There’s nothing inherently wrong with another exhibition venerating an Old Master or a modern art rock star. But this year, many museums and major institutions are instead highlighting the work of women artists, queer artists, and artists of color who were overlooked in their lifetime, or introducing a generation of fresh voices to their largest audiences yet.
Here, we share 10 artists with major museum solo shows in 2023, spanning everything from sculpture and painting to film and installation art made with artificial intelligence.
Dia Beacon, Beacon, New York
February 17, 2023–
Last year, Senga Nengudi took home the Nasher Prize, awarded for excellence in contemporary sculpture. In her practice, she’s used everything from thrifted pantyhose and dry-cleaning bags to sand, paper, and tape to create abstract works that explore the body, race, and womanhood, among other themes. The use of inexpensive, overlooked materials has been a hallmark of her practice since the 1970s, when she was staging performance art pieces in freeway underpasses and other public spaces as part of the L.A. collective Studio Z.
Much of Nengudi’s work straddles the line between sculpture and performance. To translate that cross-disciplinary aspect of her practice, Dia Beacon’s long-term exhibition of sculptures and immersive installations will be accompanied by a series of performances devised with partnering venues.
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
February 25–May 14, 2023
Also traveling to: Camden Art Centre, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
In a recent conversation with Interview magazine, artist Oscar yi Hou described Martin Wong as “the OG Gaysian Cowboy,” which seems like a suitable introduction. From the 1970s to the ’90s, the Chinese American painter captured the margins of society, depicting queer life in racialized communities and dense urban landscapes while embedding his vignettes with Chinese iconography, graffiti, images of American Sign Language, and homoerotic undertones.
Martin Wong
7
View Slideshow
The first major European exhibition of Wong’s oeuvre, “Malicious Mischief,” is set to debut at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art in February, and will include more than 100 works created between the late 1960s and 1999, the year Wong died of AIDS-related illness at age 53. After finishing its run in Germany, the exhibition will spend the summer at Camden Art Centre in London, before traveling to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in November.
Cecily Brown may have risen to prominence in her native London as the starriest painter among the Young British Artists, but she decamped to New York shortly after graduating from the Slade School of Art in 1994 and has been living in the city ever since. This year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is commemorating those nearly 30 years of American life with “Death and the Maid”—Brown’s first major exhibition in New York since her big move.
Cecily Brown
7
View Slideshow
Brown is known for her gestural brushstrokes that bring motion to static scenes, and colorful canvases that blur the line between figuration and abstraction, as well as her wealth of art historical references. Featuring 50 paintings, drawings, monotypes, and sketchbooks, the Met exhibition will highlight Brown’s references to still lifes, memento mori, and other Western motifs relating to the brevity of life and the vanity of humanity.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
April 15–September 3, 2023
Pacita Abad, installation view of “A Million Things to Say” at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila, 2018. Photo by Pioneer Studios. Courtesy of the Pacita Abad Art Estate.
For 30 years, the flamboyant Filipino artist Pacita Abad, who died in 2004, experimented with works on paper, ceramics, textiles, and costume design. But her lasting legacy has been her trapunto tapestries—canvases that she padded and stitched, in a technique akin to quilting, before applying paint and encrusting their surfaces with shells, sequins, and other objects. Even before she studied at the Corcoran School of Art and, later, the Art Students League of New York, textiles were familiar terrain: When she first moved to the United States in the early 1970s, fleeing Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship, Abad supported herself as a seamstress.
Pacita Abad
7
View Slideshow
Color, movement, and texture were constant concerns for the artist, but Abad veered from the abstract to the representational (tribal masks were a common motif) and featured both fantastical and political themes—most famously in her “Immigrant Experience” series. “I have always believed that an artist has a special obligation to remind society of its social responsibility,” she once said. The Walker Art Center’s exhibition will be the first retrospective looking at the entirety of Abad’s career.
London-born artist Isaac Julien first established himself as a voice of the Black British vanguard in 1989 with the release of his film Looking for Langston, a poignant meditation on Blackness and queer identity. In the decades since, he’s developed an expansive moving-image practice, folding elements of dance, sculpture, music, and film into immersive multiscreen installations. And now, 22 years after his Turner Prize nomination, and nearly a year after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, Julien is receiving his first survey exhibition in his home country—and at one of its most prestigious institutions, no less.
