5 Museum Shows To Visit This Summer in the Midwest - Part I
Summer isn't over yet, so if you have some time left to get out of town let art be your guide. Here are 5 shows in nearby cities that offer a creative excuse to hit the road. We will share 5 more shows soon in Part II.
– CGN
1. Walker Art Center – Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody explores the distinctive quality and enduring influence of Keith Haring’s life and art, through more than 100 works and rarely seen archival materials. Haring’s unique visual language—now broadly recognizable in popular culture—continues to resonate for its prescient address of social issues and its celebration of joy, solidarity, community, and hope.
Spanning the full arc of the artist’s career, the exhibition features a wide range of works, including major paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mural-scaled works featuring Haring’s emblematic characters, such as dancing figures, barking dogs, and crawling babies.
Thru Sept 8
Minneapolis, MN
2. Saint Louis Art Museum – Currents 123: Tamara Johnson
Dallas-based artist Tamara Johnson is known for her witty, hypernaturalistic sculptures depicting ubiquitous household objects, from colanders, hair clips, and garden hoses to an array of buffet treats, brought together in improbable, incisive assemblages. Her handcrafted objects are shaped from materials as varied as copper and concrete and then are meticulously painted to fool and delight the eye. Their exquisite surfaces—sheathed in silver leaf, coated with enamel, and brushed with diamond dust—both mask and accentuate their construction. The installations of Johnson’s sculpted items—seemingly plucked from a rummage sale, kitchen drawer or backyard—are weighted with a surreal, disquieting intimacy, a result as much of their uncanny juxtaposition and position within a gallery space as their improbable solidity.
Thru Sept 22
St. Louis, MO
3. Grand Rapids Art Museum – The Outwin: American Portraiture Today
Every three years the National Portrait Gallery invites artists working throughout the United States to submit recent work to the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Out of 2,700 entries received in 2022, forty-two finalists were selected for inclusion in The Outwin: American Portraiture Today. This touring exhibition of contemporary portraiture illuminates the genre’s power to communicate a multitude of life experiences. The artists responded with works that engage and reflect contemporary society, many providing new insights into the unprecedented reality we have experienced in the time surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thru Sept 8
Grand Rapids, MI
4. Milwaukee Art Museum – Idris Khan: Repeat After Me
One of the most defining artists of his generation, Idris Khan (b. 1978) explores the lyrical, symbolic, and physical meanings of repetition. His works span media, from photography and video to painting and sculpture, and focus on gestures of repetition as a means of physically marking time, memory, loss, transformation, and ultimately, transcendence.
Idris Khan: Repeat After Me is the British artist’s first U.S. museum solo exhibition and traces Khan’s investigations across time and media. Showcasing major works covering every facet of the artist’s career, the exhibition also inaugurates a never-before-seen body of paintings Khan created expressly for the presentation at the Museum. In these works, Khan synthesizes his earliest concerns with photographic reproduction while delving into the integral role of color in iconic masterworks of art history and our memories of them.
Thru Aug 11
Milwaukee, WI
5. Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center – Jayson Musson: His History of Art
Jayson Musson created His History of Art as part of his 2022 artist residency at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM), an institution in Philadelphia devoted to artistic collaboration. Inspired by sitcoms and educational and variety television shows, including Pee Wee’s Playhouse and The Muppets, Musson collaborated with FWM staff, film producers, writers, and editors to create a three-episode series that reconsiders key aspects of art history. The artist breaks down elitist walls surrounding art history and encourages the questioning of long-established beliefs around artistic genius.
Evoking the tone of educational PBS children’s shows and nun-turned-art-critic Sister Wendy Beckett’s BBC productions, His History of Art uses humor to explore and critique commonly studied works of art. Musson— who wrote and directed the series, in addition to performing onscreen as “Jay” – attempts to educate his skeptical puppet sidekick Ollie. They journey through time, from the prehistoric era to the present, encountering figures as varied as Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso and a larger-than-life Venus (now called Woman) of Willendorf, a four-and-a-half-inch figurine made 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. Jay and Ollie ask these art historical icons questions and listen to their “first-hand” accounts. Their explorations beg the question: is art history still important to our daily lives? If so, why, and how?
Thru Sept 8
Cincinnati, OH