Track Charlotte Brontë’s path from childhood through literary fame at the Morgan Library and Museum’s show Charlotte Brontë: an Independent Will (until 2 January 2017). The exhibition is named for the bold assertion made by the heroine of Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.” Devotees will be thrilled to see the original manuscript of the novel—on view in the United States for the first time—turned to this passage, among around 100 objects on show. It is also moving to encounter relics from the brilliantly imaginative world Brontë and her siblings created as children—as with a hand-written story and watercolour illustrations Brontë made at age 12—and the mourning letters she wrote on black-edged stationery after her siblings' deaths.
Catch Rashid Johnson’s powerful solo exhibition Fly Away, at Hauser & Wirth on 18th Street before it closes this weekend (until 22 October). The new works include a series of six large-scale pieces, all called Untitled Anxious Audience, which depict frantic faces drawn on white ceramic tiles in thick black soap and wax. The five-room show culminates with the large-scale installation Antoine’s Organ, a dense display of plants on black scaffolding interspersed with video works and stacks of books that explore black identity and the African diaspora, from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to Debra J. Dickerson’s The End of Blackness (2004). The pianist Antoine Baldwin will play a piano placed among the plants from 1-4PM on closing day.
An installation of works by the Minimalist artist Robert Morris is on view indefinitely at Dia:Beacon, just outside of New York City. The installation combines works made of earth, peat, oil and debris along with six geometric plywood sculptures created between 1962 and 1964 that were first shown at the Green Gallery in New York. A seventh sculpture titled Wall-Floor Slab (1964) that was originally intended for that exhibition but has never been shown will also be on view. On 6 November, the Dia Art Foundation will honour the artist for his contribution the Minimalist art movement at its annual fall gala in New York City.