BASEL

Dansk Mobelkunst's booth at Design Miami/Basel 2015. Photo by James Harris.

Design Miami/Basel, Messe Basel, Basel
June 14-19, 2016
Held next door to Art Basel in Messe Basel, Design Miami/ attracts some of the world’s most influential collectors, designers, and curators, thanks to its roster of top-notch dealers. Guests can browse modern and contemporary furniture, lighting, and decorative objects from a range of leading galleries, including Moderne Gallery, R & Company, Dansk Mobelkunst, Magen H Gallery, and Hostler Burrows. The fair also includes an exceptional program of curated exhibitions, panels discussions, and special commissions. Among this year’s myriad highlights is a special exhibition dedicated to the late architect Zaha Hadid, who passed away in March. Launched in 2005, Design Miami/’s two fairs run alongside the Art Basel fairs in Miami each December and in Basel each June. Click here to continue reading.

Art Basel in Basel 2015, General Impression © Art Basel.

Art Basel, Messe Basel, Basel
June 16-19, 2016
The mother of all art fairs, Art Basel, opens this week in Switzerland. Now in its forty-seventh year, the fair will bring together over 280 international galleries, including Gagosian Gallery, Howard Greenberg Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, and David Zwirner. Offerings will include works from modern masters as well as emerging artists. To make the sprawling event more manageable, Art Basel is divided into eight sectors: Galleries, Feature, Statements, Edition, Unlimited, Parcours, Film, and Magazines. The fair also includes a fascinating program of Conversations & Salon talks, which has been curated by Mari Spirito, founder of Protocinema—a mission driven art organization that creates site-aware, itinerant exhibitions around the world. Click here to continue reading.

NEW YORK

(Cuban Interior), 1920 Watercolor on paper, 17 3/8 x 23 1/8 in. APG 20664D.025 Courtesy of Hirschl and Adler Galleries, NY © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Stuart Davis: Path to Abstraction, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, NY
On view through August 19, 2016
This magnificent exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Galleries provides a rare chance to see Stuart Davis’ pivotal Hoboken and Havana series side by side. The Hoboken series—which captures the city’s bustling, gritty landscape—was created under the guidance of Robert Henri, one of the leading figures of the Ashcan School, while the Havana series, created after a 1920 trip to Cuba, illustrates Davis’ move toward more simplified forms. Together, the series trace the evolution of Davis’ style as he approaches the bold, abstract canvases that he is best known for. Path to Abstraction coincides with the major Stuart Davis retrospective currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Click here to continue reading.

VERMONT

Grandma Moses: American Modern, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT
June 18-October 20, 2016
American Modern explores the work of Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses through a new lens. The exhibition highlights the connections between Moses’ work and that of her Modernist contemporaries. By placing her paintings and works on paper alongside masterpieces from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the marginalization of Moses as a folk artist is drawn into question. Co-organized by the Shelburne Museum and the Bennington Museum, American Modern also includes a number of major loans from Galerie St. Etienne in New York. The exhibition will open at the Bennington Museum after its run at the Shelburne Museum. Click here to continue reading.

OHIO

Jaume Plensa (Spanish, born 1955), Paula. Bronze, 2013.276 x 38 5/8 x 100 1/2 in. © Jaume Plensa, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. Photo courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art. Photo by Andrew Weber.

Jaume Plensa: Human Landscape, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH
June 17-November 6, 2016
The Toledo Museum of Art is mounting a major exhibition dedicated to the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, who is best known for his large-scale figurative sculptures and installations. The show will include seven outdoor sculptures, some of which have never been exhibited in the United States, as well as immersive indoor installations, drawings, and etchings. The Toledo Museum currently has one work by Plensa in its collection, which was acquired in 2012. Spiegel, which stands over twelve feet tall and features the silhouettes of two crouched figures, is on view in the museum’s Welles Sculpture Garden alongside works by Albert Paley, Barry Flanagan, Deborah Butterfield, and George Rickey. Human Landscape was organized by the Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee. Click here to continue reading.

LONDON

The new Tate Modern © Hayes Davidson and Herzog & de Meuron.

Tate Modern Opens, London
June 17, 2016
For the past nine years, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who established the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, Switzerland, in 1978, have been working tirelessly  on Tate Modern’s $394-million expansion. The duo, who designed the original Tate Modern, which opened in 2000, were tasked with linking the existing structure to a new, ten-story building. The revamped Tate Modern, which offers sixty percent more exhibition space, will open to the public on June 17. The museum will host a free, three-day grand opening celebration that will include special installations, performances, and art talks, during which Tate staff will discuss their favorite works from the museum’s new collection hang. Click here to continue reading.

CALIFORNIA

Ritual dou vessel with phoenix-shaped handles, by the Imperial Workshop, Beijing. Qing dynasty, reign of Emperor Yongzheng (1723–1735). Copper alloy with cloisonné enamel inlays. National Palace Museum, Taipei, Gufa 000116 Lie 427–16. Photograph © National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Emperors’ Treasures: Chinese Art From the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA
June 17-September 18, 2016
This stunning exhibition features over 150 works from the National Palace Museum in Taipei.  The collection, which was passed from dynasty to dynasty, once resided in Beijing’s Forbidden City and is considered one of the world’s most spectacular collections of Chinese art. The objects on view, which include paintings, ceramics, and jades, explore the identities of nine emperors who ruled from the twelfth through the twentieth centuries, and how their personal tastes affected the evolution of Chinese art. More than half of the works on view in Emperors’ Treasures have never been exhibited in the United States. Click here to continue reading.     

Juan Esteban Perez (born 1939), Burning Sunset, 1970. Enamel on copper, silver wire, 9 x 9 in. Collection of the Enamel Arts Foundation. Photo: Jairo Ramirez.

Little Dreams in Glass and Metal: Enameling in America, 1920 to the Present, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
June 19-September 11, 2016
This exhibition made stops at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, and the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles before landing at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Organized by the California-based Enamel Arts Foundation, the show is the first nationally traveling exhibition in more than fifty years dedicated to the art of enameling. Little Dreams in Glass and Metal features approximately 120 works from the Foundation’s collection, including wearable jewelry, tableware, and wall panels. Enameling, which involves fusing glass and metal through a high-temperature firing process, became popular in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century and has continued to flourish. Click here to continue reading.  

NEW JERSEY

Mickalene Thomas (born 1971). Landscape with Camouflage, 2012. Rhinestones, acrylic, oil and enamel on wood panel, 108 x 144 in. Purchase 2012 Helen McMahon Brady Cutting Fund, 2012.22. © Mickalene Thomas and the Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism at the Newark Museum, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
June 18, 2016-January 8, 2017
Culled almost entirely from the Newark Museum’s permanent collection of African-American art, Modern Heroics feature thirty-four paintings and sculptures by an array of self-taught and formally trained modern and contemporary artists, including Romare Bearden, Thornton Dial, Minnie Evans, and Purvis Young. Spanning several generations and movements, the works are united by their expressive imagery and heroic subject matter. The exhibition explores several common themes, including the use of bold colors, direct engagement with materials, and scale. The Newark Museum acquired its first piece of African-American art in 1929 and has remained committed to collecting and exhibiting works by African-American artists ever since. Click here to continue reading.