The idea that America’s prosperity is rooted in its diversity is alive and well in the nation’s museums and galleries. It has guided a wholesale reconsideration of how the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents its holdings ahead of the opening of a striking new building. That notion resounds, too, throughout exciting new solo exhibitions from contemporary American artists Derrick Adams, Nick Cave and Samantha Yun Wall, and in retrospectives of the work of pioneers who’ve died, such as the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, the designer (whether he likes the label or not) Isamu Noguchi or that tireless innovator Marcel Duchamp, whose penchant for provocation was ready-made. Even shows devoted to Henri Matisse and Claude Monet illustrate how these old masters managed to surprise themselves with new subjects and modes of expression late in their careers.
‘Drawn to Venice’ at the Legion of Honor
This first of two complimentary tributes to Venice at San Francisco’s twin art museums features more than 30 drawings and prints from the 14th through 18th centuries, documenting the Italian city’s initial emergence as an artistic center and then its spectacular 18th-century renewal. Striking maritime scenes by Francesco Guardi and Canaletto helped to define Venice in the popular imagination for centuries, while illustrations by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his son Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo captured more fleeting scenes of humor and beauty in daily life. Through Aug. 2, Legion of Honor, San Francisco. famsf.org.
‘Samantha Yun Wall: What We Leave Behind’ at Seattle Art Museum
Samantha Yun Wall’s enveloping black-and-white drawings radiate such tension and mystery that if you look at any one of them for longer than just a few seconds, the piece will appear to move. That’s especially evident with “What We Leave Behind,” the title piece of her first major museum exhibition. In this 5-by-7-foot drawing in ink and conté crayon, a half-dozen female silhouettes in black-and-white appear to dance against a gray background. Born in Seoul to a Korean mother and Black U.S. serviceman father, and a U.S. resident since she was a child, Wall has long been drawn to silhouettes as vessels for questions of identity and belonging. “What We Leave Behind” shares with other pieces in Wall’s new show the motif of pasqueflowers with human eyes, a surreal element that alludes to Korean folklore. Through Oct. 4, Seattle Art Museum. seattleartmuseum.org.
‘Nick Cave: Mammoth’ at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Not that Nick Cave. This Mr. Cave is a son of Chariton County, Missouri, and drew international acclaim for his “Soundsuits” — ornate hybrids of sculpture and garment that he was first moved to create in the wake of the Los Angeles Police Department beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991. Cave’s exploration of his rural family history in video, sculpture and found objects is the basis of SAAM’s largest-ever commission of new work by a single artist, but its remit is far grander than mere autobiography. He presents objects such as his grandmother’s thimble collection as though they were the remnant of some long-extinct civilization. Cave uses the crafted hides and skeletons of mammoths to remind us that all things are temporary. In “Roam,” a video projection across four gallery walls, he imagines these ancient beasts wandering 21st-century Chicago. Through Jan. 3, 2027, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington. americanart.si.edu.
‘Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone’ at the Peabody Essex Museum
The Black and Indigenous sculptor Edmonia Lewis achieved significant notoriety in her own time, telling a New York Times reporter in 1878 that “the land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.” Then in her mid-30s, the artist born near Albany, New York, had left the United States a dozen years earlier, finding Rome to be a more welcoming place from which to create her neoclassical figures in marble. Lewis sculpted Abraham Lincoln and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow along with figures from antiquity such as the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Lewis returned to the United States more than half a dozen times to promote her work, and yet by the time of her death in 1907, she had fallen into obscurity and poverty. The decade-in-the-making “Said in Stone” is Lewis’s first major retrospective, including some 30 of her own sculptures. Through June 7, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. pem.org.
‘Matisse’s Jazz: Rhythms in Color’ at the Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute has held Henri Matisse’s original work from “Jazz,” his 1947 art book of cut-paper imagery, since the year after its publication but has never displayed its contents in their entirety until now. Cut paper was both a new language and a practical solution for the septuagenarian Frenchman: Recovering from abdominal surgery, Matisse was too weak to paint, so he channeled his memories of music halls and circus scenes into a series of 20 cut-paper maquettes instead. For a man who had always been obsessed by the union of color and line, this technique unlocked a new mode of expression. “The paper cutouts allow me to draw with color,” he exulted. More than 50 other samples of Matisse’s work contextualize the late-career breakthrough that “Jazz” represented. March 7-June 1, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. artic.edu.
