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Museum & Gallery Listings for May 8-fourteen

Credit... Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

May 7, 2015

Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Total reviews of contempo art shows: nytimes.com/fine art. A searchable guide to these and many other art shows is at nytimes.com/events.

Museums

★ American Folk Art Museum: 'When the Curtain Never Comes Downward' (through July 5) A sprawling, cacophony of objects, audiotapes, photographs and films is hither orchestrated into a curatorial marvel. Strange and wonderful in numerous ways, the bear witness sheds new low-cal on the performance aspects of much outsider fine art while reminding us how eccentricity is non simply bones to creativity merely to personal liberty and democracy itself. 2 Lincoln Square, Columbus Artery at 66th Street, 212-595-9533, folkartmuseum.org. (Roberta Smith)

★ Brooklyn Historical Society: 'Personal Correspondence: Photography and Letter Writing in Civil War Brooklyn' (through adjacent jump) Symbolically, the Ceremonious War concluded when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Due south. Grant in the spring of1865. For many people who lived through information technology, though, the state of war never ended at all, and it lives on in letters sent to and from the battleground. Thousands of these ended upwardly half-forgotten in attics and agency drawers; a small stash comes to light in this exhibition that consists of just one piddling room with a lot in it — including letters, Civil War souvenirs and explanatory texts — with everything as readily attainable as if in a well-packed suitcase. Brooklyn Historical Club, 128 Pierrepont Street, well-nigh Clinton Street, Brooklyn Heights, 718-222-4111, brooklynhistory.org. (Holland Cotter)

★ Brooklyn Museum: 'Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks' (through Aug. 23) In this sparkling if sometimes arcane exhibition, the contents of eight notebooks, supplemented by several paintings and big drawings, trace the evolution of Basquiat's loquacious pictorial fashion. Time spent with the catalog enhances the experience. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Brooklyn Museum: 'Kehinde Wiley: A New Democracy' (through May 24) Y'all can dearest or hate this artist's brilliant, brash, history-laden, kitsch-tinged portraits of confident, fifty-fifty imperious young black men and women usurping heroic roles from the generally lily-white history of Western painting. No affair, the 2-decade survey of his extravagant, mind-teasing canvases rewards. His career seems to be one of ceaseless ambition, socially conscious generosity and an uncanny skill that he is still harnessing. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (continuing) The stately doors of the 1902 Andrew Carnegie mansion, dwelling to the Cooper Hewitt, are open again after an overhaul and expansion of the bounds. Celebrated house and modern museum have always made an awkward fit, a collision between preservation and innovation, and the trouble remains, but the renovation has brought a wide-open new gallery space, a cafe and a raft of exist-your-own-designer digital enhancements. All-time of all, more of the museum'due south vast permanent drove is now on view, including an Op Art weaving, miniature spiral staircases, ballistic face masks and a squeamish enameled 18th-century version of a Swiss pocketknife. Like design itself, this institution is built on tumult and friction, and you feel it. 2 East 91st Street, at 5th Avenue, 212-849-8400, cooperhewitt.org. (Cotter)

Frick Collection: 'Coypel's Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish Novel in 18th-Century French republic' (through May 17) Miguel de Cervantes'southward "Don Quixote" has inspired and challenged illustrators from Goya to Dalí. This exhibition is devoted to a set of extraordinarily sumptuous, mural-calibration tapestries depicting episodes from the novel that were woven at the Gobelins Mill in Paris based on images by the artist Charles Coypel (1694-1752). It includes three of the Gobelin tapestries; 5 of the original 28 paintings, or cartoons, that the artist produced for weavers to copy; and 18 engravings by which Coypel's terrifically popular images were disseminated throughout Europe. 1 East 70th Street, , 212-288-0700, frick.org. (Ken Johnson)

Establish for the Report of the Ancient World: 'From Ancient to Modern: Archaeology and Aesthetics' (through June 7) Small-scale but bursting with ideas, this testify tells a fascinating tale about the 20th-century earthworks and estimation of some ancient Sumerian artifacts. It focuses on about 50 objects that were unearthed in the 1920s and '30s in Mesopotamia, including sumptuous jewelry and wide-eyed, bearded men carved from rock. Along with these are profuse archaeological documentation; paintings and sculptures by 20th-century artists like Willem de Kooning and Henry Moore who were inspired past Sumerian art; and politically fraught works past two contemporary artists, Jananne al-Ani and Michael Rakowitz. Plant for the Written report of the Ancient World, 15 East 84th Street, Manhattan, 212-992-7800, isaw.nyu.edu. (Johnson)

