The Autumn Exhibition Season Runs From Duchamp to Quilts
Philadelphia takes Duchamp, Boston hosts pharaohs and Washington shows quilts, while the LA Ballet and Philharmonic premiere a work at the Hollywood Bowl.
The autumn museum season has taken shape across American institutions, with major exhibitions spanning roughly a century of art history and several thousand years of everything else.
The headline shows
- Duchamp in Philadelphia
- Pharaohs in Boston
- Quilts in Washington, D.C.
The Duchamp show has an obvious home. The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds the most significant concentration of his work anywhere, an association that gives the city a claim on the artist no other institution can make.
Why quilts belong in this list
Of the three, the quilt exhibition is the one that says most about how museums have changed. Quilts were long filed under craft or folk art — categories that functioned to keep work made by women, and disproportionately by Black women in the American South, out of the main galleries.
That distinction has been steadily dismantled over the past two decades, as institutions have recognised both the formal sophistication of the work and the arbitrariness of the line that excluded it. A major quilt exhibition in a national museum is the result of that reassessment rather than a departure from it.
The pharaohs, and the argument attached
Egyptian antiquities remain among the most reliable draws in museum programming. They also arrive with a debate that will not be settled by ticket sales: how the objects were acquired, and whether they should remain where they are.
That conversation has grown considerably more serious across the sector, and institutions now mount these shows knowing the provenance questions will be asked.
Performance: a premiere at the Hollywood Bowl
The Los Angeles Ballet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic collaborated at the Hollywood Bowl on a new ballet set to Gabriela Ortiz's Kauyumari, choreographed by the company's artistic director Melissa Barak.
Pairing a ballet company with a symphony orchestra on a new work by a living composer is more ambitious than the Bowl's usual summer programming, and considerably harder to schedule. It is also the kind of collaboration that only happens where two institutions of that scale share a city.
The season's shape
Read together, the programme suggests institutions doing two things at once: presenting the canonical figures who reliably fill galleries, and continuing to widen what counts as belonging in them.