September is when New York remembers that it is an art city.
After the quiet of August, the galleries open their doors, museums roll out their fall programs, and suddenly there is too much to see. Chelsea and Tribeca are crowded again. Everyone has a new show, a new artist, a new reason why something is supposed to matter. Most of it, of course, will not.
That is part of the pleasure of a new season: figuring out what deserves more than a quick look.
Start with Maia Ruth Lee at Tina Kim Gallery. Her exhibition, Double Vision, deals with migration, memory, and the feeling of carrying one place around while trying to live in another. These are subjects that have become almost obligatory in contemporary art, which makes Lee’s restraint refreshing. Her paintings and sculptures don’t explain themselves. They accumulate slowly, as things remembered imperfectly. The work feels lived-in rather than researched.
Lee Bul, at Hauser & Wirth, is harder to ignore. Her sculptures are large, elaborate, and beautiful in that slightly unsettling way that has become her trademark. Bul has always been interested in the future, but not the glossy version of it. Her imagined worlds tend to have something wounded underneath. You admire the construction, then notice the body caught inside it. The danger is that the spectacle can occasionally overwhelm the idea. Still, when Bul gets the balance right, the work stays with you.
The Whitney’s exhibition of Minnie Evans offers something altogether different. Evans made drawings filled with faces, plants, angels and strange symmetrical creatures. They can look decorative for a moment, until you realize how intense they are. There is no sense that Evans was making work to fit into an art-world conversation. She was following her own vision. That independence is increasingly rare—and increasingly valuable.
There are other shows worth wandering into without a plan. OUT of the Jewelry Box at the Museum of Arts and Design looks at jewelry through queer identity and personal expression. It is the sort of exhibition that could easily have become overly theoretical but is most convincing when the objects themselves take over. Jewelry has always been about the body; the best pieces here remind you that the body is never politically neutral.
The best thing about New York’s art season is not that there is so much of it. It is that, every once in a while, you walk into a gallery expecting very little and walk out thinking differently.
Those are the shows to look for.
Not the loudest ones. Not necessarily the most expensive. The ones that make you stop, look again, and wonder why you hadn’t noticed something like this before.