What to See in the US This Autumn

‘a vista’ | Bel Ami, Los Angeles | 27 July – 12 October

Two-person exhibitions walk a fine line. If the paired artists are overly similar contemporaries, the show begins to feel like a boxing match. If one is lesser-known and the other a lauded historical figure, the exhibition can read like a cringey sales pitch.

Enter Covey Gong and Monique Mouton, whose works appear side by side in ‘a vista’ at Bel Ami in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. They are not a natural pairing. Gong crafts insular, architectural sculptures, while Mouton’s abstract watercolours are gestural and poetic, their faded colours dissolving into ripped sheets of collaged paper. The exhibition’s occasionally random feel is a byproduct of its unusual curatorial strategy: friendship. A year ago, the two New York-based artists embarked on a creative conversation, one that has yielded the playful admixture of new and recent works on view. This is the ‘secret third thing’ that can happen in two-person shows: ‘a vista’ is an unexpected collaboration that reveals the shared conceptual interests of two aesthetically divergent artists. – Claudia Ross

Liliana Porter | Dia Bridgehampton, New York | 21 June – 26 May

Liliana Porter rarely alters the found toys and figurines that comprise her extensive collection, viewing them as complete in their own right. Across the decades, the Buenos Aires-born, New York-based artist has staged these objects – often nostalgic mementos of mass production – in photographs, videos and large-scale assemblages. Her exhibition, ‘The Task’, at Dia Bridgehampton, features this familiar cast – Elvis Presley busts, Mickey Mouse statuettes, porcelain dolls – alongside video documentation of her 2018 play, THEM, and significant photographic works from the 1970s, reaffirming the artist’s conviction that physical objects and their representations are equally ‘real’. – Macaella Gray 

‘Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson’ | SITE Santa Fe | 5 July – 28 October

In his 1969 essay ‘Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatán’, a road-tripping Robert Smithson riffs, conflictedly, on guidebook perspectives on bygone Mesoamerica. Both road trip and riff pay stylistic homage to Jack Kerouac, another mid-century artist who succeeded in thumbing his nose at US/European canon-makers while building a fantastic career among them. A prodigious if whimsical thinker, Smithson’s creative and intellectual arc didn’t take much from his time’s de-colonial or eco-critical thought (e.g., Frantz Fanon or Rachel Carson). Witness the artist, in his text ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites’ (1968), articulating his representation of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens as ‘mapped … in terms of esthetic boundaries rather than political or economic.’

Though Smithson has been branded as an icon of ‘Earth Art’, his overarching project was more an ongoing conceptualist enterprise. This is evident in his exploration of ‘site/non-site’ in works such as A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968), which dislocates limestone from its prior context and meaning into the ‘non-site’ of the gallery space. Comprising rock-filled bins accompanied by photographs, A Nonsite is among the works on view in ‘Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson’, a cross-generational, two-artist show at SITE Santa Fe. – Brian Karl

‘In the House of the Trembling Eye’ | Aspen Art Museum | 30 May – 29 September

As with sonar navigation, curating is fundamentally a test of limits – sending a signal out and seeing what resonates. For Canadian artist Allison Katz, whose paintings pull from a vast collection of iconographies, this process of selection and combination comes easily – giving her recent turn to curating the weight of inevitability. Troubling the distinction between artistic work and curatorial project, ‘In the House of the Trembling Eye’ at Aspen Art Museum features new and recent pieces by Katz alongside works by other artists, predominantly sourced from private collections in and around Aspen, and adopts the framework of an ancient Roman townhouse, or domus. (Katz has long been fascinated by Pompeii and participated in the archaeological site’s fellowship program in 2022.) – Cat Kron

Jenny Holzer | Guggenheim Museum, New York | 17 May – 29 September 

Interviewed on video as she prepared for the 1989 debut of her now iconic LED text work, Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024), Jenny Holzer spoke of the difficulty of working with the museum’s unusual architecture. ‘It’s a wonderful space, it’s a fabulous space, a complicated space,’ she reflected. ‘[But,] on the other [hand], it’s a death-to-art space.’ The camera pans over a sheet of paper where three of her truisms are written in all caps: ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY CREATED CRIME’; ‘SLIPPING INTO MADNESS IS GOOD FOR THE SAKE OF COMPARISON’; ‘ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE’. The work, she explains, came to her after months of reflection, an idea ‘pared down to what was necessary – nothing more, nothing less – that didn’t kill off the space and didn’t kill me.’ – Jane Ursula Harris

_{Main image: Liliana Porter, The Task (detail), 2024. Courtesy: © Liliana Porter and Dia Art Foundation; photograph: Don Stahl}