Japan Gild: 'Life of Cats: Selections From the Hiraki Ukiyo-e Collection' (through June vii) Cats were brought to Nippon from China in the mid-sixth century. Adopted as pets and valued for their rat-killing skills, they naturally infiltrated Japanese art, literature and folklore. This excellent show should be catnip for cat lovers; all the amend if they're into art, too. Its 86 drawings, paintings, woodblock prints and decorative objects dating from the 17th to the early 20th century correspond cats behaving in typical, ridiculous and supernatural ways. 333 Due east 47th Street, Manhattan, 212-832-1155, japansociety.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: 'Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklanski Photographs' (through Aug. 16) A small but succinct survey of the multimedia bad-boy artist'southward polymorphous relationship to photography shows him constantly irresolute scale, film and printing methods while exploring the medium'due south ability to startle, seduce and become generic. He appropriates, imitates and pays homage equally he goes, regularly invoking his Smooth roots. Don't miss the large photo-banners in the museum'southward Great Hall or the massive cobweb-sculpture monument to the centre and to insatiable looking. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Fine art: 'Fatal Allure: Piotr Uklanski Selects From The Met Collection' (through June 14) Complementing the survey of his photographs, the artist has orchestrated 80 works from the museum's holdings — forth with a few of his own — into a mesmerizing brandish meditating on sex and death. Consisting mostly of photographs, information technology is bolstered by paintings by Dali and Cranach sculptures from several cultures and several surprises. Scratch any creative person of notation, fifty-fifty a postal service-modernistic one, and you lot ofttimes find a connoisseur. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: 'Discovering Japanese Art: American Collectors and the Met' (through Sept. 27) Highlighting contributions to the Met'south Japanese art holdings by American collectors from the 1880s to the nowadays, this gorgeous show presents more than 200 superb paintings, drawings, prints, scrolls, folding screens, ceramics, lacquer ware and works in other mediums and genres, more often than not dating from the quaternary century to the late 19th. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: 'Reimagining Modernism: 1900-1950' (continuing) One of the greatest encyclopedic museums in the earth fulfills its mission a trivial more with an aggressive reinstallation of works of early European modernism with their American counterparts for the get-go time in nigh xxx years. Objects of design and paintings past a few cocky-taught artists further the integration. It is quite a sight, with interesting rotations and fine-tunings to come. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Fine art: 'Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy' (through July 26) This beautiful, evocative exhibition sheds new low-cal on the miniature paintings, calligraphies, luxurious metalwork and scenic jewels that remain from the succession of cosmopolitan Muslim kingdoms and their turbulent 200-year golden age on the Deccan Plateau of south-cardinal Republic of india. It also presents the paintings in new ways, nigh strikingly relieved of the white mats favored by Western museums and collections. Their decorative borders and patterned anthology pages are a revelation. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Smith)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Art: 'Warriors and Mothers: Ballsy Mbembe Art' (through Sept. seven) If a dozen masterpiece Renaissance sculptures, washed in an unknown and wildly unorthodox style, of a sudden turned up in the Italian countryside, the notice would make the news. You'll encounter the equivalent of such a discovery in this show of spectacular weatherworn, wood-carved figures, some dating to earlier the 17th century, that were made past the Mbembe in southeastern Nigeria and taken to Paris past an African dealer in the early on 1970s. They caused a sensation amongst collectors and scholars at the time, and you can see why. Just the effort to find more than of them proved fruitless. The examples at the Met, which include the original dozen, represent all the fully intact stand up-alone Mbembe figures known to exist. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

MoMA PS1: 'Samara Aureate: The Flat Side of the Pocketknife' (through Sept. 7) Continuing at a railing where you await into the museum's ii-story-alpine Duplex Gallery, you behold a confoundingly complicated interior architecture with furniture, stairways, musical instruments, wheelchairs and many other domestic items rendered in silvery, foil-clad foam lath. The gallery's floor is covered past a grid of large mirrors so that everything is doubled. What you think is upward may really be downwardly and what you accept to be real might exist a virtual reflection of the real. 22-25 Jackson Avenue, at 46th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, 718-784-2084, ps1.org. (Johnson)

★ Morgan Library & Museum: 'Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions' (through May 25) Too many of the drawings in this exhibition hang inertly on the wall, particularly the more gimmicky (and numerous) ones, which are in a majority. The ones that are visually active create plenty hit contrasts to turn the show into a valuable lesson in looking and quality that everyone, the library included, benefits from. 225 Madison Artery, at 36th Street, 212-685-0008, themorgan.org. (Smith)

