Spring is around the corner, and the art world eagerly anticipates a vibrant array of gallery and museum shows, along with the opening of the Whitney Biennial this month and the Venice Biennale in April. Over twenty solo shows—from coast to coast in the United States, in Italy, and across Europe—will showcase the talent and innovation of AAR Fellows, Italian Fellows, and Residents.
Stanley Abercrombie (1983 Fellow)
Stanley Abercrombie
Point Richmond Gallery, 145 West Richmond Avenue, Point Richmond, CA
February 25–April 7, 2024
Stanley Abercrombie (1983 Fellow) can boast of an incredibly productive and interdisciplinary career, including as an architect, a writer, and an editor—and as an artist. The gallerist Margaret Sullivan has assembled an exhibition that includes about forty of Abercrombie’s works in a variety of media, many of which reflect Abercrombie’s long-lasting love of Rome. Learn more.
Vija Celmins (2003 Resident)
Vija Celmins: Winter
Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
February 16–April 6, 2024
Vija Celmins: Winter is the artist’s first exhibition of new work in six years, and comprises nine paintings, four sculptures, and one print. Don’t miss Snowfall (blue) (2022–24), which, at eight-and-a-half-feet tall, is the largest painting Celmins has ever made. “The new paintings continue her long-time interest in using imagery from nature, as well as her long relationship with the absence of color,” notes the gallery. Learn more.
Alessandro di Pietro (2018 Italian Fellow)
Ghostwriting Paul Thek: Time Capsules and Reliquaries
Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, Via Francesco Crispi 19, Rome, Italy
February 13–April 5, 2024
This exhibition by Alessandro di Pietro, consisting of new sculptures and a video work, originates in the artist’s fellowship at AAR, during which he imagined a future in which the American artist Paul Thek (1933–1988) did not die during the HIV/AIDS crisis but continued his artistic practice. “My intent was to work as Paul Thek’s ghostwriter,” Di Pietro explains, according to the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio. “I continued his mysterious narratives with my language, adapting it to the discourse surrounding today’s history: socio-political narratives and the facts of our time. My process was to imagine how a story—in this case, the story of an artist’s work—would continue if it were not interrupted.” The exhibition is curated by former Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Peter Benson Miller and Cornelia Mattiacci. Learn more.
Walter Hood (1997 Fellow)
Walter Hood: Arc of Life/Ark of Bones
Grand Gallery, June Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University, 901 South College Street, Auburn, AL
January 23–July 7, 2024
The MacArthur fellow Walter Hood is best known as founder of Hood Design Studio, the Oakland-based landscape architecture and social art and design practice. At Auburn University’s art gallery, Hood’s artistic sensibilities can be seen in a smaller scale in Arc of Life/Ark of Bones, a site-specific installation of oil paintings that are inspired by the Henry Dumas short story of the same name. Through this body of work, Hood “recalls growing up in a then-segregated Charlotte, North Carolina before living abroad and pursuing his education and career in an integrated world,” according to the museum. Learn more.
Manuele Cerutti (2022 Italian Fellow)
QUEM GENUIT ADORAVIT
Collezione Maramatti, Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, Italy
March 10–July 28, 2024
The Turin-based artist Manuele Cerutti (2022 Italian Fellow) is presenting a new body of paintings and works in paper specially for Collezione Maramatti. “Drawing inspiration from simple, yet intense personal experiences—fatherhood, and the first few years of his son’s life—Cerutti depicts the generation of an entity that unexpectedly takes on childlike attributes: an unconscious, almost involuntary creation informed by the vegetative experience of plants and minerals,” writes the collection. Learn more.
Theaster Gates (2020 Resident)
Theaster Gates: When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive
Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 South Stony Island Avenue, Chicago, IL
May 23–August 31, 2024
The Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company was one of the most successful Black media companies, known for publishing Ebony, Negro Digest, and other periodicals that highlighted and celebrated Black life and culture. Theaster Gates, who owns the Johnson Publishing Company’s archive through his Rebuild Foundation, presents an exhibition of architectural fittings, furniture, works of art, and ephemera from the archive, hoping “to show the responsibility of and urgency for cultural leaders to preserve and create continued access to our cultural treasures,” per Art Design Chicago. Learn more.
Todd Gray (2023 Fellow)
Reality Reframed: Recent Works by Todd Gray
The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, New York, NY
February 22–April 13, 2024
The Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation are presenting a solo exhibition that features recent photo assemblages by Todd Gray, drawing on his extensive archive of photography from the last four decades, and images taken during his Rome Prize Fellowship. “Gray’s formal and metaphorical methodology steps beyond text-driven historical storytelling through his use of oval and rectangular frames of varied scales and historical periods, depicting rich built environments,” notes the foundation. Learn more.
Jenny Holzer (2004 Resident)
Jenny Holzer: Light Line
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
May 17–September 29, 2024
Ascending the ramps of the Guggenheim’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda, Light Line is a site-specific show that will reimagine Jenny Holzer’s famed 1989 installation at the museum, “extend[ing] and build[ing] upon the artist’s vision from thirty-five earlier.” According to the museum, the exhibition will feature examples of Holzer’s “iconic use of the written word” from the 1980s through today, including her recent explorations of AI-generated language. Learn more.
Joyce Kozloff (2000 Fellow)
Joyce Kozloff: How We Know What We Know
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 608 New York Ave, Sheboygan, WI
February 2–June 30, 2024
How We Know What We Know surveys Joyce Kozloff’s career from 1986 to 2006, and especially the artist’s transition into cartography in the 1990s. “Across paintings, frescoes, installations, and sculpture, Kozloff uses maps to reveal the limits and possibilities of knowledge production and the varied relationships that govern systems of power,” writes the arts center, of which Kozloff is an alumna. In an echo of the frequent collaborations between Rome Prize Fellows at the Academy, this exhibition will also feature a sound composition by Carolyn Yarnell (2000 Fellow). Learn more.
