10 Exhibitions to See This Fall
Liliana Porter, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Square), 1973/2012
© and courtesy the artist
Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985
The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
September 15–December 31, 2017
As part of the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, which will involve dozens of museums across Southern California, the Hammer will open a survey of more than one hundred female Latin American artists. Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 focuses on a turbulent twenty-five-year period when much of Latin America suffered under forms of military dictatorship, and the emboldened work of female artists, in particular, challenged the status quo. While the work ranges across a wide variety of practices, a number of important artists celebrated for their photography, including Liliana Porter, Regina Silveira, and Paz Errázuriz, will be featured.
Stephen Shore, Santa Fe, New Mexico June 1972
© the artist
Stephen Shore
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
November 19, 2017–May 28, 2018
This ambitious survey, featuring numerous unpublished and previously unexhibited works, covers five decades of Stephen Shore’s photography. It begins, of course, with the gelatin-silver prints from his teenage years—famously purchased by MoMA when he was fourteen—and includes his photographs of Andy Warhol’s factory, his pioneering work with color photography, his eventual transition to digital tools and social media, and everything in between. As Britt Salvesen writes in Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973–1981 (2017), “he was trying to understand the meanings people attach to places, things, and practices—pondering their scope of knowledge, sense of urgency, and expectations of satisfaction.”
Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, 1971, from Tokyo
© the artist
Araki. Tokyo
Pinakothek Der Moderne
October 26, 2017– March 4, 2018
Nobuyoshi Araki’s series Araki. Tokyo is composed of formative photographs made from 1969 to 1973, included in one of his earliest books, Tokyo (1973). Araki, known for his erotic depiction of Japanese culture, made these photographs as if producing a diary. The twenty-eight diptychs to be featured at the Pinakothek Der Moderne juxtapose intimate portraits of nude women with the bustling streets of Tokyo. Araki. Tokyo foreshadows Araki’s recent work made after going blind in one eye, which more blatantly examines the disparity between sight and memory.
Manuel G. Barrera Jr., Evening vigil at LAPD Parker Center, ca. 1971
© the artist and courtesy the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
La Raza
Autry Museum, Los Angeles
September 16, 2017– February 10, 2019
La Raza, the bilingual newspaper published from 1967–77 in Los Angeles, was an essential platform for the visibility of the Chicano civil rights movement. Spanish for “the people,” La Raza envisioned a multicultural image of Latin American identity in the midst of a revolution. Photographers were a crucial part of the movement, incentivizing readers to join the cause through images of determined artists and activists. This exhibition at the Autry Museum will feature an extensive archive of over 25,000 images from the Chicano Studies Research Center of UCLA, illustrating an often-overlooked vision of American history.
Lauren Greenfield, Secret Moneii, 28, a stripper at Magic City who made nearly $20,000 during her first week at the club, Atlanta. Before coming to Magic City, the single mother of two was working two jobs and struggling, 2015
© the artist and courtesy Institute
GENERATION WEALTH by Lauren Greenfield
ICP Museum, New York
September 20, 2017–January 7, 2018
“I’m looking at how the values of our culture have shifted in a way that affects people beyond socioeconomic status, race, or nationality,” Lauren Greenfield, director of the celebrated 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles, said in a recent interview with Aperture. GENERATION WEALTH, Greenfield’s first major retrospective, presents her twenty-five-year, multimedia exploration of consumerism—in the U.S. and abroad. The exhibition originated at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, and includes photographs, first-person interviews, and documentary film footage, all of which reveal the tremendous level trust she has built with her subjects.
Albert Renger-Patzsch, Stapedia variegata. Asclepiadaceae, 1923
© the artist and Archiv Annund Jürgen Wilde/ADAGP, Paris
Albert Renger-Patzsch: The Perspective of Things
Jeu de Paume, Paris
October 17, 2017–January 21, 2018
This exhibition of 190 photographs marks one of the largest to date of the work of photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, a crucial figure in the New Objectivity movement during the Weimar Republic in 1920s Germany. In his stark images of nature, architecture, and commercial items— from orchids to shoe-factory machinery—Renger-Patzsch sought to precisely depict the “essence of the object.” His 1928 photobook, Die Welt ist schön (The world is beautiful), helped define the movement. Albert Renger-Patzsch: The Perspective of Things will also include a selection of the photographer’s postwar works.
Walker Evans, Truck and Sign, 1928–30
© The Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Walker Evans
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
September 30, 2017–February 4, 2018
A major retrospective of Walker Evans’s vernacular style comes to San Francisco this fall and will include more than four-hundred works from the 1920s to the 1970s that illuminate the seminal photographer’s facility for capturing the everyday. SFMOMA will mount the exhibition’s only U.S. engagement, following a presentation at Centre Pompidou. The museum’s new senior curator of photography, Clément Chéroux, curates a textured look at Evans’s practice, including not only his photographs, but also personal items such as postcards and clipped images that influenced him.
Sarah Charlesworth, Still Life with Camera, 1995, from the series Doubleworld
© The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth
Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
August 20–November 26, 2017
Can pictures be more important—and more powerful—than reality? Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013), along with her Pictures Generation peers, revisited this question throughout her career. Charlesworth’s first major retrospective in Los Angeles, Sarah Carlesworth: Doubleworld, organized by the New Museum, surveys four decades of work across ten series. In 1977, Douglas Crimp included Charlesworth in the now-legendary Pictures exhibition, among artists such as Sherrie Levine and Laurie Simmons, who shared her fascination of representation and symbolism, as well as in how images are constructed and distributed. “I use images drawn from the culture,” Charlesworth said in 1990, “because I’m interested in each piece being an interface between my personal subjectivity and a given world.”
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Staircase at Villa Farnese II, Caprarola, 2016
© the artist and courtesy of the Polo Museale del Lazio-Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Italian Tourism
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise
Japan Society, New York
October 20, 2017–January 7, 2018
More than four hundred years ago, in the 1580s, Jesuit missionaries sent four Catholic-convert Japanese boys on an eight-year tour of Europe. After discovering a fresco portraying this envoy, Hiroshi Sugimoto retraced their steps, and captured the sites that this “Tenshō Embassy” visited. Conceived by the artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise couples new, unseen work by Sugimoto and classical masterpieces from Japan. Considering the history of cultural exchange between East and West, the exhibition celebrates the Japan Society’s 110th anniversary. In addition to these black-and-white photographs, Gates of Paradise also includes several Japanese screens, which depict Christian and Western themes, from the same era.
Malick Sidibé, (Je l’appelais) La gazelle / Avec mon chapeau et mes pattes d’éléphant, 1974
© the artist and courtesy Magnin-A
Malick Sidibé: Mali Twist
Fondation Cartier, Paris
October 20, 2017–February 25, 2018
Known as the “eye of Bamako,” the late photographer Malick Sidibé (1936–2016) fused the American rhythms of James Brown with the fashions of 1960s-era postcolonial West Africa. Two decades after his first solo exhibition at Fondation Cartier, Sidibé’s vivacious studio portraits and a dizzyingly spectacular account of 1960s nightlife in Mali’s capital return to the glossy Jean Nouvel-designed museum in a retrospective organized by André Magnin and Brigitte Ollier. Sidibé was famous for staying out late, and his most iconic photographs project irrepressible joie de vivre. “I was the only young reporter in Bamako taking photos at surprise parties,” Sidibé once said, referring to the clandestine gatherings organized by the city’s youth. “I was always on the lookout for a photo opportunity, a lighthearted moment, an original attitude, or some guy who was really funny.” If the preview this spring at Red Hook Labs was any indication, the expanded version is not to be missed.
