A roundup of free and affordable exhibitions on view at New York art institutions this fall.
Lorraine O’Grady, Rivers, First Draft, 1982 (printed 2015), 11 chromogenic prints.
The School of Visual Arts welcomed new and returning students back to campus this month for the start of the 2023 – 2024 academic year. Among the many benefits of being located in the heart of New York City is SVA’s close proximity to hundreds of arts institutions, which offers students endless opportunities to experience thought-provoking and inspiring encounters with work both new and old.
In the Chelsea neighborhood alone—the heart of New York’s art world—you’ll find a rich scene of galleries within footsteps. Take a short train ride to Brooklyn for its namesake museum, the city’s second-largest, or north to the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Feeling up for a leisurely ride on the Staten Island Ferry? Dock at the harbor and head for the Staten Island Museum. There is so much art to explore across the five boroughs.
This page on the SVA site always offers the most up-to-date information regarding museum memberships, including each institution’s guest policy and ticketing information. As a benefit to students, faculty and staff, SVA maintains memberships at various museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, New Museum of Contemporary Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Here are some current exhibitions from those institutions—and others—that you won’t want to miss.
Brooklyn Museum
It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby
Through Sunday, September 24
The Brooklyn Museum partners with Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby to critically examine Picasso’s legacy through a contemporary and feminist lens. Work by women artists like Renée Cox (MFA 1992 Photography and Related Media) and SVA faculty member Marilyn Minter are installed alongside Picasso’s and accompanied by an audio tour by Gadsby that employs their incisive humor to create a space that both acknowledges Picasso’s influential legacy and asks complex questions about misogyny, “originality” and the art-historical canon.
MoMA PS1
Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Lot of People
Thursday, October 12 – Monday, March 4, 2024
Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will have his largest exhibition to date at MoMa PS1 this October, spanning four decades of his career. Since his breakthrough show in 1989, Tiravanija has consistently pushed the boundaries of the white wall gallery space, questioning mainstream ideas of how we are meant to experience art. This exhibition explores a vast array of subject matters—including his experiences as an immigrant in a Western-centric art world to more recent interrogations of global politics and the quotidian news cycle—by bringing together everything from early experimentations with installation and film to several interactive works and five re-stagings of participatory works.
Museum of Modern Art
Through Saturday, September 16
This month is the last chance to see the most recent installment of MoMA’s ongoing New Photography series, showcasing the work of seven artists with ties to Lagos, Nigeria. The artists in this exhibition consider what it means for photography to document a city as they explore the image as a social medium—what it does, who it’s for, and what it can reveal.
While at the museum, stroll through the sculpture garden and experience its latest installation. “YOU ARE HERE* Contemporary Art in the Garden” activates the Sculpture Garden with contemporary art, nearly all made in the last 20 years, including work by BFA Fine Arts faculty member Lynda Benglis.
The New Museum
Kinetic sculptor Mire Lee’s latest site-specific installation merges motors, tubes and pumps with silicone, ceramics, fabrics and liquids to create sculptures that evoke bodily functions and environmental decay. Drawing upon architecture, horror and cybernetics, Lee has filled the New Museum’s fourth floor with animatronic works that operate both like living organisms and biological machines, creating an unsettling sight within a show titled after Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book Black Sun, which was itself a study of depression and melancholia.
Darrel Ellis, Untitled (Aunt Lena and Grandmother Lilian Ellis), 1990, gelatin silver print with colored ink (hand coloring). On view at “Darrel Ellis: Regeneration,” at the Bronx Museum.
Whitney Museum of Art
Through February 2024
Drawing upon rarely-seen works from the Whitney collection, this exhibition examines the impacts of legacy across familial, historical and aesthetic lines. The show is organized across nine galleries arranged by theme and features paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs and time-based media installations by 43 leading artists, including former SVA faculty member Lorraine O’Grady. Subject matter ranges from slavery and the Great Migration to COVID, African religious traditions and colonization to constitute a diverse array of observations around “inheritance,” considering what has been passed on and how it may shift, change, or live again.
