Culture Calendar: 17 Things to Do in December 2017

December 1

The flowering of Miami as a modern art capital continues with the opening of the Institute of Contemporary Art’s gorgeous new home in the city’s Design District—a 37,000-square foot, gleaming white edifice by the Spanish Aranguren + Gallegos Arquitectos, with a striking southern façade of interlocking metal triangles and lighted panels.  The new building, which more than doubles the museum’s gallery space and adds a 15,000-square foot new sculpture garden, opens with a series of exhibitions emblematic of its mission to bring new light to modern masters and under-recognized talents alike. The ICA Miami’s thematic survey, The Everywhere Studio, explores the impact and influence of the artist’s studio from the post-war period to the present day.  There are exhibitions of work by Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Senga Nengudi and Helio Oiticica; newly commissioned works by Chris Ofili, Miami-based artist Tomm El-Saieh; significant new sculpture and installations in the garden, and much more. 61 NE 41^st St.; Icamiami.org.

December 5 - 10

Miami Art Week kicks off with a pair of fairs highlighting the newest developments in the contemporary art world. The second most attended international art fair globally, Art Miami features thousands of works by some of the most iconic artists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, including David Hockney, Cy Twombly, Alexander Calder, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Gerhard Richter, Donald Judd, Frank Stella and other modern luminaries presented by more than 85,000 new and established collectors.  Sister fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, set in the same waterfront pavilion as its older sibling, will host over 100 contemporary galleries from 26 countries, as always providing a platform for emerging, mid-career, and established artists and galleries to show alongside one another.  Art Miami Pavilion, One Herald Plaza at NE 14^th St.; artmiamifair.com.

Performances starting December 6

More than two years after staging a revolution on Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s history-making musical about America’s founding fathers opens on the West End—a theatrical mega-event that also debuts the newly reconstructed Victoria Palace Theatre. Jamael Westman and Giles Terera lead the cast as Hamilton and Burr, respectively, but the most applause might well go to the Brits’ representative in the cast—the dandyish scene stealer King George, finally singing his winking tune “You’ll Be Back” closer to Carnaby Street than Times Square.  As in all things Hamilton-related, buy tickets yesterday. They’re on sale, for now, through June 2018. Victoria St., Westminster; hamiltonthemusical.co.uk. 

December 7 - 10

In its 16^th edition, the mother of all contemporary art fairs should be easier to navigate (a new layout and show design means bigger booths and wider aisles for strolling) and as diverse as ever, with 20 new-to-Basel galleries among the 268 from 32 countries exhibiting. Highlights this year include the fourth annual Survey sector, with galleries presenting art created before the year 2000, much of it politically-oriented; eleven large-scale installations created around the “territorial” theme in the Public sector; and a program of 19 engaging conversations touching on timely topics like the changing nature of patronage, the privatization of art journalism, institutional collaboration, and the effects of the internet on contemporary art. Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Dr.; artbasel.com.

December 7 - 10

Founded 15 years ago, the New Art Dealers Alliance aims to ease the flow of information and collaboration among its membership, while shining a light on lesser-known international galleries, emerging artists, and artist-run spaces. Its annual fair this year features 23 first-time exhibitors, plus an increased international presence with galleries from far-flung locations including Dubai, Mexico City, Tokyo, Cologne, and Guatemala City, along with the second annual International Gallery Prize bestowed upon Bogota’s CARNE Gallery and Warsaw’s Dawid Radziszewski. Deuville Beach Resort, 6701 Collins Ave.; newartdealers.org.

December 7 - 9

In her more than two-decade career at New York City Ballet, Suzanne Farrell exemplified the thoroughly modern blend of Russian classicism and American wit that George Balanchine brought to the world of ballet.  A stunning ballerina who could be enigmatic and elegant one moment, sexy and daring the next, she was Balanchine’s muse and, as such, the body and mind on whom he choreographed many of his most lasting works.  For the past 15 years, she has carried on his legacy leading a talented small company at the Kennedy Center that, crucially, performed many of Balanchine’s less-seen works along with his beloved classics. The troupe will disband after a series of final performances that should feel especially poignant, as three ballets on the program were created for her—the fiery gypsy dance Tzigane, the 27-dancer Chaconne, and the rarely performed pas de deux Meditation. Farrell will continue at the Kennedy Center in a teaching role.  John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; kennedy-center.org.

