New York Events Today

This is the first exhibition in an art museum to be devoted exclusively to Oceanic musical instruments. It explores the rich diversity of musical instruments created and used in the Pacific Islands. Drawn primarily from the Metropolitan’s collections, the exhibition features more than fifty instruments from small personal types such as panpipes and courting whistles to larger forms played at performances heard by the entire community, such as the exquisitely carved temple drums of the Austral Islands or the imposing sacred slit gongs of New Guinea. On view through September 6th, 2010.

In this exhibition, acclaimed artist Kiki Smith presents a unique, site-specific installation exploring ideas of creative inspiration and the cycle of life in relation to women artists. Kiki Smith: Sojourn draws on a variety of universal experiences, from the milestones of birth and death to quotidian experiences such as the daily chores of domestic life. An important eighteenth-century silk needlework by a young woman named Prudence Punderson, The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality (Collection of the Connecticut Historical Society), which provided original inspiration for Smith’s installation, is included in the exhibition. On view through September 12th, 2010.

An exhibition exploring Pablo Picasso's creative process through the medium of printmaking, from March 28 to September 6, 2010. It features approximately 100 works from the Museum's superlative collection of the artist's prints. The exhibition is organized by Deborah Wye, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art.

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. The works included in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, and to videos, both on monitors and projected, as well as film, performance, and site-specific installations.

Themes of dislocation and displacement in contemporary photography are explored in this exhibition of works from the collection. Perambulations and digressions in photographic works from the 1960s and 1970s by Vito Acconci, Ed Ruscha, Richard Long, and On Kawara, and a 1968 video by Bruce Nauman, show how a work of art—cut loose from any specific medium or physical requirements—could take the form of a walk, a 20–foot–long book, or a rigorously nonsensical pattern of movements.

Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) chose to focus his nature-based art on the ground beneath his feet. Curated by artist Robert Gober, this exhibition features over one hundred major watercolors, drawings, oils on canvas, sketches, notebooks, journals, and doodles by this visionary American artist. Acclaimed by critics and known to a broad public audience during his lifetime, Burchfield is curiously under-appreciated today. Working almost exclusively in watercolor, Burchfield’s primary subject was landscape, often focusing on his immediate surroundings: his garden, the views from his windows, snow turning to slush, the sounds of insects and bells and vibrating telephone lines, deep ravines, sudden atmospheric changes, the experience of entering a forest at dusk, to name but a few.

As a prelude, counterpoint, and coda to the Biennial, the Museum’s fifth floor is devoted to artists in the Whitney’s collection whose works were shown in Biennials over the past eight decades. Collecting Biennials is installed as a kind of historical survey within the Biennial, underscoring the importance of previous Biennial exhibitions in the Museum’s history and the formation of its collection.

In the time between Henri Matisse's return from Morocco in 1913 and his departure for Nice in 1917, the artist produced some of the most demanding, experimental, and enigmatic works of his career—paintings that are abstracted and rigorously purged of descriptive detail, geometric and sharply composed, and dominated by shades of black and gray. The exhibition includes approximately 120 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, in the first sustained examination devoted to the work of this important period. On view through Oct. 11.