News / Nathaniel Mary Quinn / Museum Exhibitions

On View

The Time Is Always Now
Artists Reframe the Black Figure

Through May 19, 2024
National Portrait Gallery, London
www.npg.org.uk

The Time Is Always Now showcases the work of contemporary artists from the African diaspora and highlights their use of figures to illuminate the richness and complexity of Black life. The exhibition examines both the presence and the absence of Black figures in Western art history and the social, psychological, and cultural contexts in which they were produced. Work by Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

On View

Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano

Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org

This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.

On View

Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960

Through April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu

Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.

Closed

El eco de Picasso

October 2, 2023–March 30, 2024
Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain
museopicassomalaga.org

Organized as part of Picasso Celebration 1973–2023, a series of international exhibitions and events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, The Echo of Picasso focuses on his influence on twentieth-century art. The exhibition places Picasso’s practice in dialogue with work by more than fifty artists, including Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Kooning, Thomas Houseago, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Cy Twombly, Tom Wesselmann, and Franz West.

Closed

Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Split Face

October 7, 2023–March 11, 2024
Museo Novecento and Museo Stefano Bardini, Florence, Italy
www.museonovecento.it

Split Face is Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s first monographic exhibition in Italy and is held across two locations in Florence: Museo Novecento and Museo Stefano Bardini. A selection of Quinn’s paintings, many of which have never been seen before, is presented alongside the works of Renaissance artists and twentieth-century masters including Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Felice Casorati, Virgilio Guidi, Carlo Levi, and many others.

Closed

Ecstatic
Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection

June 10–August 27, 2023
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
hammer.ucla.edu

Presented in conjunction with the unveiling of the Hammer’s building expansion, Ecstatic highlights acquisitions made since 2005—the year the institution began collecting contemporary art. The exhibition is organized around two distinct installations of sculpture and works on paper that emphasize the role each medium plays within the scope of the museum’s collection. Work by Mark Grotjahn, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Jim Shaw is included.

Closed

Black American Portraits

February 8–June 30, 2023
Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta
museum.spelman.edu

Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, Black American Portraits reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning more than two centuries from circa 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 140 works draws primarily from LACMA’s permanent collection and chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance. This exhibition has traveled from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Work by Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

X
A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022

January 27–May 26, 2023
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
sheldonartmuseum.org

X: A Decade of Collecting, 2012–2022 is a survey of artworks acquired for the Sheldon Museum of Art’s collection over the past decade. The chosen works demonstrate the breadth of collecting efforts and are a modest representation of the approximately 1,875 pieces that have entered the museum’s holdings since 2012. The exhibition seeks to present a snapshot of how the collection continues to evolve. Work by Richard Avedon, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Andy Warhol, and Stanley Whitney is included.

Closed

Nathaniel Mary Quinn

February 4–May 22, 2022
Le Consortium, Dijon, France
www.leconsortium.fr

This first solo exhibition in France of work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn, curated by Le Consortium’s codirector Eric Troncy, brings together fifteen paintings unfolding around The Director (2019), which was gifted to the museum’s collection. Quinn’s striking composite portraits draw on both memory and fragments of found images sourced from magazines, personal photographs, and the Internet.

Closed

Black American Portraits

November 7, 2021–April 17, 2022
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
www.lacma.org

Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1976, and complementing the presentation at lacma of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, Black American Portraits reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces. Spanning more than two centuries from circa 1800 to the present day, this selection of approximately 140 works draws primarily from lacma’s permanent collection and chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community, and exuberance. Work by Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

The Slipstream
Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time

May 14, 2021–April 10, 2022
Brooklyn Museum, New York
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Slipstream draws examples from Brooklyn Museum’s contemporary art collection to contemplate the profound disruption that occurred in 2020. Borrowing its title from an aeronautical term that refers to the pull of the current that is left in the wake of a large and powerful object, the exhibition examines the placement and displacement of power that runs through American history and continues today. The show features more than sixty works by multiple generations of artists from the 1960s to the present day, including Titus Kaphar, Rick Lowe, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Taryn Simon.

Closed

Since Unveiling
Selected Acquisitions of a Decade

November 20, 2021–April 3, 2022
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org

Since Unveiling highlights artworks that have entered the Broad collection in the last decade, with some acquisitions completed as recently as this year. The fifty-seven works on view by twenty-nine artists represent many facets of contemporary art, from explorations of abstraction and figuration to examinations of place, identity, and narrative. Many works witness, critique, and interpret current events, speaking to politics and power structures. Work by Gregory Crewdson, Andreas Gursky, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn are included.

Closed

Nathaniel Mary Quinn in
Evidence: Selections from the Permanent Collection

July 1, 2021–February 20, 2022
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
www.moca.org

Our experience of time is situational and decidedly elastic, a reality that many of us have perceived with new acuity over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in ways intimately related to our differing responsibilities and stations in life. This selection of works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, considers some of the myriad ways that artists mark, capture, or meditate on the passage of time: its duration, its ordering into past and present, and its relation to memory. Work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

Invisible Sun

May 26–October 3, 2021
The Broad, Los Angeles
www.thebroad.org

Developed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the groundswell of demands for social justice and racial equity, Invisible Sun features artworks that resonate with this unprecedented period of rupture and unrest. The works on view speak to profound transitions, both personal and global—including the AIDS crisis, gender- and race-based violence, unchecked capitalism, and colonialism’s aftermath—and form an appeal for healing. Work by Ellen Gallagher and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

Person of Interest

January 31, 2020–July 3, 2021
Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
sheldonartmuseum.org

Exploring nuances in portraiture from the late nineteenth century to today—and testing the very definition of the genre—Person of Interest presents depictions of the literal and abstracted body from Sheldon’s rich holdings and selected loans. This exhibition asks open-ended questions about self-fashioning, cultural memory, gender identity, and the performance of identity. In doing so, it prompts conversations about race and representation, institutional power, and lived experiences. Work by Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Jenny Saville is included.

Closed

Duro Olowu
Seeing Chicago

February 29–September 13, 2020
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
mcachicago.org

Nigerian-born British designer Duro Olowu curates a show that reimagines relationships between artists and objects across time, media, and geography. Moving away from traditional exhibition formats, Olowu combines photographs, paintings, sculptures, and films in dense and textural scenes that incorporate his own work. Work by Brice Marden and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

Dirty Protest
Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection

January 24–May 19, 2019
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
hammer.ucla.edu

This exhibition highlights a lively mix of painting, sculpture, and media installations by more than thirty international established and emerging artists, drawn from the Hammer Museum’s collection. Work by Chris Burden and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.

Closed

Dreamweavers

February 13–April 13, 2019
UTA Artist Space, Beverly Hills, California
utaartistspace.com

Dreamweavers contemplates the surreal in society against a vigorously shifting twenty-first century. The group exhibition examines the paradox of fact and fantasy through the lens of artists who operate from a deeply imaginative, often provocative, psychological space. Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean has collaborated with UTA Artists Space and curator Nicola Vassell to present the show. Work by Cy Gavin and Nathaniel Mary Quinn is included.