2024 Fall Arts Preview: Visual Arts
By • September 11, 2024 0 122
Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing
American University Museum
Through Dec. 8
The American University Museum is the first U.S. venue for the touring exhibition, “Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing,” featuring more than 100 original artworks by the searingly satiric British illustrator, born in 1936. Renowned for his collaborations with maverick “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson in the 1970s, the ever-provocative master of ink, acrylic and pastels, now 88, has inspired generations of artists. Highlights include Steadman’s work with filmmaker and author Ceri Levy on “The Gonzovation Trilogy,” depicting extinct and endangered birds and animals, and the “Psychogeography” series he created with journalist Will Self for the Independent newspaper. Also on view in AU’s Katzen Arts Center: “A Sight to Behold: The Corcoran Legacy Collection of Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Landscape Paintings”; “Faces of the Republican Party,” a selection of digital collages by Jeff Gates; and exhibitions of work by photographer Connie Imboden and painters Pegan Brooke, Mira Hecht, Joseph Holston and Mark Kelner.
Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment
National Gallery of Art
Through Jan. 19, 2025
“Impression, Sunrise,” 1872. Claude Monet. Courtesy NGA.
Marking the 150th anniversary of the first of eight exhibitions by the Impressionists, “Paris 1874” comprises some 130 works, many from the Impressionists’ public debut, which opened on April 15, two weeks prior to the 1874 Paris Salon (the subject of a painting by Camille Cabaillot-Lassalle). The only U.S. presentation of “Paris 1874,” the exhibition — co-organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Musée d’Orsay, where it was on view earlier this year — features paintings by Cézanne, Manet, Morisot, Monet — including “Impression, Sunrise,” his 1872 depiction of Le Havre — Pissarro and Renoir, as well as by Eugène Boudin and other lesser-known contemporaries. Works by academic painters, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, and sculptors, such as Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié, give visitors a sense of the official style against which the Impressionists rebelled. The show also displays prints by Manet, Félix Bracquemond, Giuseppe de Nittis and Maxime Lalanne and a gilded copper medal, designed by Alphée Dubois, that was awarded to Louis Priou at the Salon.
Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Sept. 20, 2024 – Jan. 12, 2025
“Castaways,” 2023. Suchitra Mattai. Courtesy NMWA.
Born in Guyana in 1973, Los Angeles-based artist Suchitra Mattai was raised in Nova Scotia. She later earned a B.A. from Rutgers and master’s degrees in painting and drawing and in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania. By juxtaposing her richly colored two- and three-dimensional pieces — paintings, collages, sculptures and textile installations that incorporate beads and found objects — with historical art from Europe and South Asia, “Myth from Matter” initiates a visual conversation between East and West, old and new, history and mythology. Mattai’s work also interrogates binaries such as male and female, art and craft and labor and leisure, questioning whose presence persists throughout history and is monumentalized in visual culture. The show interweaves personal narratives, collective mythologies and colonial history, offering a reimagined vision of the past that centers women and people of color, especially those of Caribbean and South Asian descent.
An Epic of Kings: The Great Mongol Shahnama
National Museum of Asian Art
Sept. 21, 2024 – Jan. 12, 2025
From “The Great Mongol Shahnama,” c. 1330. Courtesy NMAA.
Considered Iran’s national epic, “The Shahnama,” known in English as the “The Book of Kings,” was completed by the Persian poet Firdawsi around 1010. This exhibition focuses on “The Great Mongol Shahnama,” a single copy made three centuries later, around 1330. Likely commissioned by Abu Sa‘id of the Ilkhanid dynasty, a branch of the Mongol Empire that ruled over Iran and West Asia, the manuscript is an example of how the Ilkhanids inserted themselves into Iran’s history. Its illustrations emphasize historical kings of Iran’s past, including Alexander the Great — known in Persian as Iskandar — and the pre-Islamic Sasanian monarchs, such as Ardashir I, Bahram Gur (Bahram V) and Kasra Anushirvan (Khusraw I Anushirvan), role models to the Ilkhanid rulers. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see 25 folios from the now dismantled manuscript, “An Epic of Kings” is also the first exhibition to present paintings from “The Great Mongol Shahnama” alongside contemporaneous works from China, the Mediterranean and the Latin West.