December 7 – January 28

Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company has always provided a home and launching pad for the most promising new voices in American theater. That tradition continues with the enterprising company’s newest production, playwright and poet Aziza Barnes’ BLKS. Barnes calls the play, about a day in the life of four young black women in New York City, “a self-portrait of me and my best friends in our cripplingly-early 20s”—in short, “a bunch of painful absurdity” that came from the author learning to laugh at the person she once was and still is.  In conjunction with the premiere, Barnes and Steppenwolf have collaborated on a salon series sparked by the themes in the play, bringing conversations with black, queer, women-identified and of-color artists to the theater. 1700 N. Halsted; steppenwolf.org.

December 8 – March 24

A colleague and close friend of Edward Hopper, watercolorist Charles E. Burchfield was known for his distinctively American depictions of nature, particularly his realistic landscapes of the scenery around his adopted hometown of Buffalo, New York.  But Burchfield grew up in Ohio, and that’s where his love of capturing the natural world first blossomed. At the center possessing the world’s largest collection of Burchfield’s works, the first exhibition in a series that will ultimately cover Burchfield’s entire life focuses on his formative years in the Midwest, with drawing, watercolors and ephemera spanning his first works as a teenager, his studies at New York City’s National Academy of Design, and his “Golden Year” of staggering output in 1917, which would later become the focus of the Museum of Modern Art’s first-ever one-man show. Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State, 1300 Elmwood Ave.; burchfieldpenney.org.

December 9 – April 15

Plenty of great photography captures outright beauty. Some of the best, like that of photojournalist Eugene Richards, finds beauty where most eyes see none. Richards has always sought out the profundity in the most difficult of circumstances. Raised in working-class Dorchester, Massachusetts and coming of age in the Vietnam era,  he joined Volunteers in Service to America in 1969, working as a healthcare advocate in rural Arkansas and photographing his experiences there. His personal and professional projects since then have always illuminated the social and economic issues complicating the lives of his subjects. 130 of Richards’ indelible images from major projects spanning his career—finding lyricism in difficult lives— come to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in this retrospective (co-organized with the George Eastman Museum). 4525 Oak St.; nelson-atkins.org.

December 9 – June 15

Today, the concept of family feels like an especially ever-changing one, but the diverse forms family might take—reaching far beyond DNA connections—has fascinated photographers far longer than the most recent years in memory.  Whether in formal portraits or candid shots, America’s most celebrated artists have captured shared relationships, generational bonds, romantic partnerships, and alternative family structures from behind their lenses.  Work by the likes of Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Gordon Parks, Sally Mann, and many more constitute the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition exploring just how many things family can mean, via eighty photographs from the Victorian era to today.  465 Huntington Ave.; mfa.org.

December 15 – 24 and 28 - 30

How to begin sifting through the seemingly endless array of Nutcrackers to choose from every holiday season? The beyond-reproach classic by George Balanchine takes many forms, from the glittering original at New York City Ballet to the whimsically-outfitted version designed by Ian Falconer across the country at Pacific Northwest Ballet, but the most compelling one this year takes place in a climate less-than-hospitable to snowflakes (dancing or otherwise). Miami City Ballet, on par with NYCB when it comes to Balanchine, will give the master’s Nutcracker a vibrant makeover this winter when the imaginative artists Isabel and Ruben Toledo redesign its sets and costumes with fanciful nods to Miami’s design-centric history, the Caribbean, and the couple’s own heritage. “We have a natural connection to Miami. We are both Cuban born, as is Lourdes,” [Lopez, MCB’s artistic director] Isabel has said of the project, “and this establishes a non-verbal dialogue that allows us to dream in similar colors.”  Miami: Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd.; West Palm Beach: Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, 701 Okeechobee Blvd.; miamicityballet.org.

