BEST ART SHOWS OF THE YEAR
1. “Matisse: The Red Studio” Museum of Modern Art
Matisse’s The Red Studio is a one-painting rebellion against illusionistic perspectival space and a gigantic shove off the cliff of the possibilities of color. This condensed exhibition brought together Matisse’s 1911 work—which depicts his own studio—and many of the actual paintings he included in the image, creating a hall-of-mirrors look into the artist’s inner sanctum. A lesson in sheer painterly gall.
2. “Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art” Metropolitan Museum of Art
This mind-blowing exhibition gathers rarely seen archaic works of Mayan art. Large, ambitious stone carvings usher viewers into rooms full of sophisticated and dazzling ideas on figuration, space, worship, the afterlife, and the power of form. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I gaped, almost gasped, at incredible headdresses and figures that seem to behold ghosts, mythical creatures, and humans communing with spirits.
3. “The Patriot” O’Flaherty’s
In this wild show, hundreds of pieces were hung cheek by jowl in this gallery that was then in a small Alphabet City storefront—the result of an open call that promised anything delivered would be installed. Gallery cofounder and artist Jamian Juliano-Villani said she wanted to “show art that is not afraid of itself ” and promised this would be a space that treats everyone “equally like shit.”
4. Paulina Peavy Andrew Edlin
Underappreciated West Coast artist Peavy, who died in 1999, used to tell people that she met an extraterrestrial named Lacamo after a séance. This inspired her to commence a kind of florid automatic painting that resulted in psychedelic compositions, biomorphic abstractions, and, most amazing, masks, which she sometimes wore while working. In an excellent three-person show alongside art by Ann McCoy and Olga Spiegel, Peavy threw down a gauntlet that museums better pick up before her work gets too sought-after.
5. Lauren Halsey David Kordansky Gallery
The life of the street, miracles of color, and an artist who has a sorcerer’s ability to commandeer found materials: Halsey makes wall works and installations that elucidate and celebrate her neighborhood, South Central L.A., making it a magic-carpet ride of optical possibility.
6. “Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear”
MoMA
Tillmans’s show is a walkin book of hours for a life in photography. No one has captured the everyday nothing of life, club kids, still lifes, protest marches, and abstract images better than he has. He not only changed what photography looks like, making it more compositionally casual, but has an almost mythological feel for his subjects. A ferocious mind giving dignity to everything he sees.
7. Al Freeman
56 Henry
Amid her brightly colored, bulbous, saggy works of sewn-together soft materials like vinyl and foam, Freeman showed wall-mounted, quiltlike pieces depicting items you may find while looking down: Pepto-Bismol packets strewn on checkered tile, torn lottery tickets, pennies on the sidewalk. Freeman packs this detritus of modern life with aggressive physicality.
8. “No existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria”
Whitney Museum
After the monster storm tore the island apart in 2017, along comes one of the first major New York museum exhibitions devoted to work about Puerto Rico and made by artists in Puerto Rico and the diaspora. Some notable works include Sofia Córdova’s film contrasting scenes of daily life with the ghost life after the storm; Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s 2018 work Untitled (Valora tu mentira americana), a blown-over streetlamp; and Miguel Luciano’s Shields/
Escudos, pieces of decommissioned school buses painted with black-andwhite Puerto Rican flags.
9. Tiona Nekkia McClodden,
“MASK/CONCEAL/CARRY”
52 Walker
This standout from the 2019 Whitney Biennial came into her full powers with this show featuring paintings based on patterns that trace the firing of an ammoless gun, videos of the artist walking with a firearm tucked into her waistband, and a monochrome work made of black leather embedded with the imprint of a clip from an AR-15 assault rifle. Also on hand was a chain-mail headdress that seemed to raise the dead or act as a protective guardian; I saw it as a kind of magic helmet in the vein of Wagner’s Tarnhelm— a supernatural object in Der Ring des Nibelungen that allows the wearer to change their form.
This show had that kind of power.
10. Yu-Wen Wu, Walking to Taipei
Praise Shadows Art Gallery at the Independent Art Fair
I saw this large work in Wu’s gallery’s fair booth: a long scroll of tiny cutout texts, place names, and mileage markers. Then I looked at the title,
Walking to Taipei, and instantly seemed to enter the realm of Borges or Herzog. Unable to visit her grandmother, this Boston-based artist Googled how to get to her and received a sequence of walking directions that was 2,052 steps long. (Strangely, she was never able to get this search result again.) The mysteries of the algorithm were transmuted by an artist’s diasporic yearning to return home.