Art Museums Will Feature Eye-Opening Exhibits in May

For art lovers—or wannabe art lovers—special exhibitions at several of New York’s major museums will be worth a detour from the annual meeting’s scientific sessions.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—which merits a visit just to see one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpieces—is featuring an exhibit titled “Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art From 1951 to the Present.”

Featuring works from the Guggenheim’s collection, the exhibit “examines the impulse toward reduction, restraint, and lucidity in postwar art,” according to a museum press release. It shows the impact of minimalism—eliminating extraneous details and stripping art to its purist form—on mid-century artists and how that movement spawned the postminimalist trend. It spotlights works by modern-art giants such as Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly (see above), Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra.

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s major exhibit during the time of the annual meeting is its 2004 Biennial, during which the museum highlights new works by emerging or established American artists. Modern art devotees turn to this prestigious exhibit to get a comprehensive view of the state and future of American art. This year’s biennial features the works of 108 artists and collaborative groups. According to a museum press release, the works range “from the apocalyptic to the ethereal, the fantastic to the political, and the sensual to the obsessive [and] convey an underlying sense of anxiety and uncertainty about the world today.”

The eclectic exhibit wanders far beyond the confines of canvas to feature sculptures, videos, films, photography, digital art, and performance art.

Among standout works in the Whitney’s permanent collection are ones by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe, George Bellows, and Joseph Stella.

The world’s leading repository of 20th-century art, the Museum of Modern Art, is in temporary quarters in the New York City borough of Queens while its Manhattan galleries are being renovated.

While now a longer subway or taxi ride from the midtown hotels, the trip is worth it: MoMA has mounted an exhibit with the intriguing title “Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990.” The exhibit explores the impact of the movies and the seemingly casual snapshot on contemporary fashion photography.

Housed in the mansion that was once home to Andrew Carnegie, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is a branch of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Pioneering industrial designer Christopher Dresser will be the focus of a major retrospective exhibit this spring on the centennial of his death in 1904.

One of the towering figures of 19th-century design, Dresser contributed designs for fabric, wallpaper, architectural ornamentation, furniture, glass, metalwork, and ceramics to more than 70 manufacturers.

Dresser’s design inspirations were a cultural grand tour, with influences from Peruvian, Islamic, Abyssinian, and Far Eastern sources. His designs, the museum points out, “were grounded in an astute understanding of science and a belief in industrial production techniques that called for a new method of composition.”

Using mass-production processes made possible by inventions of the Industrial Revolution, he experimented with patterns and geometric shapes, and “his unique combination of materials and production processes resulted in forms that are startlingly modern.”

One of today’s design mavens, Terence Conran, has called Dresser “a breath of fresh air in a Victorian world filled with gross, vulgar, overdecorated, pretentious design.” ▪