★ El Museo del Barrio: 'Nether the Mexican Heaven: Gabriel Figueroa, Art and Film' (through June 27) Painting with light is one style to ascertain the cinematographer'southward task, and it describes the fine art of Gabriel Figueroa (1907-1997), who worked with some of the leading international picture directors of his time and was a national hero in his native Mexico, the supreme painter-in-light of Mexicanidad. How do yous put this particular kind of art across in a museum — art that is as much well-nigh time as information technology is nearly material, as much nigh flux as it is about fixity? This bear witness, which mixes Figueroa moving-picture show clips with paintings and prints by some of United mexican states's greatest artists and in the process utterly transforms El Museo's interior spaces, gives an enthralling answer. 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem, 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org. (Cotter)

Museum of Arts and Pattern: 'Richard Estes: Painting New York Metropolis' (through Sept. 20) The core of this show is a pick of vivid, Photorealist paintings of urban subjects like glass and chrome storefronts, flick theater marquees, cars and trucks, subways, the Brooklyn Bridge, views from the Staten Isle Ferry and idyllic images of Fundamental Park made between 1965 and 2015. The exhibition besides includes didactic sections most the craft and technique that get into Mr. Estes painting and prints, just that attribute doesn't fully deliver what information technology promises. 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan, 212-299-7777, madmuseum.org. (Johnson)

★ Museum of Biblical Art: 'Sculpture in the Historic period of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces From Florence Cathedral' (through June 14) This terrific 23-slice show features three major works by the early Renaissance sculptor Donatello (1386-1466), including the life-size statue of a bald prophet known every bit "lo Zuccone" or "Pumpkin Head," which is widely considered the sculptor's greatest work. Along with a half-dozen other works by or attributed to Donatello are sculptures past Nanni di Banco (circa 1386-1421), Donatello's main competitor, including his awe-inspiring representation in marble of St. Luke. With the addition of a series of octagonal marble reliefs past Luca della Robbia and wooden models of the Florence Cathedral's enormous dome attributed to its designer, Filippo Brunelleschi, the exhibition amounts to a tightly cropped snapshot of the birth of the Renaissance. 1865 Broadway, at 61st Street, 212-408-1500, mobia.org. (Johnson)

★ Museum of Modernistic Art: 'Ane-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence'southward Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement Due north' (through Sept. 7) In the early 20th century, tens of thousands of African-Americans left the rural Southward for the industrial N in search of jobs, homes and respect. Officially, this MoMA show is meant to mark the centennial of that immense population shift, though information technology also marks another ceremony: the first fourth dimension in ii decades that all 60 paintings in Jacob Lawrence's great "Migration Serial," now divided between New York and Washington, D.C., accept been shown together at the museum. Here they are surrounded by menses photographs, books and fabled music in a brandish as stimulating to the mind and the ear as it is to the eye. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Cotter)

Museum of Modernistic Art: 'Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Fine art from the Collection' (through March 2016) MoMA's latest installation of works from its permanent collection fills the second-floor contemporary galleries with videos, installations, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs produced by more than xxx artists during the by three decades. It's an uneven, haphazard selection, but leaving artistic quality aside, its unusually optimistic-sounding title inadvertently raises a large and intriguing question: At a time when contemporary art seems to be spinning its wheels, what could a new heritage be? 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Johnson)

Museum of Modernistic Art: 'Björk' (through June 7) More than virtually, an exhibition devoted to the Iceland miracle — the most avant-garde popular singer of her time — needs to justify its identify in a major museum. But MoMA was clearly unable to commit in terms of space, curatorial imagination or a serious catalog. The event is something of a butchery, but at least the music videos — projected on a large screen with surround sound — ostend the visual side of Björk'southward complex sensibility and achievement. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)

★ Museum of Modernistic Art: 'Latin America in Structure: Architecture 1955-1980' (through July 19) This show recalls a not-so-afar fourth dimension when architects and governments together dreamed big nigh changing the world for the better. What got built through the 1970s in places like Havana and Buenos Aires, United mexican states City and Lima included some of the most inspired architecture of the modern age. The show is an eye-opener, rectifying a long-skewed, Eurocentric worldview, shedding light on a period neglected for generations exterior the region. It'south the sort of exhibition MoMA yet does best. Y'all tin come away shaking your caput at the variety of remarkable projects missing from the 20th-century canon. 212-708-9400, moma.org. (Michael Kimmelman)