‘Monet and Venice’ at the de Young Museum
The other half of San Francisco’s bifurcated Venetian Scheme focuses on the paintings inspired by Claude Monet’s three-month stay in Venice in late 1908. Monet had come only reluctantly, but the visit was a productive one, resulting in 37 scenes of a deserted city vanishing into an ethereal light that Monet referred to as the “enveloppe.” Monet’s fascination with this effect motivated him to paint landmarks such as the Grand Canal and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore at various times of day. This exhibit also features work from other phases of Monet’s career, along with images of Venice by Canaletto, Sargent and Renoir. March 21-July 26, de Young Museum, San Francisco. famsf.org.
‘Isamu Noguchi: “I am not a designer”’ at the High Museum of Art
Two hundred objects, many of them seldom exhibited, form the basis of the High Museum’s career-spanning survey of the work of Isamu Noguchi, the artist, landscape architect and furniture designer whose influence transcended movements and eras. The iconic Noguchi table marketed by Herman Miller since 1947 was the formal expression of a governing philosophy: Noguchi believed that good design could make our environments more welcoming and inclusive. The exhibit’s large-scale installations include the stage set Noguchi created for choreographer Martha Graham’s show “Seraphic Dialogue,” a retelling of the legend of Joan of Arc, while also featuring models for several projects Noguchi never brought to fruition. The exhibit coincides with the 50th anniversary of the opening of “Playscapes,” the public playground Noguchio designed as a bicentennial gift to the city of Atlanta. April 10-Aug. 2, High Museum of Art, Atlanta. high.org.
‘Marcel Duchamp’ at MoMA
It’s been more than half a century since Marcel Duchamp had a U.S. retrospective, so this 300-piece celebration of the conceptual art pioneer’s six-decade career has all the makings of a blockbuster. He died in 1968, just as the world at last seemed ready to embrace his scandalous experiments. “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” his shock-inducing 1912 attempt to address “the problem of motion in painting,” was too sharp-edged for the cubists. “Fountain,” a urinal turned on its side and signed with a pseudonym, from 1917, was, well, a toilet signed with a made-up name. Duchamp forced his audiences to contemplate what art is or isn’t, and his staggering evolution between 1900 and 1968 — the bookends of this exhibit — attest to his lifelong struggle “to avoid conforming to my own taste.” April 12-Aug. 22, Museum of Modern Art, New York. moma.org.
‘Derrick Adams: View Master’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art
The Baltimore-born multimedia artist Derrick Adams has always championed his scenes of Black people at leisure as a political statement. His 2023 sculpture “America’s Playground: DC” commemorated the desegregation of the city’s playgrounds. His fiberglass “Cool Down Benches” are shaped like economy-car-size ice cream pops but painted in the colors of various Pan-African flags as well those of Old Glory. The title piece of Adams’s Institute of Contemporary Art retrospective is a 6-by-8-foot expansion of the red stereoscopic viewer toy that Mattel has marketed since 1939. But Mattel’s version isn’t emblazoned with the message “Double consciousness is the dual self-perception.” Initially confounding, that epigram begins to make sense if you hold it in your mind while looking at vibrant Adams paintings such as “Just” or “Floater 84,” celebrations of color that show Black Americans enjoying hard-won moments of repose. April 16-Sept. 7, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. icaboston.org.
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA
Architect Peter Zumthor’s imposing, Wilshire Boulevard-straddling edifice is L.A.’s newest architectural landmark. Two-thousand ticketed patrons got a preview of the $720 million new space’s rough-concrete interior last summer, before the art was installed. Its 110,000 square feet of display space will exhibit all pieces on the same floor, which Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan told the New York Times is intended to democratize the exhibition experience and rebut the old notion of a single, Eurocentric view of art history. Reorganizing the LACMA collection for this new space has been a five-year project for the museum’s 45 curators, who’ve embraced the new, curvilinear building as an opportunity to view their disciplines with fresh eyes. Famous highlights of the LACMA collection are expected to remain, but there will be more costumes and textiles on display, to cite one example of the museum’s more inclusive approach to curation. Opens April 19, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. lacma.org.
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