8 Amazing Art Exhibitions to Make 2022 One to Remember

Each year, this column provides commentary on dozens of museum shows globally. While some are best forgotten, others continue to stimulate and inspire long after the work has been packaged and shipped. As the year ends, here are eight 2022 exhibitions that are still resonating. Read my quote Forbes text below, or click on the event title to read my original essay in full.

Modern Dakota: Spectacular Smithsonian Exhibition Shows How Oscar Howe Shattered Indian Stereotypes

National Museum of American Indians

“Prior to obtaining his advanced degree at the University of Oklahoma, Howe studied studio art at the Santa Fe Indian School, studying ethnographic styles…. Howe rejected this aesthetic in favor of challenging the ethnographic assumption that Indigenous culture originated in the past, recognizing that an ethnographic viewpoint is not objectively objective. for someone living in the culture he depicts Howes’ painting’s extraordinary dynamism stems from his understanding that his culture is alive, and his belief that culture will continue to thrive by placing traditional knowledge in the presence and showing the world in its full glory…”

The Met’s Blockbuster Show Shows How Bernd And Hilla Becher Turned Industrial Disease Into High Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

“… As soon as the Bechers began exhibiting their work, they drew comparisons with Conceptualism, which shared a quality of unsentimental rigor with their work. The parallels are problematic because the primary response to their art was always visual. Whereas Conceptualists tended to use monotony to excite thought with anaesthetizing the eye, the Bechers use neutrality to show what the eye alone cannot see…”

The Stunning New Image Center Exhibition Shows That Architectural Ornament Is Genuine Open-Source Software

Image Center

“… Since the early 20th century, high culture has despised ornament. Modernist architects and designers have been scornful, presenting all kinds of ornamentation as degenerate because it seems to have no purpose. Seeing so much ornamentation in one place, as one can do in Drawing Center, one might balk at Modernist strictures in the name of aesthetic pleasure.Yet there is a more significant discovery to be made in the forest of foliage and floral shapes on Wooster Street.Ornament is co-creation for cultural interaction.In a time of separatism and xenophobia, what purpose does higher than cultural relations?”

Check Out A Benevolent Mid-Career Survey From Cornelia Parker, An Artist Who Worked With The Marie Antoinettes Guillotine And A Church Was Struck By Lightning

British tates

“…Parker is constantly searching for meaning in the minuscule and fleeting. He has shown silver chips left over from engravings with burines and piles of rust left after firearms have oxidized in corrosion chambers. He has also tried to capture the origin -suggest something, e.g. flaunting an unhit coin as ‘Embryonic Money’. What is the essence of language or lucre? When do guns stop threatening? In each of these cases, Parker effectively magnifies the invisible, revealing paradoxically an unimportant substance. ..”

MoMA Features An Ingenious African Alphabet Ready to Help Prevent Environmental Crisis

Museum of Modern Art

“… The character of Frdric Bruly Bouabrs is different from the letters that have alienated us from our surroundings and which arguably inaugurated the Anthropocene in that every Bt icon is a mnemonic. Every time a character is written on a page, it evokes aspects of the West. The African landscape or the World Bt way of life underlies every word…. Literacy in Bouabrs syllables is dependent on ecological and cultural literacy because the animals and tools represented in each rebus must be known for the rebus to be understood.The act of writing mentally and physically reinforces traditional knowledge, which is re-recorded in memory by every style….”

Meet the Female Artist Who Programmed Computers To Build Homes In The 1960s

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

“From the Guggenheim Museum to the Seagram Building, Manhattan has a longstanding reputation as an island of avant-garde architecture when Alison Knowles first built the House of Dust in Chelsea. Founded in 1967 and standing for less than a year, the structure is almost unknown today, but it more radical than anything Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had ever conceived. Technically the house was not designed by Knowles. Rather it was generated by a computer, using the Fortran programming language to describe hypothetical architecture….”

In Epic V&A Fashion Show From Africa, Sartorial Is Political

Victoria & Albert Museum

“…African fashion showcases spectacular clothing by forty-five of the continent’s leading designers from Shade Thomas-Fahm to Chris Seydou to Thebe Magugu but it is more than just a show of their wits as African clothing has so much more than a spectacle in its folds. Despite clothing everywhere- which functions as a form of communication, Africa is particularly renowned for its depth of meaning, and for its long history of being misunderstood by outsiders….”

Decades Before the Metaverse, Ray Johnson Turned Social Networking Into an Art Using the US Postal Service

Art Institute of Chicago

“… Mail art was not an exclusive invention of Johnson, nor did he die by suicide in 1995. In addition to the postal service, the internet has been explored by many subsequent artists as a creative commons, an idea that Mark Zuckerberg hopes to port into the metaverse. What what sets Johnson’s contribution apart is the ambiguity of authorship, not only as a conceptual conceit but also as a creative act.This is not the equivalent of the co-authorship of a collective such as Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, but rather manifests through the fact that the artist Ray Johnson lives in each of his correspondents as he does in in his own body. Ray Johnson is his own metaverse. Zuckerberg and his Metamates can only hope to be imaginative.”