http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/arts/design/in-art-this-fall-women-win-in-a-landslide.html 2016-09-16 19:14:05 In Art This Fall, Women Win in a Landslide Female artists will be the focus of many important solo shows, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Carmen Herrera, Yayoi Kusama and Pipilotti Rist. === (Asterisks indicate the critic’s Top 10 shows this season.) I can’t predict results of the November presidential election, but I The bonanza has already begun with “A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde, 1960s-1980s” at the The Caretaking as power: what a concept. It’s also embodied in “Beverly Buchanan — Ruins and Rituals” at the And an appetite for radical thinking is what prompted the collector 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 At 101, the Cuba-born Ms. Herrera is not only still very much with us but also still intensely productive. The same is true of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama who, at a youthful 87, will have an exhibition of her total-immersion Add to the season solo shows by Frances Stark ( This doesn’t mean that men are entirely out of the picture, though the most interesting shows are by figures who have, thus far, escaped museum overexposure. “Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction”* at the That museum will also debut “Renaissance and Reformation: German Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach”* (Nov. 20), effectively a tribute to Martin Luther, the religious thinker whose “95 Theses” started the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago next fall. A more direct homage, “Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation,” at the Otherwise, big-ticket scholarly theme shows are less plentiful than in other years, though there are some. “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven”* at the Political realities are inseparable from art, which is often a direct response to them. This should be monumentally illustrated in two concurrent Philadelphia shows: “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950”* at the And addressing the present, “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter,”* organized by the architecture and design department at the No American artist has more incisively and movingly addressed this subject than the veteran West Coast photographer Anthony Hernandez, whose pictures of dispossessed people camping out under Los Angeles freeways are as pertinent today as when he took them in the late 1980s. He’ll be having a long overdue career retrospective at the If economic class continues to be one of the most bitter flash points in American politics, race is, ever, the other, and never more so than in an election year marked by surges of xenophobia and instances of police violence directed against black citizens. Such violence is by no means new: An exhibition called “All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50” at the That larger story is told with panoramic subtly in the exhibition “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,”* a traveling survey devoted to one of our great contemporary history painters. It comes to Designed by David Adjaye, an African-born British architect, it is built on the last available museum spot on the National Mall. Its display blurs, as it should, firm lines between artworks and artifacts, giving both equal significance as objects of our moral attention. President Obama will formally dedicate the space. Whomever succeeds him in the White House should make it a first-stop call.