MOCA just released its exhibition schedule for the 2015/2016 season, and it’s a singe-artist show extravaganza. With shows like “Sturtevant: Double Trouble” traveling from MoMA to the West Coast, and the organization of the first dedicated permanent collection exhibition in five years, MOCA is stepping out with an ambitious and refined slate of programming under the helm of its new director Philippe Vergne. Here are three exhibition highlights that caught our eye:
“William Pope.L: Trinket” will run from March 21 through June 28, 2015, and is set to be the largest exhibition of the Chicago-based performance artist’s work to date. Included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Mr. Pope.L is a Guggenheim fellow and probably best known for his multi-year endurance performance The Great White Way, where beginning in the late 1990s he crawled on—in stages—on all fours the entire 22 miles of Manhattan’s Broadway. The show will feature new performances and large-scale sculptures, including the titular piece Trinket, a 50-by-20-foot American flag blown by industrial fans that, over the duration of the exhibition, will fray at its ends.
Matthew Barney’s 5-and-a-half-hour-long film River of Fundament released earlier this year took the artist seven years to complete and was inspired by Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings. The film, co-produced with the Laurenz Foundation, will be shown alongside 14 sculptures (some weigh up to 25 tons), drawings, photographs, and vitrines September 13, 2015 through January 2016. From the death of the American automobile industry to Mailer himself, the show covers a wide-range of topics present in Barney’s epic filmic narrative and is curated by the 2015 Venice Biennale’s visual arts sector director Okwui Enwezor.
With New York-based artist R.H. Quaytman’s show “O Tópico, Chapter 27” currently on view at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, and her work hitting the auction block at Phillips’s November Contemporary Art Evening sale, it’s a fortuitous moment for MOCA to be organizing her first major museum retrospective. The will feature approximately 100 pieces, including the “chapters” of geometric oil paintings and silkscreen works she is likely best known for. The eponymous exhibition will take place at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location in the fall of 2016.
