From The Medici To Afrofuturism: 8 Exceptional Art Exhibits That Make 2021 Worth Remembering

Every year, this column offers commentary on dozens of museum shows globally. Though some are best forgotten, others continue to stimulate and inspire long after works have been boxed and shipped off. As the year comes to a close, here are eight 2021 exhibits that still resonate. Read excerpts from my Forbes write-ups below, or click on the show titles to read my original essays in full.

Jenny Saville

Museo Novecento

“… Saville’s proximity to the immortal Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo is not only physical. All of them tried to discover who and what a person can be by observing and recording the corporeal traces of an invisible psychic state. Saville has been able to begin where her forebears ended, unconstrained by their impulse to typecast in the tradition of classical tropes or for the sake of Biblical narratives. With pots of liquid flesh and unrepentant pentimenti, she is singularly able to surface what people understand about themselves today: the Renaissance rejuvenated.”

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“… One of the most remarkable objects in the room is a transistor radio found in a Nairobi dump by the Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru, modified with bright beading and fitted with multiple antennas, as if tuned to receive news from all possible worlds. Kabiru’s Afrofuturist radio evokes the promise of Afrofuturism more broadly: the potential to repossess history, and to transmit the past that could have been into the present for the sake of a better future. Most period rooms are problematic because they romanticize the periods they represent, setting the dens of imperialism and colonialism in the aspirational language of House Beautiful. Perhaps all could benefit from an Afrofuturist treatment….”

Joan Mitchell

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

“… The enduring allure of Mitchell’s paintings cannot be attributed to facile virtuosity, nor can the distinctiveness of her oeuvre be attributed to physical prowess. If the first impulse is to compare Mitchell’s spectacular paintings to a triple axel, the more lasting impression is that they read like sonnets….”

Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s

The Menil Drawing Institute

“… As Christo and Jeanne-Claude understood, monumental plans need not be self-negating in order to succeed in the absence of physical manifestation. Preparatory drawings have monumental presence because they retain their potential. In the right hands, their power may even be concentrated when compressed to two dimensions. And as Robert Smithson once observed, the unrealized monument remains dialectically unconstrained….”

Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality

The Museum of Modern Art

“… Like an echo, or the roar of an ocean, Kubota’s video is everywhere and nowhere. Perhaps this can be seen as a premonition of our own age, in which people are tethered to the mobile technologies that are supposed to set them free. More optimistically, her work can be viewed as an escape we might yet make by privileging experiences over the mechanisms that deliver them.”

The Medici: Portraits & Politics, 1512-1570

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“When Cosimo I de’ Medici became the second duke of Florence, the problems he inherited all but guaranteed he’d be the last. Cosimo rose to the challenge by conjuring the Renaissance and situating Florence at the center of the cultural rebirth. This supreme act of socio-political propaganda is the central theme of The Medici: Portraits & Politics, 1512-1570, offering a stimulating balance of spectacular art and behind-the-scenes machination that played equal parts in defining one of the most famous periods in history….”

Everything That Wasn’t White: Lonnie Holley at the Elaine de Kooning House

The Parrish Art Museum

Lonnie Holley: Tangled Up in de Kooning’s Fence

The South Etna Montauk Foundation

“… The relationship between materials and memories goes both ways in Holley’s art. The materials revive memories and the memories redeem materials. These moves might be heavy-handed in the hands of an artist less adept and committed than Holley. By allowing for the cohesion to be essentially aesthetic, he avoids the diagrammatic and didactic. Sense of the material world is made without being settled. Memories retain their spirit. His personal history may come together in alternative ways as other materials are found….”

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

The Bundeskunsthalle

“… In a sense, Warburg was lucky that he didn’t have a chance to finish his Bilderatlas, and perhaps even more fortunate that the original panels were lost for nearly a century. His claims about universality were worryingly overstated, and the focused research on classical Greece and Renaissance Italy dissipated into apophenia when applied to popular culture. Warburg was fortunate because the relative invisibility of a relatively inchoate masterwork made it mythic. Warburg himself might have appreciated this situation more keenly than most people, because memory was the guiding principle of his atlas. Mnemosyne was his muse and he appreciated her as much for her elusiveness as for her persistent presence….”