What We Think Will Be Great

1.Pope.L (Public Art Fund, “Conquest”; 9/21.

Whitney, “Choir”; 10/10–winter 2020.

MoMA, “member”; 10/21–2/1/2020)

After winning the Whitney’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award in 2017, Pope.L hits the New York institutional trifecta with an extravaganza of three upcoming shows. The Museum of Modern Art will mount a retrospective of the activist-sculptor-painterprovocateur’s work from 1978 to 2001—including videos of the epic crawls he did on his belly through the streets of New York City dressed as an African-American superhero. Also stay tuned for a mass performance of over

100 volunteers of all races crawling together through the Washington Square arch to Union Square.

2.Amy Sherald: “the heart of the matter …” (Hauser & Wirth; 9/10–10/26)

This will be the first big

New York solo show of Sherald’s haunted, ashen, poised, yet onceremoved African-American figures rendered in flat fields of alternating bright and muted colors with simple forms and uninflected surfaces. Sherald, 46, is the artist who created the portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama.

3.“Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler” (The American Folk Art Museum; 9/17–1/26/2020)

The American Folk Art Museum is the most underrated cultural resource in Manhattan. Show after show, mounted with grit, intelligence, and love in the museum’s difficult lobby space, luxuriates in the glories of selftaught visionary artists. This fall, see a deep dive into Heckler’s magnificent collection of their work.

4.Nicolas Moufarrege: “Recognize My Sign” (The Queens Museum; 10/6–2/16/2020)

The great, now-almost-unknown Egyptian-Lebanese New York– based artist-writer Moufarrege died too young, of AIDS, in 1985 at age 37. Moufarrege made gorgeous embroidered paintings to address issues of migration, queerness, and homophobia. He was also among the sharper critics of his day and a fabulous dandy.

5.“Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art” (The Jewish Museum; 10/18–2/9/2020)

Halpert (1900–1970), born in Odessa (then a part of Russia), was the first significant woman gallerist in the United States.

She helped propel American art, seen everywhere else as hopelessly provincial and out of it, to center stage. From 1926 on, she showed artists like Stuart Davis, Charles Sheeler, Ben Shahn, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who was classified as an enemy alien during World War II. This American hero deserves her due.