Highlights include grand retrospectives of Alex Katz and Wolfgang Tillmans, a titanic assembly of van Gogh and a celebration of the pioneering Just Above Midtown gallery.
After two and a half tumultuous years, the art world is finally catching its breath. There are plenty of exciting objects on the move this season — Aboriginal bark paintings, pre-Revolutionary French fashion magazines, must-see exhibits of African sculpture and Korean modernism. There’s some shiny new real estate, too, including an updated campus for the Orange County Museum of Art and the brand-new Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C.
But the overall mood this fall tends toward surveys of well-established artists, like Alex Katz at the Guggenheim; reliable 19th- or 20th-century blockbusters, like van Gogh in Detroit or Matisse in Philadelphia; and bequests, like a major promised gift from John Waters to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where, at the boundary-pushing filmmaker’s insistence, you can now visit the all-gender “John Waters Restrooms.” What follows is a list of highlights.
September
THE FACADE COMMISSION: HEW LOCKE, GILT The British sculptor and assemblage artist Hew Locke, who, in the words of the museum, uses “an aesthetic of excess and theatricality to deconstruct iconographies of power,” remixes the Met’s facade. (Sept. 15-May 22, 2023; Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org)
THE 58TH CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL: IS IT MORNING FOR YOU YET? Combining historical work with new commissions, this latest edition of North America’s longest-running international exhibition considers what “international” actually means. (Sept. 24-April 2, 2023; Carnegie Museum of Art and various locations, Pittsburgh, cmoa.org)
November
JIMMY DESANA: SUBMISSION Punk art, mail art and unsettling nudes shot with colored gels — the first museum survey for a downtown photographer who died of AIDS at 40. (Nov. 11-April 16, 2023; Brooklyn Museum, brooklynmuseum.org)