The best exhibitions and openings of 2023: North America

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist to date, will track the full breadth of Ruscha’s career over 65 years, without narrowly defining him. Mirroring his own cross-disciplinary approach, the exhibition will feature over 250 works, produced from 1958 to the present, in various mediums — showing him as painter, bookmaker, filmmaker, photographer, and draughtsman.

The exhibition will also include the artist’s Chocolate Room (1970), a space covered in paper screen-printed with chocolate paste. First presented at the Venice Biennale, this will be the installation’s New York debut.

The exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which has co-organised the show, in April 2024.

Sandro Botticelli is a name synonymous with the Renaissance, but there has never been a major exhibition dedicated to his drawings. The lack thereof is partly due to the scarcity of these works. His unconventional stylistic progression makes attribution challenging, and since works on paper that are more than 500 years old are by nature fragile, it is perhaps unsurprising that fewer than 30 securely attributed ones exist. Yet, as this upcoming exhibition demonstrates, Botticelli’s expert draughtsmanship underpins all his work and his most well-known paintings.

This landmark show traces Botticelli’s artistic journey through his drawings, spanning from his earliest renderings whilst studying under maestro Fra Filippo Lippi to his designs for his final painting whilst leading his own workshop in Florence. Demonstrating Botticelli’s design process from paper to panel, the curators have reunited some of his most memorable masterpieces, like Adoration of the Magi (1475), with their preparatory drawings for the first time.

Jiangnan — the Chinese coastal region south of the Yangzi River home to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Nanjing — is one of the country’s most prosperous lands. For millennia its art has defined the image of traditional China for the rest of the world — hilly landscapes of verdant greenery, delicate pagodas, luxurious silks — yet this will be the first exhibition in the West to focus on the region’s art and cultural impact.

Exploring how Jiangnan set cultural standards and gained a leading role in China’s artistic production, China’s Southern Paradise presents works of art from Neolithic times to the 18th century, ranging from jade, silk, prints, and paintings to porcelain, lacquer and bamboo carvings.

Although Ruth Asawa is widely known for her sculptures that echo sinuous organic forms in looped-wire, stone and bronze, drawing was also fundamental to her practice. She would draw on a daily basis, calling it her ‘greatest pleasure and the most difficult’.

Presenting drawings, collages and watercolours alongside stamped prints, copper foil works and sketchbooks, Ruth Asawa Through Line will be the first exhibition to showcase drawing’s foundational role in the development of Asawa’s visual lexicon. We see, for example, the emergence of her fascination with repetition, as well as motifs and approaches like the Greek meander and the paper fold, which she crystallised in her sculptures.

After the exhibition closes at the Whitney, it will travel to the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston.

At a legendary 1973 party in the Bronx, DJ Kool Herc revealed a new turntable technique that allowed him to spin two records from the same album and seamlessly move from beat to beat. Hip hop was born. Since then, the genre has grown into a global phenomenon, driving innovations in music, fashion, technology, and visual and performing arts. In celebration of hip-hop's 50th anniversary, the Baltimore Museum of Art has opened an exhibition examining the genre’s cultural impact over the past two decades.

The multimedia exhibition includes painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video by some of today’s most celebrated artists and brands, including Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, Derrick Adams, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Black femme subjectivity forms the core of Simone Leigh’s work. Informed by rigorous attention to Black feminist thought — and a wide range of historical periods, geographical regions and artistic traditions in Africa and the African diaspora — Leigh confounds the Black female figure with architectural forms and domestic vessels to explore issues of race, unacknowledged labour, womanhood and community.

Her current survey at the ICA Boston marks the first comprehensive study of her career, presenting 29 key works that provide a holistic understanding of her work in ceramics, bronze, and video. It also includes 10 works from Leigh’s star turn at the Venice Biennale in 2022, when the artist made history as the first Black woman to represent the United States at the biennial. Later in the year, the retrospective will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.

Between 1882 and 1890, Vincent van Gogh and other Post-Impressionists including Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard and Charles Angrand, flocked to villages on the outskirts of Paris. Whilst the Impressionists had found inspiration in rural provinces far from the capital, the area along the Seine provided fresh inspiration for this new generation of artists.

With industrialization in the late 19th century, coal, gas and manufacturing facilities altered the skyline. To convey this new and varied landscape, the artists came up with novel methods of painting. As Van Gogh put it, ‘the bringing together of extremes’ gave him new ideas. Seurat and Signac experimented by applying contrasting colours in unblended strokes to form Pointillism. Bernard laid out large swathes of bold colour defined by dark contours in what became Cloisonnism.

Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape presents more than 75 paintings and drawings from this intensely creative period — many rarely publicly displayed — including 25 works by Van Gogh. It illuminates how one destination inspired a generation of artists and sparked ideas that changed the course of art history.

María Sol Escobar adopted the name Marisol when she began exhibiting in New York in the late 1950s. Best known for carved wooden sculptures that she embellished with drawings, fabric and found objects, she was influenced equally by pre-Columbian art and the assemblages of Robert Rauschenberg. Although she loomed large in the Pop art scene, working closely with Andy Warhol and even featuring in his films, some critics characterised her work as a folk artist.

‘She was an incredibly significant sculptor who has been inappropriately written out of history,’ said Marina Pacini, the chief curator at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. ‘In the 1960s she had more press and more visibility than Andy Warhol.’The Buffalo AKG Art Museum is rectifying that, by organising a retrospective that will tour the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art, before ending up at the AKG in July 2024. This is fitting — the AKG was the first museum to formally acquire Marisol’s work in 1962, and after she bequeathed them her estate, they now hold the world’s most significant collection of her work. The most comprehensive survey ever devoted to the artist, it will feature all Marisol’s canonical works, as well as source materials, sketches, studies and personal photographs to illuminate her working methods and life.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is not only the subject of an acclaimed retrospective currently at the Whitney; the influential Indigenous artist has also curated a ground-breaking exhibition showcasing the works of 50 contemporary Native American artists at the National Gallery of Art. Working across weaving, sculpture, beadwork, painting, performance, drawing, video, and more, the artists share a concern for the land, drawing on thousands of years of study and reverence and ultimately visualizing this core part of collective Indigenous knowledge.

This survey of contemporary Indigenous art and its enduring connections to land and landscape will include several recent acquisitions from the museum’s permanent collection, including works by G. Peter Jemison (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron Clan), Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians/European descent) and Emmi Whitehorse (Diné).

Carla Stellweg has played an instrumental role in the development of the art scene in Mexico throughout her life, specifically in its connection to the international art world. A fervent promoter of Latin American art, she was one of the first independent curators in Mexico, working with Fernando Gamboa — the renowned museum builder and director of the Museo de Arte Moderno — on international projects such as Expo 67 and the Venice Biennale. She also co-founded Mexico’s first contemporary art magazine, Artes Visuales, which became a vital platform connecting Latin American artists.

Cultivate. Homage to Carla Stellweg at Mexico City’s Museo Tamayo pays tribute to her career, bringing together archival materials and the work of artists she’s collaborated with, and centring her as a crucial agent in Latin American contemporary art. The museum’s connection with Stellweg serves as a solid foundation for the show: she was formerly their deputy director and worked with Rufino Tamayo to build his collection.

‘You don’t have to know anything about art to appreciate it’, Keith Haring famously said, ‘There aren’t any hidden secrets or things you’re supposed to understand’. The omnipresence of his subway art, public murals, and invitingly vibrant works in 1980s New York emphasized his point that art is for everybody. More than 30 years after his death, the artist’s first museum exhibition in Los Angeles, on view at The Broad, confirms that Haring’s art continues to break barriers between art and life and spread joy.

The Broad’s survey features the breadth of materials that Haring worked with, including video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and graphic works, as well as representations from the artist’s many public projects. Works presented span from the late-1970s when he was a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York up until 1988, just two years before he died from AIDS-related illness at the age of 31. The exhibition also explores Haring’s life and creative process, with much of the source material coming from his personal journals.

William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, he is now considered a seminal figure of Romantic visual art and poetry. With an unconventional worldview, Blake produced a symbolically rich collection of works, representing universal forces of creation and destruction through his own cast of characters.

By combining his poetry and imagery on the page through radical graphic techniques, he created some of the most striking imagery in British art and has since inspired countless boundary-breaking artists including Walt Whitman, Jimi Hendrix, and Jackson Pollock his exhibition will explore the artist-poet’s imaginative world through his most celebrated works.