On View

“Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition”Phillips Collection, Washington, DC What the museum says: The show “presents works by African American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries together with examples by the early 20th-century European artists with whom they engaged. “European modernist art has been an important, yet complicated influence on black […] More

“Meleko Mokgosi: Your Trip to Africa”at the Pérez Art Museum Miami What the museum says: “Combining a high degree of painterly skill with a poetic, open-ended semiotic approach and a penchant for deep archival research, Meleko Mokgosi shines light on some of the complex socioeconomic dynamics that animate contemporary southern Africa. Whereas traditional history paintings feature […] More

“Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle”Peabody Essex Museum What the museum says: “‘Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle’ is the first museum exhibition of the series of paintings ‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ (1954–56) by the best-known black American artist of the 20th century, Jacob Lawrence. Created during the modern civil rights era, Lawrence’s 30 intimate panels […] More

“Boro Textiles: Sustainable Aesthetics”Japan Society, New York What the museum says: “ (“rags” or “tatters”) are patchwork textiles hand-pieced by peasants in Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The inability to cultivate cotton in the northern climate of Tohoku necessitated the practice of stitching remnants of used fabric into utilitarian items, including blankets, coats, and […] More

In the past decade, a public reckoning has unfolded over monuments in the United States, about who gets honored and why, and whether statues to figures such as Confederate generals should be removed from display altogether. The Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has spent his career addressing these thorny subjects, often by appropriating the objects themselves. Civil […] More

As galleries and museums across the US shuttered this week in a desperate attempt to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, the writer-curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen spent the weekend putting together a group show responding to the crisis—one that would be hosted not in a white walled gallery, but online. On Monday, […] More

“Ebony G. Patterson: … while the dew is still on the roses… ”Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina What the museum says: Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson’s “neo-baroque” works “address violence, masculinity, ‘bling,’ visibility, and invisibility within the post-colonial context of her native Kingston and within black youth culture globally. This exhibition focuses on […] More

“Desire: A Revision from the 20th Century to the Digital Age”Irish Museum of Modern Art What the Museum Says: “From the beginning of the 20th century to now, ‘Desire: A Revision’ develops through the lens of the Eurocentric male gaze of the Surrealist artists and their influence in shaping artistic depictions of desire in contemporary […] More