Isaac Julien
4
View Slideshow
“What Freedom Is To Me” at Tate Britain will start with works Julien produced as part of the politically minded Sankofa Film and Video Collective in the 1980s. The exhibition will also feature career highlights like Western Union: Small Boats (2007), which interrogated the various traumas of migration, and Lessons of the Hour (2019), his portrait of Frederick Douglass.
National Gallery Singapore
January 13–November 26, 2023
Discussions about the meeting of East and West in art tend to focus on American and European artists incorporating Asiatic elements into their work. But that fascination can go both ways, and Taipei-based artist Liu Kuo-sung—one of the foremost figures in contemporary ink painting—is living proof. Since co-founding the Taiwanese Fifth Moon Group in the 1950s, he’s been marrying the techniques and traditions of his craft with elements of Western Abstract Expressionism, geometric art, and modernist aesthetics, all the while experimenting with new methods and materials.
Liu Kuo-sung
4
View Slideshow
“Experimentation as Method” at the National Gallery Singapore will showcase the breadth of Liu’s career with more than 60 paintings and 150 other materials gifted from the artist’s personal archive. Among the works on view will be pieces from his long-running “Space” series, inspired by and often incorporating images from the Apollo 8 mission; and Himalayan landscapes from his “Tibet” series.
Carrie Mae Weems’s famous “Kitchen Table Series” (1990) is, on its surface, an intimate exploration of the life of the individual: daily rituals, romantic relationships, moments of boredom, frustration, and contentment. But at the same time, the black-and-white photographs, with Weems at their center, speak to broader themes of collective experience—such as motherhood, friendship, and the passing of time—through the lens of race, gender, and class. This mode of investigating the political through the poetic has been a consistent thread through the MacArthur fellow’s practice, and will be on full view at her summer survey at the Barbican—her first major solo museum show in the U.K.
Carrie Mae Weems
3
View Slideshow
In her artist statement, Weems, who considers herself both an artist and an activist, said: “My responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.” This spirit is embodied in works that will be on view, like The Shape of Things (2021), a seven-chapter panoramic film exploring facets of American racial politics; and Lincoln, Lonnie and Me (2012), a meditation on president Abraham Lincoln and the artist/activist (and regular Weems collaborator) Lonnie Graham.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
June 25, 2023–January 2, 2024
Raven Halfmoon, Weeping Willow Women, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Kouri + Corrao Gallery.
Raven Halfmoon studied ceramics, painting, and cultural anthropology at the University of Arkansas before completing a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in 2020. However, her interest in sculpture stretches back to her upbringing in Oklahoma. Her tribe, the Caddo Nation, has been producing pottery for centuries, and she would make clay pieces with a community elder as a teenager.
Raven Halfmoon
5
View Slideshow
Halfmoon still works with clay, creating monumental sculptures of Indigenous figures, often stacked or set side by side. Each piece is visibly crafted by hand, as revealed by the deep dents left by the artist’s fingers that repeat in a rough pattern. Meanwhile, glazes in symbolic colors—red for the blood of murdered Indigenous women, and black for the clay of the Red River—are poured and dripped on haphazardly. In a way, the sculptures serve as a bridge between tradition and modernity to comment on both historic and ongoing injustices.
“My artwork exists to break the mold of the romanticized Native American stereotype and to simply say: We are still here and we are powerful,” Halfmoon has said. Her upcoming exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will include works created over the last five years, along with a new commission.
Haus der Kunst, Munich
September 8, 2023–March 10, 2024
WangShui, installation view of Quiet as It’s Kept, 2022, in the Whitney Biennial 2022. Photo by Alon Koppel Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
WangShui, installation view of Quiet as It’s Kept, 2022, in the Whitney Biennial 2022. Photo by Alon Koppel Photography. Courtesy of the artist and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Where other artists view artificial intelligence as an encroaching foe (in many cases rightfully so), WangShui sees the technology as a part-time collaborator. Their contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial, for instance, was a series of otherworldly LED video sculptures, programmed with the aid of an algorithm (and two helpful human programmers).
The interplay between technology and human beings, and larger questions of perception and corporeality, are at the heart of WangShui’s practice. “Certainty of the Flesh” at Haus der Kunst will lean into this further. Along with paintings co-authored by AI, the exhibition centers on a namesake installation of interconnected LED screens playing an “artificial drama” generated by AI.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
April 6–September 4, 2023
Also traveling to: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; California African American Museum, Los Angeles
Simone Leigh, installation view of “Sovereignty” in the U.S. Pavilion of the 59th International Art Exhibition in La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.
