In New York and beyond, this month and next yield many wonderful things for the art enthusiasts among us to see. Beginning with the beyond—a new show opening on the West Coast offers a worthy reevaluation of the midcentury art scene—while some blockbuster East Coast events (Alex Katz, Edward Hopper) are already bringing in crowds.
Long before Big Tech moved into San Francisco, a small group of painters established their own fledgling aesthetic movement there in the 1950s, now known as Bay Area Figuration. From that fertile ground sprang Joan Brown (1938–1990), the bewitching subject of a major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on view from November 19, 2022—March 12, 2023.
Brown was freshly out of art school when she first found a following in the early 1960s, creating heavily impastoed canvases that blurred the line between abstraction and figuration. Discomfited by the demands of the art market, however, she soon changed course, pivoting to a flat, almost cartoonish style that favored portraiture and unselfconscious sentimentality. (Personal hobbies, including swimming and baking cookies, had a way of showing up in the work.) “She really had so much to lose at that time, in switching gears and being true to herself instead of delivering on expectations,” says Janet Bishop, a curator at SFMoMA. Still, Brown was irrepressible: “She really painted whatever she wanted to paint.” That fact is clear in the exhibition, which spans some 80 artworks executed over 35 years—but her greatest achievement isn’t hanging on a wall. A devoted instructor at Berkeley, Mills College, and other local institutions, Brown was most fulfilled in the classroom, sharing her democratizing approach to art-making with students. “In the last decade of her life,” notes Nancy Lim, SFMoMA’s associate curator of painting and sculpture, “she wrote a number of times in her journal that she had come to believe that teaching was her highest service in this life.”
A few other shows worth visiting this fall and winter:
Weatherford’s first New York exhibition since 2018 centers on painterly monoprints related to her The Flaying of Marsyas series, inspired by Titian’s masterwork of the same name at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice. Through December 17, 2022 at Gagosian.
Sprawled across two galleries, “The First Decade” includes oil and gouache paintings made by Drexler between 1959 and 1969. A student of Robert Motherwell and Hans Hofmann, she developed a body of densely colorful, mosaic-like work in New York and, after 1971, on Monhegan Island, Maine, where she died in 1999. Through December 17, 2022 at Berry Campbell and Mnuchin Gallery.
For those who missed the major survey of Mitchell’s work that traveled from San Francisco to Baltimore earlier this year—or who won’t be in Paris for “Monet – Mitchell” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton—consider this more intimate collection of paintings, mostly executed in the bucolic commune of Vétheuil, France, where Mitchell had a home. Through December 17, 2022 at David Zwirner.
Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan curated his countryman’s first U.S. exhibition, a compelling group of portraits that nod to Burnside’s long engagement with Afrofuturism. Through December 23, 2022 at Perrotin.
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