Osgemeos: Endless Story
Hirshhorn Museum
Sept. 29, 2024 – Aug. 3, 2025
Osgemeos. Courtesy Hirshhorn.
“Endless Story” will fill the Hirshhorn’s sweeping third-floor galleries with large-scale paintings on wood and canvas, scores of drawings, monumental sculptures and room-sized installations incorporating light, music and motion. Inspired by embroidery, graffiti, hip hop and sci-fi, these works, approximately 1,000 in number, are the creations of identical Brazilian twins Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. 1974), known as Osgemeos (os gêmeos, from Gemini, means “the twins” in Portuguese). The exhibition will introduce Tritrez, a mystical universe of large-headed, yellow-skinned figures that the artists invented as children. Central place will be given to “The Tritrez Altar” of 2020, a vast rainbow-colored structure housing sculptures of their trademark characters, and “The Moon Room,” constructed in 2022. Another highlight will be a colossal handmade zoetrope, devised in 2014, that animates the twins’ imaginary world in the spirit of precinema. Also on view: photographic and archival documentation of Osgemeos’ murals and graffiti in São Paulo.
Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti
National Gallery of Art
Sept. 29, 2024 – March 9, 2025
“Houses by the Bay,” c. 1944-45. Hector Hyppolite. Courtesy NGA.
In the mid-1900s, powerful images inspired by Haiti’s daily life, religious traditions and history by artists such as Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), Rigaud Benoît (1911-1986) and Philomé Obin (1892-1986) became known worldwide. “Spirit & Strength” will be the first chance to see a group of these works, from the collections of Kay and Roderick Heller of Franklin, Tennessee, and Beverly and John Fox Sullivan of Washington, Virginia, recently given to the National Gallery of Art. Most of the featured artists were associated with the Centre d’Art, a school, gallery and cultural institution founded in Port-au-Prince in 1944 by American artist DeWitt Peters (1865-1948). Organized by Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art, the exhibition will also display works by artists working prior to the Centre d’Art’s establishment and artists who built upon its legacy, including several — notably Americans Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) and Eldzier Cortor (1916-2015) — who visited Haiti on Guggenheim and Rosenwald Fellowships.
William Gropper: Artist of the People
The Phillips Collection
Oct. 17, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025
“Justice” from “Capriccios,” 1953-59. William Gropper. Courtesy Phillips Collection.
The first exhibition dedicated to William Gropper (1897-1977) in Washington, D.C., “Artist of the People” will display more than 30 paintings, drawings and prints, including works from “The Capriccios” of 1953-56, a series of 50 lithographs inspired by Goya’s “Los Caprichos” and the artist’s subpoena by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” subcommittee. The son of immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, Gropper grew up in poverty on New York’s Lower East Side (one of his aunts died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers, mostly immigrant women and girls, perished). After studying on scholarship at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art, now Parsons School of Design, he became an artist on the staff of the New York Tribune in 1917, also contributing illustrations to radical publications. Later, his satirical work appeared in mainstream magazines. In the 1930s, Gropper painted murals for the Treasury Relief Art Project and the Works Progress Administration. He maintained his social realist style into his 70s.
Also of note …
Sightlines: Chinatown and Beyond
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Through Nov. 30, 2025
Presented by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, “Sightlines” — installed in a gallery overlooking D.C.’s historical Chinatown neighborhood — traces the imprint of Chinese, Korean and Javanese Americans on the District’s physical and cultural terrain.
American Vignettes: Symbols, Society and Satire
Rubell Museum DC
Sept. 27, 2024 – Fall 2025
Nearly 100 works from the collection of the Rubell Museums, by artists including Robert Colescott (1925-2009), David Hammons (b. 1943) and Kara Walker (b. 1969), will provide a sweeping look at contemporary American art.
