli, features new and beloved works of art that together reveal the diverse ways in which artists contend with environmental and cultural change. Created over a span of 175 years by 39 artists, the works are united by shared engagements with landscape, allegory, and abstraction. Some, like Richard Mayhew's Pescadero (2014) or George Inness's The Pasture, Durham, Connecticut (c. 1879), present luminous, if precarious, visions of the American landscape. Others, including Deborah Buck's They Had Stars in Their Eyes (2020) and Dorothy Dehner's Landscape (1976), employ modes of abstraction that speak to issues of gender and materiality. The resulting visual conversations emphasize the Museum's ongoing commitment to social concerns, environmental issues, and Long Island's diverse communities.
2. Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream
If you’re looking for a cultural experience outside the city, take a trip up to Annandale-on-Hudson and Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, which includes the Hessel Museum of Art. Currently on view is an exhibition of the work of American artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953), whose work investigates such themes as history, identity and power. Over the course of 40 years, she has built an acclaimed body of work using photographs, text, fabric, audio, installation, video and performance.
The exhibition is sequenced over nine rooms, each representing a body or bodies of work. Beginning with Painting the Town (2021), Weems addresses the protests that erupted in May 2020 in over 2,000 cities and towns across the United States in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police. In Weems’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, the protests continued through September 2020, escalating to points of violent confrontation between police, protestors, and counter-protestors. Weems returned to Portland to photograph many of the businesses that boarded their storefront windows to protect against potential looting and vandalism. In an adjacent room, Weems displays an array of intimate portraits entitled Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984), an earlier series from Portland of black-and-white photographs recording the joys and agonies of family life.
NEW
3. Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation
Coinciding with The Noguchi Museum’s 40th anniversary in 2025, works from the Museum’s original second floor installation will return to those galleries for the first time since 2009.
The exhibition uses as its basis the catalogue The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), written by Noguchi as a guide to works in the Museum in place of traditional wall labels. This in turn used to define the Museum’s permanent collection after his death in December 1988. The original installation consisted of sculptures that had accumulated before and after Noguchi’s move to his 10th Street studio in Long Island City in 1961. Noguchi considered a number of these to be personal breakthroughs, works that represented significant turns and returns within his cyclical practice over the course of six decades.
The exhibition can never replicate Noguchi’s exact vision for these galleries, as they have since been repartitioned after renovations in the early 2000s. Rather, this installation is a distillation of various phases from 1985–88, adapted and reimagined according to archival photographs documenting how Noguchi assiduously arranged and rearranged his works in different constellations in the first years of the Museum.
4. Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now
on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea, the exhibition features the work of 32 contemporary artists, in conversation with objects from the museum’s permanent collection. This expansive, museum-wide show includes painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performance. The works reimagine the forms, symbols, and narratives of the living cultures of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and other Himalayan regions.
The pairings create visual, thematic, and material connections that invite new ways of understanding Himalayan art and culture. Throughout the museum's six floors, the 50 works are connected through symbols and stories from Himalayan cultural heritage. The works explore the artists’ personal and collective histories and examine themes such as identity, spiritual practice, sense of belonging, grief, and memory.
Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now is the Rubin’s final exhibit at their 17 Street location. The show is on view through October 6.
5. I'm a thousand different people—Every one is real
Currently on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is I’m a thousand different people – Every one is real. The exhibition brings together a selection of works recently acquired by the museum, representing an intergenerational swath of LGBTQ+ artists with an emphasis on accessibility, authenticity, and self-determination.
The show takes its title from a drawing by artist and queer icon Candy Darling. The words, haphazardly written on an inconspicuous piece of scratch paper, emphasize the complex reality of queer and trans identity. This drawing is displayed alongside works by artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, Kia LaBeija, and Tommy Kha. The show encompasses a diversity of media and representational styles, and includes both historical and contemporary pieces. The exhibition embraces a prismatic approach to rendering LGBTQIA+ existence, with an emphasis on plurality, fantasy, and reinvention.