It’s no longer enough to like our favorite artists’ works. By putting on Hopper’s fedora, Picasso’s striped shirt, Warhol’s wig or Kahlo’s colorful couture, we want to become their avatars.
Known for his social practice, performance, sculpture and work with archives, the Chicago artist memorializes those who shaped his worldview in his first major American museum survey.
Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic, on fall exhibitions that capture a period during which art and art history have been in flux, including the New Museum’s survey of the polymathic Theaster Gates.
The artist turned the remote town of Marfa into a cultural pilgrimage site. Three decades after his death, the foundations charged with preserving his complicated legacy are debating how to move forward.
At the Mississippi Museum of Art, Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates Jr., Carrie Mae Weems and others explore the personal legacy of the era-shaping movement from the rural South.