Renato Leotta (2019 Italian Fellow)
Vittoria sul Sole
Sprovieri, 23 Heddon Street, London
January 26–March 28, 2024
Renato Leotta, who lives and works in Acireale and Turin, will have a solo show of predominantly three-dimensional works at Sprovieri in London entitled Vittoria sul Sole (Victory over the Sun). Attracted to natural phenomena such as the oceans, the stars, and plant life, Leotta’s works are “acts of observation” that use a “series of images, visualized through different media, that although being related to time and space contain a universal character,” according the gallery. The artist offers a two-line poem to accompany the show: “Dark clouds laden with ash and lapilli erupt from a volcano at the heart of the Mediterranean sea / This new matter, just created by nature, flies, moved by the wind into the Gallery, adhering and erasing all surfaces.” Learn more.
Nari Ward (2013 Fellow)
Nari Ward
Pirelli Hanger Bicocca, Via Chiese 2, Milan, Italy
March 28–July 28, 2024
The Milan museum and exhibition space Pirelli HangarBicocca has organized a retrospective of Nari Ward’s work that “interweaves Ward’s exploration of performativity and collaborative projects,” according to the gallery. “With a particular focus on time-based media works, including video, sound, performative sculptures, and installations, the exhibition delves into over thirty years of practice,” adds Pirelli HangarBicocca. Learn more.
David Salle (2000 Resident)
David Salle: Works on Paper
Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center, 82 North Broadway, Nyack, NY
January 18–April 28, 2024
The Edward Hopper House Museum is presenting an exhibition of new paintings by the artist David Salle, who is also known for his essays in the New York Review of Books. These works take inspiration from Hopper, who Salle says “remains […] a touchstone for how to translate the visual world into paintable forms.” “Salle is described as an artist's artist,” says Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, the museum’s director. “We are honored to feature his new work in galleries within the historic home of another iconic artist, providing an interesting venue to delve into Salle’s artistic dialogue with Edward Hopper.” Learn more.
Whitfield Lovell (2019 Resident)
Whitfield Lovell: Passages
Cincinnati Art Museum, 953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati, OH
March 1–May 26, 2024
Whitfield Lovell: Passages is the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date, according to Cincinnati Art Museum. Featuring over eight works, the exhibition will bring together two of Whitfield Lovell’s major installations: Deep River (2013), an experiential narrative of the journey freedom enslaved people took across the Tennessee River during the Civil War, and Visitation: The Richmond Project (2001), a homage to one of the first major Black entrepreneurial communities in the United States. Complementing these immersive installations are representative examples of Lovell’s signature conté crayon portraits that incorporate vintage objects, among other works. “Exploring multiple dimensions of the African American experience through intriguing and emotive assemblages and installations, Lovell honors the lives of everyday people of the past and reflects on prospects for the future,” says the curator Julie Aronson. Learn more.
Julie Mehretu (2020 Resident)
Julie Mehretu: Ensemble
Palazzo Grassi, Campo San Samuele 3231, Venice, Italy
March 17, 2024–January 6, 2025
This major exhibition of the work of Julie Mehretu brings together over sixty works in painting and printmaking over a twenty-five-year span, including works from the Pinault Collection (which operates the Palazzo Grassi), the artist’s collection, and other private and public collections. Work by the artists and writers Nairy Baghramian, Huma Bhabha, Tacita Dean, David Hammons (1990 Fellow), and others will be displayed in dialogue. Mehretu’s “sensual and emotional compositions are imbued with palimpsestic and inventive marks that emerge to the surface from a density of multilayered and complex ideas that originate from her longstanding engagement with the traditions and traces of history and photography,” notes the Pinault Collection. Learn more.
Wangechi Mutu (2019 Resident)
Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined
New Orleans Museum of Art
January 31–July 14, 2024
With nearly one hundred works across mediums, Intertwined is “the most complete survey of Wangechi Mutu’s work to date” and “a rare opportunity to see the range and depth of the artist’s practice across her influential career and to trace the thematic throughlines and progressions in her work,” per the New Orleans Museum of Art. Some of these themes include the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and cultural traditions of the African and other diasporas. The exhibition was organized by the New Museum. Learn more.
Catherine Opie (2021 Resident)
Catherine Opie: Walls, Windows and Blood
Peder Lund, Tjuvholmen allé 27, Oslo, Norway
January 20–April 6, 2024
Walls, Windows and Blood features a body of work initiated during Catherine Opie’s residency at the American Academy in Rome in summer 2021, during which she investigated “the idea of City,” especially through visits to the Vatican City. “With this body of work, Opie applies a distinctly American voice, both artistically and politically, to some of the deepest entrenched concepts of a powerful entity like the Catholic Church,” notes Peder Lund Gallery. Versions of this show were previously in Naples and New York. Learn more.
Karyn Olivier (2019 Fellow) and Isaac Julien (2016 Resident)
Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY
March 20–August 11, 2024
The eighty-first Whitney Biennial has seventy-one participants. This year, one AAR Fellow and one Resident will be among them: Karyn Olivier and Isaac Julien. The curators of this year’s biennial write, “Society is at an inflection point around this notion, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity. Many of the artists presenting works—including via robust performance and film programs—explore the fluidity of identity and form, historical and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment, among other urgent throughlines, and we are inspired by the work they are creating and sharing.” Learn more.
The American Academy in Rome welcomes news from Fellows, Residents, Italian Fellows, and Affiliated Fellows—in both the arts and humanities—about their work. Please email updates [at] aarome.org (updates[at]aarome[dot]org) to share.