CAA News Today
CWA Picks: Spring 2025
posted by CAA — March 13, 2025
Jordan Ann Craig (Northern Cheyenne), Sharp Tongue II, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 70 in., Tia Collection
The selection of exhibitions and other events featured in the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts Spring Picks emphasize capacious connections that both well-known artists and their lesser-known counterparts have forged among the materials and imagery of fine art, craft, and popular cultures. The works remind viewers of the many ways that historical and contemporary art, makers, and communities are linked, and these multifaceted connections point to the deeply relational ways in which art is conceptualized, produced, disseminated, experienced, and remembered.
UNITED STATES
Annet Couwenberg: Sewing Circles
Through May 10
Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA
Having published extensive research on such historically Dutch object types as ruffs and Delftware, Annet Couwenberg (b. 1950, The Netherlands) incorporates new technologies like laser cutting and 3D printing into the making of intricate origami and textile works that place these traditions in dialogue with the digital age.
Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)
Through August 10
Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH
Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light) explores the narrative artistic practice of Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero. Spanning the past decade of her work, this exhibition presents a thematic examination of Romero’s complex and layered images, which celebrate the multiplicity, beauty, and resilience of Native American and Indigenous experiences. Accompanied by a catalogue of the same title and debuting at the Hood Museum in January 2025, this is Romero’s first major solo exhibition.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective
Through June 1
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
This exhibition, the largest of Christina Ramberg’s (b. 1946) work to date, will illuminate the artist’s encyclopedia of imagery exploring experiences of gender, sexuality, and normative ideals of female beauty. Ramberg is usually associated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose fellowship of artists in the mid-1960s who made vibrant work inspired by popular culture, from comic books to low-budget films and store-front displays. However, her exquisitely detailed, kinky aesthetic has always set her apart. Ramberg consistently worked in pursuit of a “coherent visual statement”, honing in on feminized aspects of the body and its erotic trappings: hairstyles, hands, corsets, shoes.
Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble
April 12–September 28
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
The dynamic artist collective known as the Guerrilla Girls (est. 1985), who declared themselves “the conscience of the art world,” mark their fortieth anniversary in 2025. Drawn from NMWA’s extensive holdings of work by the Guerrilla Girls, this exhibition presents an enthralling visual timeline of the group’s progress and ever-expanding subject matter, including gender disparity in the arts as well as politics, the environment, and pop culture.
Jordan Ann Craig: My Way Home
Through June 29
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), Santa Fe
Known for her research-based, large-scale paintings, Jordan Ann Craig’s (Northern Cheyenne) A-i-R ’19 striking geometric abstractions and delicate dot drawings in My Way Home blend traditional influences with modern forms and dynamic explorations of color. Craig’s Hard–edge paintings draw inspiration from Northern Cheyenne and other Plains Indian art practices, including beadwork, hide painting (parfleche), weaving, and basketry patterns. Complementing these are her meditative dot drawings, which incorporate repetition and abstraction to evoke the landscapes of New Mexico, captured from memory. Her use of repetition and patterns also connect to deeper, contemplative art practices such as beading, stitching, and weaving.
The Laying of Hands
Through May 3
Southern Guild, Los Angeles
Contemporary South African artist Manyaku Mashilo’s first solo exhibition in the United States will feature a new series of multi-panel paintings exploring the artist’s emergence into womanhood and the matrilineal passage of indigenous knowledge.
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch
Through July 13
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn
As an Afro-Indigenous woman artist, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (American, 1890–1960) pursued her practice in the face of entrenched racism and sexism. Her sculpture is unmatched in its emotional nuance and technical virtuosity, and her story is a model of unshakable determination. I Will Not Bend an Inch—the first museum examination of this underrecognized sculptor—honors Prophet’s remarkable work and legacy with timely new scholarship. Twenty rare works and historical documentation reveal how she navigated an unwelcoming art world.
A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Art Making
April 25–September 28
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Art Making examines the organization’s rich history as a proponent of book arts for marginalized communities in the US, where documentation and critical analysis in the field are still largely devoted to white male artists. Through artists’ books, zines, printed materials, ephemera, and archival materials, the exhibition shows how Women’s Studio Workshop’s policies, programming, and operations have evolved over the last fifty years, creating a space where the conditions of art-making and institutional support help to build a sustainable and more equitable art ecosystem.
