wcw NOVEMBER 2023

Local and National Art Exhibits
to Experience
NATIONAL MUSEUMS
Met presents
The Harlem Renaissance &
Transatlantic Modernism
In February 2024, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art will present The Harlem
Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism
exhibition. Through some 160 works, it
will explore the far-reaching ways in which
Black artists portrayed everyday modern life
in the new Black cities that took shape in the
1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and
Chicago’s South Side and nationwide in the
early decades of the Great Migration when
millions of African Americans began to
move away from the segregated rural South.
The exhibition will establish the Harlem
Renaissance as the first African American–
led movement of international modern art
and will situate Black artists and their radically
new portrayals of the modern Black
subject as central to our understanding of
international modern art and modern life.
A significant percentage of the paintings,
sculpture, and works on paper on view in
the exhibition come from the collections
of Historically Black Colleges and Universities
(HBCUs), Fisk University Galleries
and Howard University Gallery of Art. Visit
www.metmuseum.org/
Love Gardening?
Check out The Morgan
Their latest exhibit is Seeds of Knowledge:
Early Modern Illustrated Herbals. Seeds
of Knowledge highlights the collection
of 15th to 17th-century European printed
herbals assembled by Dr. Peter Goop of
Liechtenstein.
Herbals were highly illustrated texts that
included both the folklore of plants and
their medicinal uses, and they served as references
to both doctors and lay healthcare
providers. The text and illustrations were
repeatedly refined as the medicinal benefits
of a plant’s use were more clearly understood,
and the style of illustration tended
towards higher degrees of naturalism.
These books were working manuals
and were frequently annotated by readers
with notes on herbal remedies, medicines,
or other uses not found in the printed
text. Dr. Goop’s collection is one of the
most extensive in private hands. Using
the Morgan’s 10th-century manuscript of
Dioscurides’ De materia medica as
a centerpiece, this Thaw Gallery exhibition
will explore developments
in the understanding of the healthful
and healing properties of plants, as
Europe moved away from medicinal
folklore towards an increased understanding
of the natural world.
Open through January 14, 2024.
Visit www.themorgan.org.
At The Frick
Since opening in 1935, The Frick
Collection has inspired generations
of artists who have engaged with
the complex legacies and enduring
importance of Old Master painting.
Barkley L. Hendricks was one such
artist, and the Frick—with its iconic
portraits by Rembrandt, Bronzino, Van
Dyck, and others—was one of Hendricks’s
favorite museums.
At the Frick Madison, Barkley L. Hendricks:
Portraits at the Frick presents
14 early works by this pioneering American
artist who, beginning in the late 1960s,
revolutionized contemporary portraiture
by uniting portraits of Black figures with
traditions of European painting.
His work has inspired some of the most
prominent artists of today, including
Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, and
Kehinde Wiley. Frick Madison is a particularly
appropriate venue for this show, as it
was in the Breuer building (then the home
of the Whitney Museum of American Art)
that Hendricks first showed his art in a New
York City museum exhibition, in 1981.
Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the
Frick, which will display paintings drawn
from both public and
private collections,
is organized by the
Frick’s Curator Aimee
Ng and Consulting
Curator Antwaun
Sargent. The accompanying
catalogue
is authored by Ng
and Sargent, with a
foreword by Thelma
Golden and contributions
by Adams,
Thomas, and Wiley,
along with Hilton
Als, Nick Cave, Awol
Erizku, Rashid Johnson, and Fahamu
Pecou. The Frick will present a
roster of educational programs to
complement the show.
Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits is
on exhibit through January 7, 2024.
Visit www.frick.org
At the Whitney:
Henry Taylor
For more than thirty years, the
Los Angeles–based artist Henry
Taylor has portrayed people from
widely different backgrounds—family
members, friends, neighbors, celebrities,
politicians, and strangers—with a
mixture of raw immediacy and tenderness.
His improvisational approach to artmaking
is hinted at in this exhibition’s title, Henry
Taylor: B Side, which refers to the side of
a record album that often contains lesser-known,
more experimental songs.
Taylor’s paintings, executed quickly and
instinctually from memory, newspaper
clippings, snapshots, and in-person sittings,
are variously light-hearted, intimate, and
somber. In them, he combines flat planes
of bold, sensuous color with areas of rich,
intimate detail and loose brushstrokes to
create paintings that feel alive.
Taylor offers a view of everyday life in
the United States that is grounded in the experiences
of his own community, including
the incarceration, poverty, and often deadly
interactions with police that disproportionately
affect Black Americans.
Henry Taylor: B Side presents the artist’s
paintings along with a selection of his
assemblage sculptures, rarely exhibited early
drawings, a large grouping of painted objects
on recycled cigarette packs and other everyday
supports, and two new installations, one
made specifically for this exhibition.
Information: whitney.org
Sapphic Paris at the Barnes
Marie Laurencin’s contributions to 20th century
art are under recognized, and Sapphic Paris
is the first major US exhibition of her work
in over 30 years. Marie Laurencin: Sapphic
Paris examines questions about representation
and access throughout art history.
Beginning in the early 20th century,
French artist Marie Laurencin created a
unique pictorial world that placed women
at the center of modern art. With a highly
original painting style that defied categorization,
she moved seamlessly between the
male-dominated cubist avant-garde, lesbian
literary and artistic circles, and the realms
of fashion, ballet, and decorative arts.
The exhibition explores Laurencin’s
career, from her self-portraits to her
collaborative decorative projects;
from her early cubist paintings to
her signature work—feminine and
discreetly queer—that defined 1920s
Paris. Runs through January 21,
2024. www.barnesfoundation.org
FLORIDA MUSEUMS
The Ringling
Who is the intriguing man wearing a
religious habit and a gold hoop earring
in The Ringling’s portrait by Italian
Baroque master Il Guercino? And why
does he point to a stack of drawings?
This fascinating exhibition investigates
the sitter, Fra Bonaventura
Bisi (1601-1659), a Franciscan Minor
Conventual friar whose work as an art dealer,
printmaker, and celebrated painter of miniatures
made him a major figure in the artistic
culture of seventeenth-century Bologna.
Offering a captivating glimpse into the
worlds of art making and art collecting in
Baroque Italy, the exhibition explores Fra
Bisi’s artistic training, his close relationships
with Guercino and other Bolognese
artists and intellectuals, his extraordinary
painted miniatures, his dogged pursuit of
continued on page 24
22 WEST COAST WOMAN NOVEMBER 2023