Brooklyn-based sculptor Simone Leigh made history last year when she became the first Black woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, and again when she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participation in the international exhibition “The Milk of Dreams.” Her winning work, Brick House (2019)—a 16-foot-tall bust of a Black woman that was originally commissioned as the inaugural High Line Plinth Commission—is a testament to the artist’s ongoing focus on Black female subjectivity and the possibilities of bronze.
Meanwhile, Leigh’s African-inspired makeover of the neo-Palladian U.S. pavilion was an exploration of diaspora, domestic architectures, and colonial histories—some of the themes that have defined her two-decade-long practice. Works from her pavilion presentation, “Sovereignty,” will form the core of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston’s fall survey of Leigh’s work. Expect a plethora of sculptures in bronze, porcelain, glass, and terracotta, along with video works and installations. The exhibition will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., this fall before it is jointly presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in the summer of 2024.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
In a case that has sent shockwaves through the Vancouver Island art community, a local art dealer has been charged with one count of fraud over $5,000. Calvin Lucyshyn, the former operator of the now-closed Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay, faces the charge after police seized hundreds of artworks, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, from various storage sites in the Greater Victoria area.
Alleged Fraud Scheme
Police allege that Lucyshyn had been taking valuable art from members of the public under the guise of appraising or consigning the pieces for sale, only to cut off all communication with the owners. This investigation began in April 2022, when police received a complaint from an individual who had provided four paintings to Lucyshyn, including three works by renowned British Columbia artist Emily Carr, and had not received any updates on their sale.
Further investigation by the Saanich Police Department revealed that this was not an isolated incident. Detectives found other alleged victims who had similar experiences with Winchester Galleries, leading police to execute search warrants at three separate storage locations across Greater Victoria.
Massive Seizure of Artworks
In what has become one of the largest art fraud investigations in recent Canadian history, authorities seized approximately 1,100 pieces of art, including more than 600 pieces from a storage site in Saanich, over 300 in Langford, and more than 100 in Oak Bay. Some of the more valuable pieces, according to police, were estimated to be worth $85,000 each.
Lucyshyn was arrested on April 21, 2022, but was later released from custody. In May 2024, a fraud charge was formally laid against him.
Artwork Returned, but Some Remain Unclaimed
In a statement released on Monday, the Saanich Police Department confirmed that 1,050 of the seized artworks have been returned to their rightful owners. However, several pieces remain unclaimed, and police continue their efforts to track down the owners of these works.
Court Proceedings Ongoing
The criminal charge against Lucyshyn has not yet been tested in court, and he has publicly stated his intention to defend himself against any pending allegations. His next court appearance is scheduled for September 10, 2024.
Impact on the Local Art Community
The news of Lucyshyn’s alleged fraud has deeply affected Vancouver Island’s art community, particularly collectors, galleries, and artists who may have been impacted by the gallery’s operations. With high-value pieces from artists like Emily Carr involved, the case underscores the vulnerabilities that can exist in art transactions.
For many art collectors, the investigation has raised concerns about the potential for fraud in the art world, particularly when it comes to dealing with private galleries and dealers. The seizure of such a vast collection of artworks has also led to questions about the management and oversight of valuable art pieces, as well as the importance of transparency and trust in the industry.
As the case continues to unfold in court, it will likely serve as a cautionary tale for collectors and galleries alike, highlighting the need for due diligence in the sale and appraisal of high-value artworks.
While much of the seized artwork has been returned, the full scale of the alleged fraud is still being unraveled. Lucyshyn’s upcoming court appearances will be closely watched, not only by the legal community but also by the wider art world, as it navigates the fallout from one of Canada’s most significant art fraud cases in recent memory.
Art collectors and individuals who believe they may have been affected by this case are encouraged to contact the Saanich Police Department to inquire about any unclaimed pieces. Additionally, the case serves as a reminder for anyone involved in high-value art transactions to work with reputable dealers and to keep thorough documentation of all transactions.
As with any investment, whether in art or other ventures, it is crucial to be cautious and informed. Art fraud can devastate personal collections and finances, but by taking steps to verify authenticity, provenance, and the reputation of dealers, collectors can help safeguard their valuable pieces.