Transcending Tradition: Selection of Works from The Bennett Collection of Women Realists
Through May 11
Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI
Transcending Tradition celebrates women figurative realist painters who have changed the landscape for women in the arts. Featuring iconic paintings from The Bennett Collection, this exhibition highlights work by both historical and contemporary women painters, such as Artemesia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Elaine de Kooning, Andrea Kowch, Zoey Frank, Katie O’Hagan, and many more. Throughout history, women artists have faced resistance to creating art and had to overcome societal rules and traditions to follow their passion. To create art, women had to be transcenders–people who stepped beyond tradition and its limitations in order to find success as artists.
Tsedaye Makonnen—Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes
Ongoing
National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.
Tsedaye Makonnen is a Washington, D.C.-based Ethiopian American artist. In the seven sculptures featured in this exhibition, she explores the dehumanization of Black women, femme people and their communities, finding connections in form and themes related to the power of motherhood and sisterly solidarity. Her seven light tower sculptures are made up of 50 boxes, each named after an individual lost to violence, enshrining their names with love as a form of comfort and solidarity, with a sense of hope for a different future.
The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans
May 10–October 26
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Over half a century, American artist Minnie Evans (1892–1987) created thousands of radiant and kaleidoscopic works of art inspired by vivid dreams and local landscapes in her native Wilmington, North Carolina. These imaginative, intricately detailed drawings and paintings merged her own inner world—her religious beliefs, interest in mythology, and study of history—with the natural environment that surrounded her. This exhibition features 16 multimedia works by Evans—all on loan from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington—and contextualizes them with handwritten letters, postcards, and other ephemera to illuminate the artist’s complex and profoundly spiritual relationship to nature in her hometown.
MEXICO
Cinco décadas en espiral/Five Decades in a Spiral
April 5–October 19
MUAC, Mexico City
Magali Lara is one of the most representative visual artists in Mexico, noted for her contribution to feminist art in Latin America. Her work, which encompasses painting, drawing, animations, objects and graphics, is characterized by an expressive visual language, where writing, space, and the representation of the plant and body world explore the contemporary female experience. Through a combination of subtlety and humor, it addresses themes such as fragility, everyday violence, and erotic and existential aspects. Five Decades in a Spiral offers an inverted narrative process of Magali Lara’s career, moving backward in time.
CANADA
Lauren Crazybull: Wish you were here
Through November 2
Contemporary Calgary Gallery, Calgary
What is at stake when sacred Indigenous sites are commodified and commercialized within a tourism-based economy? What would it mean to access these sites today – both as Indigenous people and settlers – and to bear witness to the history of these lands? Lauren Crazybull: Wish you were here reflects on our relationship to the ancestral lands that we inhabit, looking at the ways in which these familial and ancient places are transformed into heritage tourism sites that are both an extension and a reflection of the slow violence that is etched into their core.
Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar
April 18–September 28
Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver
Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar is the first major presentation of Lucy Raven’s work in Vancouver and the artist’s largest exhibition in Canada to date. It features the world premiere of the new moving image installation Murderers Bar (2025), alongside previous, related works. Lucy Raven (b. 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist who works in installation, photography, video, drawing and sculpture to examine historic and contemporary representations and narratives of the American West. The works reveal the intermingling of nature and technology, the frequent interrelation of military and entertainment applications, and the impact of these forces on lived experience.
Rajni Perera and Marigold Santos: Efflorescence/The Way We Wake
Through April 6
Contemporary Calgary Gallery, Calgary
This duo exhibition showcases recent paintings and sculptures produced by each artist from 2021 to 2024 and begins with the collaborative piece after which the show is named. Efflorescence/The Way We Wake speaks to the artists’ diasporic experiences, research into their respective cultural heritages, art making, and motherhood.
SOUTH AMERICA
Adela Casacuberta
Through April 27
Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay
Mexico-born, Montevideo-based Adela Casacuberta (b. 1978) creates agglomerations of ceramic objects–some amorphous and porous, others resembling clamshells or fine dishware; some modest in scale, some wildly oversized; some left white, some tinted, and some glazed, whether with drips, splatters, or meticulously rendered china patterns–evoking the growth and deterioration of fungal structures (the mycelium) and providing a metaphor, Casacuberta writes, for mi mapa corporal fragmentado, “my fragmented body map.”
