Just about every gallery and museum would like to have a David Hammons show.
But that artist is famously particular and elusive. So the Mnuchin Gallery feels fortunate to be mounting a 50-year career survey of Mr. Hammons with his blessing.
“We talked about this at length,” said the longtime dealer Robert Mnuchin. “If he said, ‘I don’t want you doing this show,’ we would not have done it.”
The show, from March 15 through May 27, will offer a sampling of about 40 works, most on loan from museums and private collections. (Fewer than 10 will be for sale.)
The exhibition will include the recognizable — one of Mr. Hammons’s basketball hoop chandeliers and his tarp paintings — and the more recent, like a 2014 tangerine-tinted sculpture made of glass, wood, nails and acrylic, titled “Orange Is the New Black.”
“He’s been a real bridge between the modernists and more contemporary artists,” said Sukanya Rajaratnam, Mr. Mnuchin’s business partner.
“But he is as much an important African-American artist as he is a successor to Duchamp and to Arte Povera in his use of found objects and unorthodox materials.”
The Mnuchin Gallery has mounted two previous shows of Mr. Hammons’s work, in 2007 and in 2011. “Once we got involved with Hammons, we were Hammonized,” Mr. Mnuchin said.
The Whitney Opens Up
Those who toured the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building before it opened saw what its fifth floor looked like as a single vast gallery — reputedly the largest column-free museum exhibition space in New York. Then walls were installed for the first show — “America Is Hard to See” — and, subsequently, for the current Frank Stella show.
But starting on Feb. 26, the public will be able to experience the fifth floor in all its expansiveness, with “Open Plan.”
The exhibition is unorthodox in that it will essentially feature five solo shows in succession. Each artist has been invited to respond to the space with installations that will last from a few days to just over two weeks.
“The whole thing is an enormous experiment and a bit of a risk,” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s chief curator.
The five artists selected by Whitney curators represent a mix of ages and mediums. “We didn’t want it all to be major names and established figures,” Mr. Rothkopf said. “But the mandate is so huge — both literally and figuratively — we had to think about whether someone could take on the space.”
Andrea Fraser, 50, will use audio recorded at a prison to contrast different institutional spaces.
Lucy Dodd, 34, will create a large-scale painting in real time — she’ll be present throughout — using materials like fermented walnuts and kombucha scoby (the acronym for “symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast”).
Michael Heizer, 71, will show his full-scale slide projection of the horizon from inside an 18-foot-deep hole that he excavated in Munich — the first time the Whitney has been able to show the piece, which is in its collection.
Cecil Taylor, 86, the jazz pioneer, will present a series of live performances (others will also perform) amid videos, audio and notational scores spanning his career.
And Steve McQueen, 46, the filmmaker behind “12 Years a Slave,” will revise and expand his video installation “End Credits,” which features the performer Paul Robeson’s F.B.I. file.
“Each work is distinct as an idea about art,” Mr. Rothkopf said, “but also an experience.”
Embracing Conceptualism
MoMA has doubled down on conceptualism, having recently made two major acquisitions in that area: the Daled Collection of American and European Conceptual art and a major group of works from the dealer Seth Siegelaub, who died in 2013.
Now the museum is planning what it describes as the most comprehensive exhibition to date on the Conceptual artist Adrian Piper, 67.
Opening in spring 2018, the show will be Ms. Piper’s first American museum exhibition in more than 10 years and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for best artist at the Venice Biennale this year.
“Lawrence Weiner at the Whitney, Dan Graham, John Baldessari,” said David Platzker, the MoMA’s drawings and prints curator. “Adrian was long overdue for a similar treatment.”
Comprising more than 100 artworks from public and private collections, the retrospective will include a range of media from five decades — video, performance, painting, sound, works on paper, and graphics.
Where her peers in Conceptual art were toying with philosophical elements in their work, Ms. Piper actually earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard and is reputed to be the first female African-American philosophy professor in the United States to receive tenure.
“They were self-taught — she was exceedingly academic,” said Mr. Platzker, who is organizing the show with Cornelia Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where the exhibition will go after MoMA, before it tours internationally.
“Her work was flavored by philosophy — Kant, in particular,” Mr. Platzker said, “but also humanism, which is often lacking in a lot of Conceptualism.”
He added that he had been working on the show with Ms. Piper, who lives in Berlin. “It’s a true collaboration,” he said.
below: David Hammons, 'A Movable Object', 2012:
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