Looking to the Future
At a time when museums need our support most, we turn our attention toward the many phenomenal exhibitions happening in major museums across the country during 2021.
Our special Museum Issue returns, spotlighting dozens of important, upcoming museum exhibitions across the country in 2021
Museums continue to adjust to local and national rules pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some are temporarily closed, others are open with timed entry ticketing to limit the number of visitors at one time.all require masks. Many have increased their online presence through social media or virtual exhibitions on their websites. It is best to check the websites for hours and restrictions. At the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, New Century, New Woman continues through January 24. It celebrates “women’s new personal and political freedoms at the turn of the 20th century through the lens of fashion.” New Century,
New Woman commemorates the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
The Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio continues its exhibition Celebrating Women: Female Artists from the Permanent Collection into the new year. Featuring work by well-known and lesser known artists alike, this show explores artistic contributions of female artists, not only regionally, but nationally and internationally as well.artists in the show include Davira Fisher, Frances Hynes, Helen Bosart Morgan,aminah Robinson, Alice Schille, Kara Walker and Stella Waitzkin.
The Baltimore Museum of Art will exhibit She Knew Where She Was Going: Gee’s Bend Quilts and Civil Rights,
January 10 through May 2.The Black craftswomen of Gee’s Bend,alabama, have been making utilitarian quilts since the 1880s. In the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the quilters founded the Freedom Quilting Bee. “This cooperative championed the vision and production of Gee’s Bend quilters in national auctions and commercial partnerships, empowering the quilters and reworking systems of American quilting.”the museum has purchased five quilts with the support of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation & Community Partnership.
Quilts are also featured at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin. Handstitched Worlds:the
Cartography of Quilts will be shown June 12 through August 29.The exhibition
“is an invitation to read quilts as maps, tracing the paths of individual histories that illuminate larger historic events and cultural trends. Spanning the 19th to 21st centuries, this insightful and engaging exhibition presents 23 quilts from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in Newyork City.”
The Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-salem, North
Carolina, has assembled an exhibition,
Girlhood in American Art, which will be shown through March 21.Artists include Gilbert Stuart,william Merritt Chase, Mary Cassatt and Robert Henri.“all of the pieces in the exhibition reflect the cultural and social environments the girls inhabited.”
B etsy James Wyeth: A Tribute continues at the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, through January 10.“Betsy Wyeth [who died in 2020] was her husband Andrew Wyeth’s business manager and curator, with great precision recording the details of every work completed by the artist and encouraging and propelling him to achieve throughout his career.the artist painted his wife many times over the course of their almost seven-decade marriage.the selection of 20 works shown here are both intimate and enigmatic, capturing her elegance while also communicating a sense of elusiveness that the artist was so adept at conveying.”
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is known for its fine maritime collection which, to most of us, means paintings of sailing ships on the high seas, models and artifacts.the museum takes a different tack in its exhibition In
American Waters, May 29 through October 3. Organized with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the exhibition gives the visitor the opportunity to discover “the sea as an expansive way to reflect on American culture and environment, learn how coastal and maritime symbols moved inland across the United States, and question what it means to be ‘in American waters.’ Be transported across time and water on the wave of a diverse range of modern and historical artists including Georgia O’keeffe, Amy Sherald, Kay Walkingstick, Norman Rockwell, Hale Woodruff, Paul Cadmus,thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence,valerie Hegarty, Stuart Davis and many others.”the exhibition will be shown at Crystal Bridges November 6 through January 31, 2022.
Several women artists will be featured in solo exhibitions throughout the year.
The Baltimore Museum of Art will show Joan Mitchell March 21 through July 18 (Dates subject to change). “Co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition features rarely shown paintings and works on paper from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe.the exhibition follows Mitchell’s cyclical way of working, in which subjects and gestures appear and resurface years later.”
