Exhibitions

Brushing the Present: Contemporary Academy Painting from China presented a selection of academic artists’ responses to the cultural changes occurring in contemporary China. These portraits, models, and still lifes included themes of globalization, the Chinese landscape, folk arts and legends, and traditional and new... See more 

Alyson Shotz reproduces nature as most people experience it: interfaced with technology and filtered through civilization. Her works continue a long artistic tradition of examining culture through current perceptions of nature, from the majestic and unspoiled vistas of the Hudson River School painters to the glossy... See more 

Nayland Blake creates performances, videos, sculptures, and drawings that complicate notions of cultural and sexual identity with intellectual rigor and disarming humor. Blake’s performance-based works are often displayed though video; they include works such as Gorge, a documentation of the artist being continually... See more 

Marcel Duchamp remains arguably the most important voice in visual art of the last century. His ideas about what art can be and how art can function in the world continue to revolutionize contemporary art, and his influence has reached artists in a variety of disciplines, including makers and thinkers alike. Among... See more 

The sinuous elegance and innovative freshness of Trisha Brown’s choreography was apparent in this retrospective look at the postmodern legend’s celebrated career. Beginning in the early 1960s at the Judson Dance Theater, Trisha Brown started working in an interdisciplinary mode, uniting dancers with musicians,... See more 

Selecting works from the span of the artist’s career, Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress featured anti-racist parodies depicting powerful images of race, sex, slavery, and violence. Widely exhibited and internationally acclaimed, Walker creates a distinct disconnect between the delicate beauty of her chosen... See more 

Defying the boundaries between artwork and display wall, Paul Henry Ramirez: Elevatious Transcendsualistic expanded a series of fourteen large-scale abstract paintings into a plurality of experiences. Curvaceous forms, heavy drips, flying squirts, and waving hairs painted directly onto gallery surfaces emanated from... See more 

Issues of racial bias, gender, class, politics and aesthetics feature prominently in Fred Wilson’s inquiries into the complex relationship between the art object and the museum. The museum itself is Wilson’s medium and muse: his oeuvre consists of faux museum installations and finely wrought mock art objects that use... See more 

Honoring the prescience of Ileana Sonnabend, one of the late twentieth century’s most influential dealers and collectors of contemporary art, Robert Rauschenberg said, "I've never finished a painting without wondering what Ileana would think of it." The Sonnabend Galleries have been both catalyst and incubator for... See more 

Early twentieth-century photographer and amateur anthropologist Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952), convinced the American Indian was doomed to extinction, made it his lifelong goal to create an exhaustive document of memories of this “disappearing race.” Between 1900 and 1930, he traveled the Western half of North... See more