Charli XCX, Childish Gambino, Bikini Kill
The fall concert schedule kicks off with Afrofuturism and theatricality. The Afropunk Festival returns to Brooklyn, on Aug. 23-24, with the BLKTOPIA event headlined by Erykah Badu, and, days later, the renaissance man Donald Glover closes the curtain on his eclectic Childish Gambino project at Barclays Center (Aug. 26-27), alongside the star-child Willow. Early September keeps the hits coming with incomparable noise artists, sound designers, and genre distillers. At Radio City Music Hall, the Afro-R. & B. trailblazer Tems (Sept. 5) and the modern soul man Jon Batiste (Sept. 6-7) unleash voices that seem to filter history. Things amp up at Brooklyn Paramount with the reunited riot grrrls of Bikini Kill (Sept. 7-8) and the guitar heroics of St. Vincent (Sept. 10-11). The bilingual pop shape-shifter Omar Apollo stops at Forest Hills Stadium for the “God Say No” tour (Sept. 7), and the composer-titan Hanz Zimmer brings cinematic sounds to Madison Square Garden (Sept. 12).
As fall gets into full swing, M.S.G. opens its doors for the main characters of this year’s pop summer, allowing them to settle into their victory laps: Charli XCX christens the success and excess of “Brat,” alongside the “Rush” sensation Troye Sivan (Sept. 23); Sabrina Carpenter relishes the newfound glow brought on by her pair of catchy, chart-conquering bops, “Please Please Please” and “Espresso” (Sept. 29); and Billie Eilish restlessly navigates the curious sounds of her May album, “Hit Me Hard and Soft” (Oct. 16-18). The arena also hosts Vampire Weekend (Oct. 5-6), which is again in rare form on the recent album “Only God Was Above Us,” and remains an indie-rock lodestar even as the genre’s locus shifts.
Beyond the Garden, there is no shortage of artists in full bloom. The singer-songwriter Mk.gee goes lo-fi at Terminal 5, on Sept. 25, and the English d.j. and producer Nia Archives trots out dance music for introverts at Brooklyn Steel, on Oct. 11. Webster Hall spotlights Ravyn Lenae’s tinsel R. & B. (Oct. 8) and Empress Of’s incandescent pop (Oct. 15), as Bowery Ballroom invites the “tenderpunk” of Illuminati Hotties (Oct. 18) and the Music Hall of Williamsburg showcases the slacker rocker MJ Lenderman (Oct. 25-27). In an inspired union of artist, venue, and moment, BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House welcomes the experimentalist ANOHNI (Oct. 18-19) for her first shows with the Johnsons in a decade.—Sheldon Pearce
Art
Fallible Flesh, Orphism, Gold
This fall belongs to groups. Relatively few of the tentpole art exhibitions have an individual at their center, and several of the most intriguing ones celebrate movements that, for as many reasons as there are tourists at the Met, still lack for fame. Shaker furniture is world famous for its plain, proto-minimalist design; to begin to understand nineteenth-century Shaker drawing, picture the exact opposite. A blast of bright color and wiggly shapes, sometimes verging on the psychedelic, is coming to the American Folk Art Museum under the banner of “Anything But Simple: Gift Drawings and the Shaker Aesthetic” (opening Sept. 13).
The place of Siena in Italian art history may seem as shaky as Florence’s and Rome’s are secure. There’s a very simple explanation: in the middle of the fourteenth century, a plague picked off the city’s finest painters, including Duccio, Simone Martini, and Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti. Even if these Masters died just when things were getting interesting, they were crucial superspreaders of the Renaissance, as anyone who attends “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350,” at the Met (Oct. 13), will be able to confirm.
Nobody could mistake the theme of MOMA’s “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body” (Nov. 3) as neglected—it’s hiding in plain view. More than a hundred works, mainly from the permanent collection, depict strange, sacred, fallible flesh, with special attention paid to the ways in which bodies are sorted by race and gender. Look out for drawings by Christina Ramberg, coming off of an excellent retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Bhupen P. Khakhar’s ecstatic “Kali,” making its first appearance in these galleries.
Orphism, one of the most fascinating also-rans of European modernist painting, began, much like a rom-com, with the opposites-attract collision of hot, bright Fauvism and dun, jumbled Cubism. Its key figures, such as Robert and Sonia Delaunay and František Kupka, were prolifically inventive, but they lack, at least right now, the visibility of Picasso or Matisse. The Guggenheim’s “Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930” (Nov. 8) pays them some overdue attention.
Should the halos in Sienese painting whet your appetite for expensive, shiny, metal stuff, the Brooklyn Museum has just the thing. “Solid Gold” (Nov. 16) assembles more than four hundred works, including altarpieces, coins, designer clothing, sculptures, and jewelry. Is there an argument behind any of this—something about the perils of extraction, maybe? Does anybody need one to see this show? It’s gold.—Jackson Arn