12 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
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The Chilean-born artist Cecilia Vicuña,
a self-described “poet of precarity,” cre-
ates daring, beautiful works—paintings,
textiles, books, performances, films—
that interweave language, spirituality,
progressive politics, and ancient Andean
culture. Vicuña has lived in New York
City since 1980, and now the Guggen-
heim presents the artist’s first museum
retrospective, “Cecilia Vicuña: Spin Spin
Triangulene,” in her adopted home.
(Opens May 27.)
As the war in Ukraine rages on, it’s
hard to imagine a more timely sum-
mer show than “Designing Peace,” at
the Cooper Hewitt. Twenty-five coun-
tries are represented by forty pacifist
propositions—models, maps, objects,
mobile-phone apps, videos, full-scale in-
stallations—including rugs woven from
discarded bullet casings and plans for a
memorial garden at the forthcoming In-
ternational African American Museum,
in Charleston, S.C. (Opens June 10.)
The quicksilver collagist Ray John-
son (1927-95), best known for dissemi-
nating his art through the U.S. mail, was
once dubbed “New York’s most famous
unknown artist.” The unknown aspect
of Johnson’s art was recently magnified
by a major discovery—a cache of pho-
tographs that he took in his final years,
using disposable cameras. The first
show on this surprising new chapter,
“Please Send to Real Life: Ray Johnson
Photographs,” is on view at the Morgan
Library & Museum. (Opens June 17.)
In 2021, the Met installed a bronze
plaque on its façade, acknowledging
that the museum is situated on Lenape
land and honoring “all Indigenous com-
munities—past, present, and future.” A
similar spirit informs its wide-ranging
exhibition “Water Memories,” which
places historic, modern, and contem-
porary works by Native American
artists—including Cannupa Hanska
Luger, Cara Romero, and Fritz
Scholder—in conversation with those
of their Euro-American counterparts.
(Opens June 23.)
The vibrant, smart, and scathingly
funny paintings of Robert Colescott
(1925-2009)—the first Black artist torepresent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale,
in 1997—riff on famous works by Goya,
Manet, and van Gogh, among others, to
skewer racial stereotypes and academic
pretensions. The New Museum, which
organized a retrospective of the painter’s
work in 1989, revisits his œuvre in “Art
and Race Matters: The Career of Robert
Colescott.” (Opens June 30.)
“Streetwear in my mind is linked to
Duchamp,” Virgil Abloh told Doreen
St. Felix, whose Profile of the wildly
influential artist and designer was pub-
lished in these pages before his life was
cut tragically short, by cancer, in 2021.
“Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech,” at
the Brooklyn Museum, considers his
legacy and includes never-before-seen
objects from his archive. (Opens July 1.)
Before there were viral memes
there was Barbara Kruger, whose aph-
oristic text-and-image works (“I Shop
Therefore I Am”; “Your Body Is a Bat-
tleground”) have been predicting and
reflecting American culture for the past
forty years. moma devotes its soaring
second-floor atrium to the site-specific
commission “Barbara Kruger: Thinking
of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.” (Opens
July 16.)
—Andrea K. ScottSUMMERPREVIEW
Making Peace, Virgil Abloh, Barbara Kruger