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Ragnar Kjartansson: Romantic Songs of the Patriarchy, with performers Diana Gameros, left, and Kendra McKinley at the Guggenheim Museum iin New York. A video installation by Wu Tsang with Beverly Glenn-Copeland is part of a series of shows with a shared political charge, a taste of what can be. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; David Heald via The New York Times.
by Holland Cotter
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- When the lockdown lifted this past spring, some of our big New York City museums were able to slide major waiting-in-the-wings exhibitions into place. The Guggenheim wasnt so lucky. A traveling Joan Mitchell retrospective slated to fill its rotunda had been canceled. The museum might have whipped up a crowd-pleasing show of modernist chestnuts from the collection. Instead, it did something more interesting. It turned itself into an old-style alternative space. It already had some small side-gallery shows in place or on track, including a selection of gnarly, gripping photographs by the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize winner, Deana Lawson. But to fill its spiraling central space high and wide, a combination cathedral and chasm the museum had to get inventive, and it did so in a multipart series of installations called Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda. In part, the program was designed to facilitate social distancing. The ramp bays, which ... More