Through February 2024
Another selection of works from Whitney’s collection, “Trust Me” brings together photographers who embrace intuition and indeterminacy in their creative process. Depictions of ancestral bonds, friendship and romantic partnership are captured intimately in photographs that could have only been made with vulnerability by the artist.
OTHER EXHIBITIONS (no or low cost)
Bronx Museum of the Arts
Free
Through Sunday, September 10
This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of the late artist Darrel Ellis. Ellis’s work focused on Black selfhood and domesticity through a merging of painting, printmaking, and photography that anticipated current artistic interest in archive, appropriation and personal narrative.
If you’re visiting later this month, stop by “Michael Richards: Are You Down,” a retrospective that combines the artist’s visionary artworks addressing repression and reprieve from social injustices through sculptures, drawings, installations and video work created between 1990 and 2001.
El Museo del Barrio
Suggested $9 admission
Something Beautiful: Reframing La Colección
As a result of a multi-year research initiative during which El Museo del Barrio engaged in dialogues with more than 40 artists, scholars, community leaders and museum professionals—as well as conversations with a Taíno counsel led by scholar Christina Gonzalez and members of the Taíno community—the museum has organized a year-long rotating display of over 500 artworks that reconsiders the framework of its permanent collection, centering concepts such as African and Indigenous heritages, urban experiences, representational strategies and craft intersections.
Installation view, “Sarah Sze: Timelapse,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Guggenheim
$18 student tickets; pay-what-you-wish admission on Saturdays, 6:00 – 8:00pm
Through Sunday, September 10
This month is the last chance to see this site-specific series by Sarah Sze (MFA 1997 Fine Arts), which blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture, sound, print, drawing, video and architecture. As they weave through the Guggenheim, Sze’s overflowing artworks create a choreographed path for visitors that highlights how timelines are built through collective experience and memory while simultaneously translating the digital age’s overload of images into kaleidoscope installations.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery
Through June 4, 2024
Curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, this is the first community-curated Native American exhibition in the history of the Met. The selection includes more than 100 historical, modern, and contemporary clay works, offering a look at over 10 centuries of artworks representing the aesthetic lineages of New Mexico’s nineteen Río Grande Pueblos as well as the West Texas community of Ysleta del Sur and the Hopi tribe of Arizona.
Museum of the City of New York
$14 student tickets
This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture
Through July 21, 2024
In honor of the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Museum of the City of New York, the museum presents a comprehensive look at how New York City has been captured in media of all forms throughout the past century. At one end of the exhibition, visitors can experience the music of each borough by crossing outlines on the gallery floor. In contrast, at the other end, they can choose items from a “digital bookshelf” to be projected into the space. From silent films and TV shows to music, poetry, literature, and more, this show offers a look into how the city has inspired countless artists since the early 1900s.
If you visit before Monday, September 18, stop by “Food in New York” before it closes. This exhibition takes a critical look at New York City’s food networks and explores how artists and designers like Stephen Ellis (BFA 1994 Illustration) and BFA Fine Arts Chair Suzanne Anker are approaching challenges such as sustainability, labor justice and equitable access to food.
New-York Historical Society
Through July 7, 2024
What defines “women’s work?” This exhibition examines the trends in American economic, legal, and political history that have shaped our cultural understanding of “women’s work” and how intersectional identities have impacted this definition. A selection of 45 objects is brought together from New York Historical’s Museum and Library collections to demonstrate this inherently political work’s breadth, complexity, and significance.
Poster House
$8 student tickets; free on Fridays.
“Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party”
Through Sunday, September 10
During the 1960s, several Black-led organizations set out to redress systemic oppression by rallying their communities’ support through various creative means. This exhibition chronicles how one highly influential group, the Black Panther Party, devised a specific graphic language to control its own narrative, brand Black nationalism, and mobilize the community towards communal revolution.