Fabril La Mirada
Through June 16
MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Argentine artist Lucrecia Lionti uses narratives of modern art to question them, transferring the languages of conceptual art to the popular imagination, and from abstract art to crafts. This exhibition presents textile installations and a series of works on paper made between 2012 and 2017. The artist locates her work at the convergence between art history and craft practices, critically addressing the relationship between abstraction and the autonomy of materials. Her work activates not only the link with the work historically associated with women, but also with subaltern political movements, through the use of precarious materials and social slogans.
TMWYGH: Text Me When You Get Home
April 5–May 4, 2025
apexart, São Paulo, Brazil
Text Me When You Get Home,” a phrase translated to every language spoken by women, symbolizes a shared vigilance born of necessity. This exhibition, TMWYGH, weaves together the intricate layers of female identity, resilience, and the inherent solidarity forged from collective survival and the pursuit of safety in community. It aims to highlight the invisible threads that bind women across cultures, elevating a universal sisterhood crafted for survival.
EUROPE & UK
Barbara Steveni: I Find Myself
Through June 8
Modern Art Oxford, Oxford
Uncover female stories and explore the social impact of art through the life and work of artist-activist Barbara Steveni. Steveni often worked outside the art gallery creating artworks that were multidisciplinary and research based, and often took place without its participants realizing. Visit I Find Myself to see some of her most influential works come back to life through restagings and artist interventions. With a career spanning seventy years, Steveni was influential on many artists of different generations. Explore the galleries where some of Steveni’s key collaborators and those influenced by her career create new commissions responding to her work.
Citra Sasmita: Into Eternal Land
Through April 21
Barbican Centre, London
The Barbican presents Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita’s first solo UK exhibition. Via painting, installation, embroidery and scent, take a sensory journey exploring ancestral memory, ritual and migration. Sasmita’s practice often engages with the Indonesian Kamasan painting technique. Dating from the fifteenth century, and traditionally practiced exclusively by men, Kamasan was used to narrate Hindu epics. Reclaiming this masculine practice, Sasmita is interested in dismantling misconceptions of Balinese culture and confronting its violent colonial past. Challenging gender hierarchies and reinventing mythologies, her protagonists are powerful women who populate a post-patriarchal world.
ASIA
In the beginning, Womankind was the sun – Weren’t we?
May 17–June 14, 2025
apexart, Tokyo
This exhibition critiques the Japanese state’s control of women’s bodies and sexuality from the modern period to the near future by showcasing works by three contemporary Japanese women artists. These pieces offer perspectives on the imperialist era, the present and the future socio-political landscape of Japan.
Lai Kwan-ting, Everyday Whispers (Hong Kong Artist Dialogue Series)
Through May 7
Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong
Part of a series celebrating artists who live and work in Hong Kong, this show presents ink-and-watercolor renderings of unselfconscious figures by Lai Kwan-ting (b. 1985) in the traditional naturalistic gongbi style, pairing them with an exhibition of works from Paris by Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir that forges especially strong links with Renoir’s depiction of subjects engaged in humble activities.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Ruth Patir: Motherland
Through September 13
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
A multi-episode video installation documents artist Ruth Patir’s journey to fertility preservation, told from a personal, funny, and touching perspective. Using advanced technology, she animates ancient fertility figurines from the region as avatars of herself and the women around her. Motherland raises questions about free choice, fertility control, and motherhood as a contemporary pursuit with ancient roots.
Shilpa Gupta: Lines of Flight
Through May 7
Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai
In the wide-ranging practice of Mumbai-based Indian artist Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976), represented here in works from 2006 to the present, the line insistently recurs, whether in the subdivisions of wooden boxes; in the delicate pencil outlines of individuals being removed from legislative meetings; in the cords of arrayed hanging microphones or light bulbs; or in the lettering of texts written in light or shown on flags, LED screens, or flapboards. These lines, and the works they compose or inhabit, ask the viewer to think about connections and divisions: ancestry, social networks, national borders, itineraries, and horizons.
AFRICA
One Must Be Seated
Through October 5
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa presents this solo exhibition by Ghanaian-American artist Rita Mawuena Benissan. Deeply rooted within her Ghanaian culture, Benissan’s practice focuses on reimagining the royal umbrella and stool, symbols of Akan chieftaincy. The exhibition explores the enstoolment of a prospective chief, akin to coronation; a call to take their rightful seat in the stool that has been chosen for them. Through tapestry, sculpture, photography and video, Benissan’s work highlights and celebrates the rich traditions of Ghanaian culture. She breathes new life into traditional craftsmanship while addressing themes of leadership, community, and femininity within Ghanaian society.