December 19 – January 21

The minimalist light-installation artist Dan Flavin and European ceramicists Lucie Rie and Hans Coper worked in thoroughly different mediums, but the three artists, all visionaries in their fields, shared a unifying ambition: to establish and redefine ideas of space, materiality, harmony, and permanence while working in seemingly simple materials (light and clay). Evidently, Flavin recognized a kinship with the Vienna native Rie and her German-born protégé, Coper. He began collecting their work in the 1980s, and in 1990 made two series of his own dedicated to the duo. Eighteen light works from that series, along with fifteen of Flavin’s own vessels by the now London-based potters, will be on view in the first exhibition to bring the trio of artists together, at the Vito Schnabel Gallery in St. Moritz.  Via Maistra 37; vitoschnabel.com.

From December 21

Ten years in the making, the Louvre’s satellite home on Abu Dhabi’s flagship cultural district, Saadiyat Island, finally opened last month in its breathtaking silver-domed Jean Nouvel-designed home, inspired by the traditional medina and constituting a 23-gallery “museum city” of sorts.  The new museum, which presents its holdings chronologically rather than geographically in an effort to emphasize the universal among disparate art realms, will host four temporary exhibitions per year, each organized by one of thirteen French museum partners. The first of those opens this month, tracing the creation of the Musee de Louvre in Paris from the royal collections at Versailles under Louis XIV through the residency of the Academy and Salons in the Louvre, with 150 significant paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, and more on display. louvreabudhabi.ae.

In theaters December 22

It’s a good bet that the title of a Michael Haneke film will prove antithetical to its actual mood (see the decidedly horror-filled Funny Games) and his latest release, the Cannes Palm d’Or-nominated Happy End, is no exception. Isabelle Huppert—the grande dame of onscreen suffering—plays Anne Laurent, the doyenne of an imposing estate and of a lucrative family business in Calais. All’s far from well in that gorgeous house: her father is suffering from dementia, her son is a drunk who has put the business in jeopardy, her brother is the father of a creepy pre-teen girl, and her town is awash in refugees.  It all adds up to an atmosphere of dread, building toward a signature Haneke close—but with the estimable Huppert leading the show, it’s well worth the pins and needles.

In theaters December 22

To call a film about journalists taking on a combative president timely might be the understatement of the year. This would explain, at least in part, why Steven Spielberg pushed to get his movie about the Washington Post’s fight to publish the Pentagon Papers out less than a year after he first read the script.  There’s also, of course, significant pre-end-of-year Oscar buzz surrounding the briskly-shot movie and its star-packed cast anchored by Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham and Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee. As Spielberg himself has said, “Sometimes bad things do happen twice,” making the telling of this “heroic story” all the more necessary.

Through December 31

This past spring, the Santa Monica Museum of Art got a new name, identity, and location when it became the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The new building, with 7,000 square feet of exhibition space in the heart of Downtown L.A.’s burgeoning arts district, hosts its inaugural exhibition through the end of the year—a monographic presentation of work by the self-taught artist Martin Ramirez, who made a remarkable collection of drawings and collages during his thirty-year internment within Northern California’s state psychiatric hospitals (following a too-quick schizophrenia diagnosis by doctors who didn’t speak Spanish). 1717 E. 7^th St.; theicala.org.

Through December 31

One of South America’s premier modern art collections makes a trip up to the American Southwest when the Museum of Modern Art, Sao Paolo brings its wide array of painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and more to the Phoenix Art Museum. A snapshot of the past two decades of contemporary Brazilian artists’ work, the show is conceived around five themes—The Body/The Social Body; Shifting Identities; Landscape Reimagined; Impossible Objects; and the Reinvention of the Monochrome—all united by the idea that even among diverse disciplines, there is no one “Brazilianness” that can be identified as a discrete trait of all the artists represented, and that they instead share a devotion to, and a devotion to subverting, a national art history.  1625 N. Central Ave.; phxart.org.