The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveils its fall 2016 exhibition this week, titled Masterworks: Unpacking Fashion (18 November-5 February 2017). The show features womenswear and some menswear from the 18th-century to the present, comprising around 60 items that the museum has acquired over the past ten years. Spanning three galleries, the show profiles nearly 40 designers including Cristóbal Balenciaga, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, among others. Some of the looks will be presented in packing crates and palettes, as if they had just arrived to the museum.
In the second iteration of its Sacred Spaces series, the Rubin Museum of Art presents Sacred Spaces: Himalayan Wind (until 5 June 2017), a site-specific commission created by the Soundwalk Collective that encompasses an entire floor of the museum. The work draws on 120 hours of recorded sound and footage from 200 villages and monasteries in Nepal, including recordings of the wind, devotional chanting and silence. The show also features a shrine assembled with various Buddhist artefacts from the museum’s collection and other American museums. An interactive screen adjacent to the shrine allows visitors to learn more about each object’s origin, religious significance and ritualistic use.
Andreas Gursky: Not Abstract II at Gagosian gallery (until 23 December) is a show of recent photographs by the German artist that are accompanied by an electronic sound installation produced by the Canadian DJ Richie Hawtin. The pairing of Hawtin’s minimalist music with Gurksy’s hypnotic landscape photographs are said to inspire “longer pauses that allow each image to expand beyond its frame”, according to a press release. Photographs such as Les Meés (2016), which depicts rolling hills that are mostly covered by solar panels, resemble abstract compositions from afar. All but one of the 20 photographs in the exhibition have never been shown in the US before. The show coincides with the artist’s survey at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany.