At the Jewish Museum, the exhibition Take Me (I'm Yours) (until 5 February 2017) lets audiences walk away with the art. The show includes freebies made by 42 artists like Christian Boltanski, Yoko Ono and Gilbert and George, each of who have made editioned items that visitors are invited to take home at no cost, from a t-shit by Rirkrit Tiravanija to candies offered by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres. According to the museum, an average of 10,000 items have been produced for each work. The show is a reiteration of an exhibition organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Christian Boltanski in 1995 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, which included 12 artists. P.P.
Most of us can recall a teacher who made us reconsider what we thought was possible. For artists like Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston and Michael Frimkess, that teacher was Peter Voulkos. The sculptor, who died in 2002, founded the ceramics programme at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1954. His mantra? “No rules, no rules.” An exhibition with that title at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery in New York (until 29 October) includes 21 works, only around half of which are for sale. It explores Voulkos’s influence on 14 artists who work with clay, from established names like Lynda Benglis to emerging artists like Cassie Griffin. The show elegantly captures how Voulkos’s permissiveness inspired generations of artists to push the envelope even further. J.H.
The Kunstraum C.G. Boerner is celebrating a new cycle in its life—a move from the Upper East Side to a larger gallery space in Chelsea—with the exhibition On Death (until 20 October). The show includes 50 works from the Chicago-based Richard Harris Collection that all deal with mortality, a theme that unites a wide and unexpected swath of artists and practices across time and geography. These include Old Master memento mori, an Edo (Japanese) woodcut, a 19th-century headhunter’s trophy from India and works by artists whose work is frequently macabre (James Ensor, Käthe Kollwitz, Bruce Conner). The show reveals varying attitudes towards death and how hidden it has become when compared to its presence in the past, as with a 17th-century embroidered clergy robe from Spain that prominently features a skull. V.S.B.
Three other must-see shows: Kai Althoff at the Museum of Modern Art; Sean Scully: the Eighties at Mnuchin Gallery; Diane Arbus: In the Beginning at the Met Breuer
