NEW
Africa's Fashion Diaspora
This is an innovative exhibition that explores fashion's role in shaping international Black diasporic cultures. This exhibition is the first to examine fashion as a mode of cross-diasporic cultural production. Sixty ensembles and accessories by Black designers from Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean are placed in dialogue with each other, showing how these designers take complex inspirations from their own Black cultures and others across the diaspora.
The concept that Black peoples build and share common cultural networks—despite differences in geography, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language, and religion—is an enduring idea that scholars and leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, and Paul Gilroy have hypothesized over the 19th and 20th centuries. Self-identified Black peoples within the diverse nations of Africa and throughout the Black Diaspora have expressed this connectivity as Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, and Afrocentricity, among many other movements.
While Black Diasporic connections have been explored in music, literature, art, and philosophy, this exhibition is the first to investigate how 20th- and 21st-century fashion designers contribute to these conversations with creative practices that focus on visual storytelling to explore how Black identity operates in the contemporary world.
2. Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today
Opens September 21
This exhibition presents the history of the Sèvres Manufactory and its production of extraordinary sculptural objects in various ceramic pastes. Organized by Sèvres, Manufacture et Musée nationaux, and Bard Graduate Center, the exhibition is the first outside of France to highlight the production of sculpture made at the famed porcelain manufactory.
From extravagant Rococo to restrained Neoclassical, from romantic, neo-Gothic inventions to the elegant curves of the Art Nouveau or the geometries of the Art Deco, and in partnership with artists associated with Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop art, Sèvres has continually pushed the boundaries of ceramic production, creating objects that are neither functional nor decorative but rather art that it simply calls “sculpture.”
3. Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala
This exhibition on view at Asia Society Museum presents a watershed moment in global art history, sharing with the American public a history of Aboriginal Australian bark painting curated and narrated by the Yolŋu people inhabiting northeastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. For millennia, Yolŋu have painted their sacred clan designs on their bodies and ceremonial objects.
These designs—called miny’tji—are not merely decorative: they are the patterns of the ancestral land itself. Yolŋu people describe them as maḏayin: a term that encompasses both the sacred and the beautiful. In the early twentieth century, they turned to the medium of painting on eucalyptus bark, creating shimmering designs using ochre colors with fine brushes made of human hair, for trade, to share their identities, and as acts of diplomacy. Expressing the power and beauty of their culture, these artists continue to find new and innovative ways to transform their ancient clan designs into compelling contemporary statements.
Led by Yolŋu knowledge holders and their world views, Maḏayin offers a rare opportunity for American audiences to experience an evocative and enduring artistic movement, with parallels to modes of abstraction in other movements within modern and contemporary art history.
Drawn from the world’s most important holdings of Aboriginal bark paintings, including the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, the University of Melbourne, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, and the National Gallery of Australia, Maḏayin encompasses eight decades of artistic production at Yirrkala, from 1935 to the present, including 33 new works commissioned especially for the exhibition through the Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre.
LAST CHANCE
4. Far and Away: Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection
closes September 22
The drawings assembled by Clement C. (Chips) Moore constitute one of the preeminent collections of Dutch drawings in private hands. On view at the Morgan Library & Museum, the collection also includes works by Flemish, French, Italian, British, and American artists, spanning the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
The exhibition will demonstrate the breadth of the Moore Collection through a selection of around seventy-five works, grouped thematically to highlight the principal themes of Dutch art, the various functions and techniques of Dutch drawings, and the connections between the Dutch and other European artistic traditions.
Works on view are by Hendrick Goltzius, Jacob de Gheyn, Jan Brueghel, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Peter Lely, Claude Lorrain, Thomas Gainsborough, and John Constable are among those featured in the selection.
5. Projects Tadáskía
Change, or mudança, in Tadáskía’s native Brazilian Portuguese, lies at the center of her multidisciplinary work. Across drawing, sculpture, and other mediums, she foregrounds improvisation, conveying a sense of fluidity through her dynamic mark-making, nuanced imagery, and kaleidoscopic palette.
Projects: Tadáskía on view the Museum of Modern Art, features the artist’s expansive unbound book, ave preta mística mystical black bird (2022), which places freeform drawings in dialogue with her own poetic, bilingual text. From one sheet to the next, we follow the narrative’s winged protagonist on a flight “towards a journey of freedom,” informed by the artist’s lived experience as a Black trans woman.
For this exhibition, the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States, she has produced a monumental wall drawing and a set of sculptures in response to the gallery space. While her vigorous mark-making encourages us to trace her coursing, shifting lines, the organic materials used in her sculptures evoke the ephemeral life cycles of nature. Alongside the central role of change, as Tadáskía asserts, “the main character in the work is time.”
“I’m interested in the passage from one thing to another. ”