Maren Hassinger, who turns seventy-six this year, did some of her most powerful work in media so unorthodox that they make zines look like watercolors. In 1983, she mounted bunches of iron cables onto cement bases and called the result, which looks a little like a mass of wheat stalks, “Field.” As the title might suggest, Hassinger’s art keeps one foot in the natural world and the other in industry. The sculpture’s display at Dia Beacon (Dec. 16) represents its welcome return to the public eye after a hiatus of more than thirty years.
Harold Cohen, a painter and a lecturer at U.C. San Diego, authored several versions of AARON—one of the earliest artificial-intelligence software programs capable of making art—between 1968 and Cohen’s death, in 2016. The program’s creations, on display at the Whitney, include drawings and paintings, both in color and in black-and-white, some representational and others abstract. (There will be live demonstrations of AARON’s artistic process.) One can’t help but wonder what sort of work the program would be doing had its inventor lived even longer—and, the way things are going, whether there will be sentient androids, eager to honor their illustrious ancestor, by the time that “Harold Cohen: AARON” (Feb. 3) welcomes patrons through the doors.
A century on from the Harlem Renaissance, cultural historians still aren’t sure what to do with it. The Met’s ambitious survey—the first in any New York City art museum since the eighties—makes the case for the movement as a form of modernism: regional yet international, tied to the Great Migration and Jim Crow but also to Egyptian aesthetics and the European avant-garde. Roughly a hundred and sixty works of photography, sculpture, film, and painting appear in “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” (Feb. 25), some from the museum’s permanent collection and others on loan from historically Black colleges and universities.
The art of Joan Jonas, now eighty-seven, resists categorization, but MOMA is making an attempt. The retrospective “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning” (March 17) is a hearty stew of video, film, sculpture, photography, drawing, and dance, often addressing themes of gender, performance, and ecology. Jonas has a thing for folklore, as evidenced by the installation “The Juniper Tree”; some of her recent work incorporates ideas inspired by marine-biology research, creating a mood both scientific and mystical.—Jackson Arn
The Theatre
Illustration by Nolan Pelletier
Alicia Keys, “Teeth,” the Pinball Wizard
After a stately programming pace this fall, the theatre goes into a full gallop as the nights get longer. It begins with a burst of biographical musicals, including “Hell’s Kitchen” (Public Theatre; starting previews on Nov. 19), by and about, in some elliptical way, Alicia Keys; “The Gardens of Anuncia” (Vivian Beaumont; Nov. 20), written by Michael John LaChiusa, about the director-choreographer Graciela Daniele; and “Buena Vista Social Club” (Atlantic Theatre Company; Nov. 17), Marco Ramirez’s dramatization of the creation of the Cuban band’s titular album, making for a production full of music.
Around Thanksgiving, just in time for uncomfortable dinner conversations, Sarah Paulson appears in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Broadway début, the family drama “Appropriate” (Hayes; Nov. 28), in which white heirs discover their valuable—and morally repugnant—inheritance. In its way, “Life & Times of Michael K” (St. Ann’s Warehouse; Nov. 29), a widely toured puppet-centric adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel, set in South Africa, tells a similar story about racism working its slow way through generations.
On Broadway, cold weather calls for sober programming: Manhattan Theatre Club moves Joshua Harmon’s “A Prayer for the French Republic” (Samuel J. Friedman; Dec. 19) to Broadway, where its arguments about the promise of Israel will cut particularly deep; Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James star in “Days of Wine and Roses” (Studio 54; Jan. 6), Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s musical adaptation of the movie about alcoholism; and Tyne Daly and Liev Schreiber appear in a revival of John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 drama, “Doubt” (American Airlines; Feb. 2), about a nun who mistrusts a priest.
