In Art This Fall, Women Win in a Landslide

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I can’t predict results of the November presidential election, but I can tell you that women are going to rule the 2016-17 art season, with enough having solo museum shows to form an entire White House cabinet, and then some.

The bonanza has already begun with “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde, 1960s-1980s” at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, a traveling retrospective look at the famed “topless cellist” who was, right up to her death in 1991, a daring artist and a visionary organizer of a passionately successful campaign for electronically-based multimedia art, which she helped to invent.

The Queens Museum has survey of another innovator in “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art,”* a survey of an artist who has, since the 1960s, combined feminism, environmentalism and labor activism in private and public art projects, some done in her role as the New York City Department of Sanitation’s official (though unsalaried) artist in residence. In the 1980s, she choreographed a ballet for garbage trucks. It was fantastic. (Sept. 18)

Caretaking as power: what a concept. It’s also embodied in “Beverly Buchanan — Ruins and Rituals” at the Brooklyn Museum, a full-career look at an artist who invested much of her energy in reconstituting, in miniature, African-American vernacular architecture of the Carolinas and Georgia, where she grew up. At the time of her death last year, Ms. Buchanan’s work, which includes painting and photography, had been out of the New York limelight for a while. The retrospective, which opens Oct. 21, makes a welcome return and serves as the kickoff event in “A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum,” celebrating the 10th anniversary of the museum’s radically smart Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

And an appetite for radical thinking is what prompted the collector Virginia Dwan to turn dealer in the late 1950s and early 1960s and promote Minimalism, Conceptualism and Earth Art, trends then considered on an avant-garde lunatic fringe. “Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959-1971,” which opens on Sept. 30 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington has work by dozens of artists — Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Agnes Martin — who were little known when Ms. Dwan was both selling and buying them, and who are classics now.

In line with the times, the Dwan galleries favored male artists, but also found room for women, Ms. Martin (1912-2004) among them. A major overview of that artist’s abstract paintings, drawings and prints, “Agnes Martin”* will pulse through the great spiral of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum this fall and is certain to be one of the great shows of the New York season. By the time it opens on Oct. 7, the life’s work of her near contemporary, “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight,” will be enlivening the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art with sharp-edged forms and brilliant colors.

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