Must-see shows in New York this Autumn

Mary Sully: Native Trendy

Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, till 12 January 2025

The Met hosts the primary solo present of drawings by the late Yankton Dakota artist Mary Sully (1896-1963), who mixed conventional aesthetics of the Dakota and different Indigenous teams with the Artwork Nouveau fashion and common tradition of her time. Largely unknown till the twenty first century, Sully is now celebrated for her “character prints”: summary triptych portraits of individuals like Fiorello La Guardia, Babe Ruth and Gertrude Stein. Sully was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota and had a fancy household historical past. Her mom, Susan Pehandutawin, was additionally an artist, as was her great-grandfather—the painter Thomas Sully, who created the 1824 portrait of Andrew Jackson that has been used for the $20 invoice since 1928. Her grandfather, Alfred Sully, was a army officer who fought in a number of wars in opposition to Native People. Collectively along with her sister, the anthropologist Ella Deloria, Mary Sully travelled all through the US, taking inspiration for her personal work from the humanities of the various Native American teams they visited.

Elena Goukassian

Tasks: Tadáskía

Museum of Trendy Artwork, till 14 October

The centrepiece of this exhibition by the mononymic Brazilian artist Tadáskía is ave preta mística mystical black chicken (2022), an unbound guide consisting of 61 drawings and texts in English and Portuguese that chronicle the titular chicken’s journey of discovery and transformation. The Museum of Trendy Artwork acquired the work earlier this yr and, for this exhibition (co-organised by the Studio Museum in Harlem), the artist created kaleidoscopic murals and sculptural installations to accompany and amplify ave preta mística’s fantastical imagery.

The exhibition marks Tadáskía’s first solo present within the US and comes after a breakout exhibiting ultimately yr’s Bienal de São Paulo, the place a equally dazzling set up pairing site-responsive murals and sculptures with works on paper made a powerful impression. “This particular collaboration is a exceptional alternative to champion an rising voice in modern artwork and furthers the Studio Museum’s dedication to artists of African descent globally,” says Thelma Golden, the Studio Museum’s director and chief curator.

Benjamin Sutton

Frank Walter: To Seize a Soul

The Drawing Heart, till 15 September

For the late Antiguan artist Frank Walter’s (1926-2009) first solo exhibition within the US, The Drawing Heart introduced collectively a number of the polymath’s wide selection of inventive output. In his lifetime, Walter created hundreds of work, drawings, sculptures, images and audio recordings delving into the historical past and politics of the Caribbean and incorporating the matters of slavery, colonialism, and race and identification. Walter had a sophisticated relationship to his personal identification as a descendant of each enslaved individuals and plantation house owners, which was made extra fraught after he grew to become the primary particular person of color to handle an Antiguan sugar plantation. This was additional compounded by his later encounters with structural racism when he moved to Europe for a number of years within the Nineteen Fifties. Along with his visible artwork, Walter was an avid author, abandoning a 50,000-page archive of poetry, tales, genealogical bushes, maps and even musical scores. The title of the exhibition comes from somebody witnessing the artist at work: “With just a few traces,” one acquaintance noticed, “he would seize your soul.”

E.G.

FUTURA 2000: Breaking Out

The Bronx Museum, 8 September-30 March 2025

A fixture of New York Metropolis’s graffiti scene within the Nineteen Seventies, Leonard Hilton McGurr—higher often called FUTURA 2000—set himself aside in 1980 along with his notorious Break portray, an Summary, neon-hued composition throughout a whole subway automotive that made it look as if a large gap had been punched by means of the aspect of the prepare. Since then, he has been one of the crucial enduring and ingenious artists to cross over from graffiti into the gallery world. This retrospective, FUTURA 2000’s most complete thus far in his hometown, brings collectively work, archival supplies, prints, drawings, sculptures, research, site-specific installations and extra. It’ll span his early street-based works and science-fiction inflected work of the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties to his more moderen graphic and summary compositions, showcasing the graffiti pioneer’s monumental vary. “FUTURA 2000’s distinctive visible language—bridging road artwork, Summary Expressionism and vogue—locations him alongside his friends like Jean-Michel Basquiat inside the canon of artwork historical past,” says Klaudio Rodriguez, the museum’s govt director.

B.S.