Simple Pleasures:the Art of Doris Lee will be at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, September 26 through January 9, 2022. Active in the Woodstock Artist’s Colony in the ’30s and ’40s,“lee’s body of work reveals a remarkable ability to merge the reduction of abstraction with the appeal of the everyday and offers a coherent visual identity that successfully bridged various artistic ‘camps’ that arose in the postworld War II era.” Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and
Natasha Gelman Collection continues at the Denver Art Museum through January 24.The show explores the Mexican modernism movement through more than 150 works.“featuring paintings and photographs by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Gunther Gerzso, María Izquierdo, Carlos Mérida, and others, the exhibition takes a closer look at the role that art, artists, and their supporters played in the emergence of national identity and creative spirit after the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920.” Frank Duveneck (1848-1919) was born in Covington, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. He studied in Munich and returned to the U.S. where he was an immediate success with small exhibitions in Cincinnati and Boston. He returned to Germany, however, and, after a trip tovenice, set up his own painting school in Munich.among his students were John White Alexander (1856-1915) and John H.twachtman (1853-1902). After again returning to the U.S., he was awarded a Special Gold Medal of Honor at the Panama-pacific Exposition
in San Francisco in 1915.At his death, he bequeathed a major collection of his work to the Cincinnati Art Museum.the museum will show the exhibition Frank
Duveneck:american Master through March 28. It notes the exhibition is “a major re-evaluation of the work of Frank Duveneck, the most influential painter in Cincinnati history, with the first comprehensive exhibition in more than 30 years.through his brilliant and inspiring work as a painter and printmaker and as a charismatic teacher, Duveneck’s impact on the international art world of his time was substantial and enduring.”
A Fiery Light:will Shuster’s New
Mexico continues at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe through May 2, the centennial anniversary of Shuster’s arrival in the Southwest.“in addition to exhibiting the artwork that Shuster produced in New Mexico, it will look at his time as a member of Los Cinco Pintores, an early group of young Santa Fe painters devoted to ‘taking art to the people.’the show explores his relationship with prominent American realist painter John Sloan and his collaboration with Gustave Baumann to conceive of the now iconic Santa Fe boogeyman, Zozobra.”
W illiam J. Glackens: From Pencil to Paint continues into the spring at NSU Art Museum of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The museum has drawn from its own archive of Glackens’ works, juxtaposing drawings with the paintings for which they were made. Glackens was a member of The Eight, which had a significant impact on the development of American art after its first 1908 exhibition.the artists had been rejected from exhibitions at the National Academy because of their gritty paintings of everyday life.
Horace Pippin: From War to Peace continues a long run at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.“injured during World
War I, Horace Pippin turned to painting to help mend his body and spirit. In the process, he distinguished himself as one of the most original artists of his generation. This gathering of six paintings highlights Pippin’s pursuit of a range of themes, from racial violence and the alienation of war to
the serene beauty of his home in Chester County, Pennsylvania.” Pippin wrote, “Pictures just come to my mind and I tell my heart to go ahead.”
The Portland Museum of Art in
Maine will mount David Driskell:
Icons of Nature and History the first retrospective of his work, June 19 through September 12.The museum describes him as “artist, curator and scholar” and continues,“driskell’s legacy in the history of American art is unparalleled: through his curatorial work, his writing and his teaching, he pushed audiences to consider the American story inclusive of the art of Black people.”
David Park:a Retrospective continues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through January 18.The midcentury Bay Area Figurative painters abandoned abstraction to return to figuration. Park, in fact gathered up all his abstract paintings and took them to the dump.the museum notes, “It is the first major museum exhibition of Park’s work in three decades and the first to examine the full arc of his career, from his tightly controlled paintings from the 1930s to his final works on paper from 1960. The heart of the show is a rich selection of the 1950s Bay Area Figurative canvases for
which he is best known.”