Museum of the City of New York: 'Everything Is Design: The Work of Paul Rand' (through July 19) You may not know the name Paul Rand (1914-96), the immensely influential advertisement art director, illustrator and graphic designer, just information technology'southward a prophylactic bet you're familiar with some of his works. After shaking up American advertising and book cover design in the 1940s and '50s, he created logos for UPS, IBM, Westinghouse and other American corporations. His admirers called him "the Picasso of graphic design." This show tracks his vi-decade career with 150 examples of vintage magazines, book covers, three-dimensional containers, children'southward books and books past Mr. Rand about principles of design. Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, 212-534-1672, mcny.org. (Johnson)

Neue Galerie: 'Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gilt' (through Sept. 7) With the release of the movie "Woman in Golden," which is about the restitution of some Nazi-looted paintings by Gustav Klimt to their rightful heir, the most celebrated of those works, the predominantly golden "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907), is back in the media spotlight later on its 2006 buy by Ronald South. Lauder for the price of $135 million, a record at the fourth dimension. This small evidence features the portrait along with 8 other Klimts and an assortment of jewelry and decorative objects typifying the luxurious lifestyle of Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the fine art collectors who commissioned it. 1048 5th Avenue, at 86th Street, 212-628-6200, neuegalerie.org. (Johnson)

★ New Museum: 'Surround Audition: 2015 Triennial' (through May 24) If you're fed up with big joke-shop sculpture, diva spectacle and brain-dead abstraction, this museum's 2015 Triennial will come up as a break in the clouds — non a full flood of new light, but a pull in a different direction. Information technology'south a glimpse of terrain composed nearly entirely of border crossings in media, fine art disciplines, ethnicities, genders and species. The in-between equally an aesthetic is no surprise given the curators: Lauren Cornell of the New Museum, who has been paying astute attention to digital art and the Net for years, and the artist Trecartin, whose laptop-generated, YouTube-distributed, hourslong pop-epic videos add together up to some of the almost thoroughly genre-collapsing art of the past decade. If nil by the 51 artists from 25 countries is as genius as his work, there is even so a lot to ponder in a bear witness that represents a welcome shift to microgravity flux within a gross-objects industry. 235 Bowery, at Prince Street, Lower E Side, 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org. (Cotter)

★ New-York Historical Society: 'Freedom Journeying 1965: Photographs of the Selma to Montgomery March by Stephen Somerstein' (through Oct. 25) Well-nigh 50 years ago, the picture editor of a campus paper at Metropolis College of New York assigned himself a breaking story: covering what promised to be a massive march in Alabama, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Male monarch Jr., to demand free-and-clear voting rights for African-Americans. On short notice the editor, Stephen Somerstein, grabbed his cameras, climbed on a passenger vehicle and headed southward. The 55 pictures of black leaders and everyday people in this show, installed in a hallway and small gallery, are some that he shot that day. The paradigm of Dr. Male monarch's caput seen in monumental silhouette that has get a virtual logo of the film "Selma" is based on a Somerstein original. 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, 212-873-3400, nyhistory.org. (Cotter)

★ Whitney Museum of American Art: 'America Is Hard to Run into' (through Sept. 27) With loftier ceilings, soft pine-plank floors and low-cal-flooded windows and terraces, the galleries of the new Renzo Pianoforte-designed Whitney Museum in the meatpacking district are as blusterous as 19th-century sailmaker'south lofts. Art feels at home in them, and the work in the museum'southward top-to-bottom inaugural exhibition is homegrown. Culled from the permanent collection, information technology mixes bookmarked favorites by Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe and Jasper Johns with objects and artists that the Whitney had all but forgotten or merely brought in. As a vision of a larger America, the show is far from comprehensive; as a musing on the history of a particular New York institution over most a century, information technology is very fine, smartly detailed and superbly presented. 99 Gansevoort Street, at Washington Street, 212-570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)

Galleries: Chelsea

★ Lisa Yuskavage (through June xiii) The artist's paintings of sexy young female things continue to score points almost the male gaze and women'south sexual autonomy, but they need to unsettle their medium. Flirting with kitsch and bad taste isn't plenty, nor is offset to describe men. In that location are likewise many artists tackling representation and painting both for her not to join the fray. David Zwirner, 533 W 19th Street, 212-727-2070, davidzwirner.com. (Smith)

