8 Art Shows We Can’t Wait to See in 2024
The new season in art is awash in amazing shows in galleries and museums. The first third of 2024 will feature the world-building artist LaToya Ruby Frazier and a new look at the Met at an immense topic: the Harlem Renaissance. There will be both young artists and older talents like Stephen Shore exploring unfamiliar terrain, as well as superstar Cindy Sherman showing new work. Indulge!
“LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity”
MoMA (May 12–September 7)
The MacArthur-winning artist-activist’s images of her hometown, Brandon, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; and other Rust Belt sites of industrial waste, decay, and ecological poisoning give us everyday people in everyday existence fighting for their lives. In many of her photographs, we see Frazier’s family and the artist herself, some of whom have been made sick by living so close to industry. Behold this quietly revolutionary testament to our time, a hybrid form of Black feminist world-building.
“The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism”
Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 25–July 28)
With over 150 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera made between the 1920s and ’40s, the Met gives us the glory that was the Harlem Renaissance, when Black art and life and creativity flowed through and burst out of this magnetic, mythologized neighborhood. We will see the forming of a new American aesthetic that has been seeding art and artists ever since and is now finally being seen as important and primary, as it always was. It is a river.
“Joan Snyder: Come Close”
Canada Gallery (January 12–February 24)
There is a look that might be called Canada Gallery: loud, funky, materialist, handmade, strange, ugly, poetic, and smart — and 83-year old Joan Snyder was Canada before it even existed. Her paintings look like quilts, with their many textured sections, but also like magic carpets for the ways they transport us.
“Jamian Juliano-Villani: It”
Gagosian Gallery (March 16–April 20)
Juliano-Villani, a petite stick of dynamite, seems to channel 100 types of energy at once. Her paintings are flat conglomerations of images, each painted meticulously and nearly searing the eyes with color. And her own gallery, O’Flaherty’s, on Avenue A is one of the hottest, craziest artistic spaces in New York.
Huma Bhabha
David Zwirner (February 22–April 6)
Bhabha’s rough-hewn, totemic sculptures depict demons, deities, and warning spirits. They are neo-archaic, bringing us into close contact with something primary, stripped-down, and somewhat terrifying.
Cindy Sherman
Hauser & Wirth (January 18–March 9)
Our moment under the existential blade needs this show by one of the art world’s resident shamans. She will don guises, assume poses, and make faces, manipulating the optical feed of her camera and bending it to convey the danger and banality of our time.
Stephen Shore
303 Gallery (May 30–July 3)
Shore is the poet laureate of non-moments that loom large in the imagination. Whether it’s a desolate highway, a TV dinner, or a parking lot, his images turn even the grandest subjects into incidents and accidents.
Hannelore Baron
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (January 27–March 23)
This visionary artist, who was born in Germany in 1939 and fled to America thereafter, began making art later in life. Her small collages are powerful summonings of deeply felt emotions, conveying a mind set on fire by materials.