G ordon Parks | I, too, am America opens January 21 and continues through May 8 at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas.the museum owns over 170 works by the LIFE photographer who was one of the most prominent photographers of the 20th century.the title of the exhibition is from his friend Langston Hughes’ poem I,too. “Through his words and images, Parks sought to demonstrate the universality of his subjects’ experiences and their centrality to America’s identity.this was both bold and vitally needed work in his time, when struggles against racial injustice shook up and reshaped America.today, these images remain equally relevant in our own, surprisingly similar, times.”
The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, hosts Paul Manship:ancient
Made Modern, February 11 through July 4. Manship is best known for his sculpture of Prometheus at Rockefeller Center in New York.
C harles E. Burchfield & the American Scene continues through March 28 at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York.the exhibition “features artwork by Burchfield from the period around the 1920s and 1930s along with photographs he and others took during that period that feature some of the locations that he painted.the exhibition will also focus on influential authors of the period that had an impact on his work,” such as Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis and Robert Frost.
The Brandywine River Museum hosts
Ralston Crawford: Air & Space & War June 19 through September 19. Drawn from the Vilcek Collection, the exhibition includes 48 paintings, photographs and drawings. “Ralston Crawford’s art underwent a dramatic evolution in the 1940s influenced by aviation—from his personal experiences in flight, to his exposure to the construction of airplanes and the destruction they wrought in the war.” The Cleveland Museum of Art hosts
Gustave Baumann: Colorful Cuts through May 2. It augments Baumann’s colorful woodblock prints with a set of blocks as well as the proofs for one print allowing visitors “to understand how he printed layers of color to achieve rich effects.” Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, shows Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948–1960
February 11 through June 6,“the first major museum exhibition to investigate the early work of one of the most celebrated American artists of the 20th century. It tells the overlooked story of Lichtenstein’s early career and establishes a deeper understanding of postwar American art.”
Jasper Johns: Mind/mirror will be featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, September 29 through February 13, 2022.There will be a simultaneous retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.“inspired by the artist’s long-standing fascination with mirroring and doubles, each half of the exhibition will act as a reflection of the other, inviting viewers to look closely to discover the themes, methods, and coded visual language that echo across the two venues.a visit to either museum will provide a vivid chronological survey; a visit to both will offer an innovative and immersive exploration of the many phases, masterworks, and mysteries of Johns’s still-evolving career.”
Abstraction and figuration continue to draw curatorial attention in museums across the country.
The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center invermont confronts one point of view directly in its exhibition Figuration Never Died: Newyork Painterly Painting, 19501970 running through February 14. Curator Karen Wilkin notes,“this exhibition focuses on 10 inventive artists from this generation, whom we could describe as painterly: Robert De Niro Sr., Lois Dodd. Jane Freilicher, Paul Georges, Grace Hartigan, Wolf Kahn,alex Katz,albert Kresch, Paul Resika and Anne Tabachnick.they are linked not only by their mutual fascination with making reference to the visible, but also by their closeness in age, friendships and shared experiences in the small Newyork art world of the 1950s and 1960s.”
The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, continues its exhibition Expanding Abstraction: Pushing the Boundaries of Painting in the Americas, 1958–1983
through January 10. Drawing from its permanent collection, the museum notes that as abstraction grew,“dripping, pouring, staining and even slinging paint became common, as did the use of nontraditional media such as acrylic and industrial paints.artists also challenged the flat, rectangular format—long the standard in painting—to create texture and dimensionality, blurring the lines between painting and sculpture and foregrounding
the object’s materiality.”
The Brandywine River Museum steps back to an earlier period of representation in its exhibition America’s Impressionism:
Echoes of a Revolution, October 9, through January 9, 2022. Curator Amanda C. Burden writes,“digging deeper into their origins, the exceptional works of American Impressionism assembled in this exhibition reveal a nuanced history of art interchange in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, far more complicated than the straightforward imitation of a foreign style. “The exhibition endeavors to explore more fully a redefinition of American Impressionism as a practice less intent on mimicking the French style than on creating an equally independent movement in this country.”