Galleries: Other

★ Allan deSouza: 'Notes From Distant' (through June 6) This ii-project show updates canonical pieces of cultural history. In a 2011 photographic response to Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series," Mr. deSouza, born in Kenya and of South Asian descent, brings the story of the 20th-century African-American diaspora from the South to the Northward into a global present of surveillance-saturated international airports. In a 2014 piece, "Ark of Martyrs," he brilliantly rewrites the fevered, racist delirium of Joseph Conrad's "Center of Darkness" into contemporary political terms of war, Wall Street and religion. Talwar Gallery, 108 East 16th Street, Flatiron district, 212-673-3096, talwargallery.com. (Cotter)

Pam Lins: 'model model model' (through May 31) Pam Lins'due south current show includes two projects that explore the connection betwixt photography and sculpture, one relating to a grainy black-and-white image depicting a workshop at Vkhutemas, the state fine art academy founded in Moscow in 1920. Ms. Lins has beautifully approximated in clay and wood the abstract forms and supporting platforms visible in the photograph. It is a project that is both generous in its visual approach and corresponds with changing notions of photography, treating information technology more as an analogy than as an index, reproduction, or re-create. Rachel Uffner Gallery, 170 Suffolk Street, nearly Houston Street, Lower E Side, 212-274-0064, racheluffnergallery.com. (Martha Schwendener)

Sarah Peters (through May 17) With the haunting, eyeless bronze heads in this elegant prove, this Brooklyn sculptor scores an aesthetic chapeau fox: They appear antique, Modern and Postmodern all at once. All take smoothly and sensitively modeled faces with deep hollows where their optics were. There are ii men with close-cropped pilus and long, total beards; a jug-eared boy; and 2 women who could be ancient priestesses. Though bullheaded, they requite the impression that they've had their vision turned inward toward a metaphysical plane. Eleven Rivington, 11 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, 212-982-1930, elevenrivington.com. (Johnson)

★ 'Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera' (through July 11) In 1979, Mr. Tseng (1950-90) began to create his well-nigh memorable works: photographic self-portraits in which he appeared wearing dark glasses and a Zhongshan adapt — the blazon of drab uniform favored by Mainland china's Mao Zedong. Thus outfitted, he posed before famous monuments like Mount Rushmore and the Eiffel Tower and natural wonders similar Niagara Falls and the Canadian Rockies. This entertaining survey presents about 80 works from a short but prolific career. Gray Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, 212-998-6780, nyu.edu/greyart. (Johnson)

Out Of Town

★ National Museum of African Fine art: 'Conversations: African and African American Artists in Dialogue' (through early 2016) For its 50th anniversary, this museum has brilliantly thread together work from ii sources: its ain holdings in African material and the Camille O. and William H. Cosby Jr. drove of African-American art. The Cosby drove, weighted toward canonical figures like Romare Bearden and Charles White, will bring in the crowds, merely it is the curators and museum itself, which is in a period of renaissance, that have made the show ascension well higher up predictability. Smithsonian Institution, 950 Independence Artery SW, Washington, 202-633-4600, africa.si.edu. (Cotter)

Last Chance

★ Asia Society and Museum: 'Buddhist Fine art of Myanmar' (closes on Sunday) In 1962, Myanmar, once known as Burma, closed its doors to the earth and threw away the key for almost xl years. Under surveillance-obsessed military dominion, little from outside could get in, and little from within could become out, including art. Recently, the country has re-established international contact, and even fabricated efforts to advertise its cultural riches. They couldn't accept made a more persuasive case than with this splendidly designed exhibition of some 70 sculptures and paintings, from modest portable eighth- and ninth-century Buddha statuettes, each basically a mobile advice device, a spiritual smartphone kept shut for use on the road or at home; to a single towering 19th-century lacquered woods shrine, glinting with gilt and cut glass and ascent, tier upon tier, to the ceiling. Welcome to Bliss Urban center. 725 Park Avenue, at 70th Street, 212-517-2742, asiasociety.org. (Cotter)

★ Metropolitan Museum of Fine art: 'The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky' (closes on Sunday) Some of the primeval surviving art by native North Americans left America long agone. Soldiers, traders and priests, with magpie eyes for brilliant things, bundled it and shipped it across the bounding main to Europe. Painted robes, embroidered slippers and feathered headdresses tinkling with chimes constitute their way into cupboards in 18th-century London and Paris, and lay there half-forgotten. Now, with this traveling evidence, some of those wondrous things — truly world masterpieces — have come home in an exhibition context that carries the Native American story from 100 B.C. into the 21st century. 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org. (Cotter)

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/arts/design/museum-gallery-listings-for-may-8-14.html

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