School’s back in session in the art world, too — this fall, exhibitions on textbook artists like Abstract Expressionists Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and modernist Constantin Brancusi are landing at The Met, the Whitney, and MoMA, respectively. Then there’s the shows writing the textbooks of tomorrow: surveys of artist-filmmaker Arthur Jafa, who remixes and shapes Black visual culture; photographer Taryn Simon, who plumbs American myths and institutions; and conceptual artist (and pathologist!) Teresa Margolles, who takes on death, that cruelest of subjects.
Elaine de Kooning
Berry Campbell, 524 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Oct. 29–Dec. 19
In 1962, Abstract Expressionist painter Elaine de Kooning began preparatory sketches for a monumental commission: a portrait of President John F. Kennedy. In the year leading up to his assassination, she observed the president in his natural habitat and drafted psychological, impressionistic studies in her signature gestural style. Now, you can examine the historic series alongside other works in de Kooning’s groundbreaking oeuvre, some of which are on view for the first time since her death.
—Lisa Yin Zhang, Hyperallergic