The French impressionist Claude
Monet is featured in two major exhibitions, Monet and Boston: Lasting Impression
shown through February 28 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Monet and Chicago at the Art Institute of Chicago. In Boston, the museum has mounted a once in a generation opportunity to see all 35 of its paintings by Monet.the 70 works in the Art Institute’s exhibition are drawn from its permanent collection as well as other Chicago-based collections.
The 20th century wasn’t the first to see tradition-breaking art.the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno hosts Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-raphaelites to
the Arts & Crafts Movement March 7 through May 30.The museum notes,“in the second half of the 19th century, three generations of young, rebellious artists and designers revolutionized the visual arts in Britain by challenging the new industrial world around them.the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood and the champions of the Arts & Crafts Movement offered a radical artistic and social vision that found inspiration in the pre-industrial past and came to deeply influence visual culture in Britain and beyond…the exhibition explores the ideas that preoccupied artists and critics at the time—the relationship between art and nature, questions of class and gender identity, the value of the handmade versus machine production, and the search for
beauty in an age of industry—issues that remain relevant and actively debated today.”
Utilitarian American craft is featured in the exhibition, Careful, Neat & Decent:
Arts of the Kentucky Shakers shown through March 14 at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Items from the 19th-century Kentucky Shakers of Pleasant Hill and South Union are featured.the museum explains,“along with furniture—the most familiar Shaker legacy—the exhibition will explore other corners of Shaker production like textiles, hats and bonnets, vegetable seeds, preserves, and hymn writing.the exhibition will also share the intersectional stories of the Shaker experience, including those of women, of African Americans, and of orphans.”
The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, examines one of the ways American art was made popular among the public in the exhibition Revisiting America:
The Prints of Currier & Ives through
April 11. Currier & Ives lithographs were displayed in tens of thousands of American homes. Drawing from its collection of 600 prints, the museum notes,“known today for its lush, hand-colored lithographs that nostalgically depicted an idyllic republic of pioneer homesteads, sporting camps and bucolic pastimes, these sentimental images comprised only one aspect of Currier & Ives’ production.the company’s inexpensive and popular prints were a ubiquitous presence for decades, and just as frequently touched on pressing social and political issues.”
In addition to exhibitions mentioned previously, the importance of African American art is explored in several exhibitions.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art will show the exhibition, In the Presence of Our Ancestors: Southern Perspectives in African American Art, through April 11.“Black artists of the American South have created art to honor their collective histories, experiences, and spiritual communities, solidifying their impact on the art world for decades to come.”
The Westmoreland Museum shows African American Art in the 20th Century
through January 17.“The artists featured
came to prominence during the period bracketed by the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement.the means of these artists varied—from representational to modern abstraction to stained color to the postmodern assemblage of found objects—and their subjects are diverse. These works were created at a significant social and political moments in America.” “Awakened inyou”:the Collection of Dr.
Constance E. Clayton will be show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art through May 23. Dr. Clayton is an educator, civic leader and advocate for the arts. In 2019 she gave a collection of 70 artworks by African American Artists to the academy.
The Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan draws from the 856 works in its Jack B. Pierson Print Collection for the exhibition Political and Personal: Images
of Gay Identity April 17 through July 11.The exhibition “draws on Pierson’s experience as a gay man and sheds light on the important role sexual identity played in informing his collecting habits... Through emphasis on public identity and activism, dissecting historic complexities of the gay male gaze, and considering the pensive and private moments of gay love and attraction, this exhibition captures the multi-dimensional nature of gay identity in the 20th century.”
The Peabody Essex Museum brings together, documents, artifacts and paintings for its exhibition The Salem Witch
Trials 1692 on view through April 4.
The museum explains,“many unfounded theories about the Salem witch trials, from poisoning by rotten bread to property disputes to an outbreak of encephalitis, still persist to this day.the panic grew from a society threatened by nearby war and a malfunctioning judicial system in a setting rife with religious conflict and blatant intolerance. For more than 300 years since, the complex drama of the witch trials and its themes of injustice and the frailties of human nature has fascinated us.”