OCEANIA
Lee Bul: Untitled
Through August 1
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Lee Bul is a Korean artist and leading figure in the contemporary art world. Since the late 1980s, Bul’s installations and sculptures have drawn from the visual languages of science fiction, anime and manga to explore the social constructions of the human body. Bul creates monsters and cyborgs that deconstruct binaries across gender, nature and artifice. These hybrid creatures occupy a strange, but awe-inspiring alternative reality as they extend and reconfigure human and animal forms to produce new, unsettling beings. Produced for the NGV in 2004, Untitled is being shown at the Gallery for the first time in over a decade.
Nusra Latif Qureshi Birds in Far Pavilions
Through June 15
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
This is the first major solo exhibition of Melbourne-based artist Nusra Latif Qureshi, whose allegorical paintings offer space for reflection, dialogue and dreaming. Born in Pakistan, she trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, where she learnt the painting traditions brought to the Mughal courts from Persia in the 16th century. At once beautiful and challenging, Qureshi’s works bear witness to the indelible presence of the past and the persistence of trauma, dislocation and loss, coupled with the uncertainties of love. In her meticulously painted vignettes, solitary female figures float among fields of color, quietly asserting their presence.
Suzanna Vangelov: 2025 Solo Exhibition
June 5–June 26
M.Contemporary, Sydney
Light and shadow are integral to Suzanna Vangelov’s artistic practice. Working predominantly with abstract painting, she is influenced by the natural environment. Elements of construction are often evident in Vangelov’s surfaces. Working horizontally on a large scale, Vangelov cuts into swathes of canvas and reassembles the raw forms. Fabric creases and textures remain intact and provide a tactile surface. Secured with a mixture of pigment and rabbit skin glue or stitched together with thread, Vangelov relates these techniques to processes of transformation, healing and strengthening, and to craft practices traditionally considered to be “women’s work” like sewing, mending and binding.
CWA Picks: Winter 2024–25
posted by CAA — December 20, 2024
Chiharu Shiota, Between Worlds
Art, like memory, is rarely linear. It ebbs and flows, reshaping itself in the way we consider it. The exhibitions that were chosen for CWA Winter 2024–25 Picks ask us to engage in the act of looking both forward and back while reflecting on how the passage of time, shifting perspectives, and evolving experiences transform our understanding of the artists’ work. Through these acts of reconsideration and reevaluation, we notice that meaning is not static—it is shaped by context, perception, and the continuously shifting relationship between the artist and the audience.
UNITED STATES
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Through March 9
SFMOMA, San Francisco
This exhibition presents nearly fifty of Amy Sherald’s luminous paintings, including her iconic portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, poetic early works, and new works on view for the first time. Sherald’s artworks convey the quiet power of everyday people and invite viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of American identity.
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
February 8–July 2025
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
California-born, Berlin-based sound artist Christine Sun Kim’s playful, politically resonant infographics on paper, murals, sculptures, performances, and other works address her lived experience as a Deaf individual and speaker of American Sign Language. This first museum survey covers the artist’s works from 2011 to the present.
Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape: Dana Fritz
February 4–August 2
Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas
In this series by artist and University of Nebraska–Lincoln professor Dana Fritz (b. 1970), haunting black-and-white photographs present the remains of a spring-fed forest within an otherwise near-empty stretch of semiarid Nebraska prairie, a thirty-one-square-mile plot of trees hand-planted at the turn of the twentieth century. The images raise questions about historical and contemporary environmental efforts: their motivations (here, originally, the desire to create a timber industry from scratch), their failures, and, in the forest’s survival, their successes.
Goddess Tales
Through December 21
Apexart, New York
Goddess Tales reinterprets the function of ritual, techniques that can be tools for the diaspora to feel at home via shared cultural understandings. The exhibition highlights the need to reimagine these practices today. Included artists subvert patriarchal values and gender binaries to create their own future folklores centering on the goddess archetype. The exhibition also foregrounds Native practices that were historically banned because they were seen as threats to colonial power.
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
January 26–May 25
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs of the Western landscape and the female nude. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with that of her own relationship with her partner at the time, Betsy Odom, enriching our understanding of the couple from her contemporary queer and feminist perspective. Selections from Pictures for Charis appeared in Art Journal 83, no. 2.
Made of Memory
Through March 16
New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU), Los Gatos, CA
NUMU presents an exhibition of five women artists who explore concepts of memory as it pertain to generational and cultural experience, immigration and migration. Through various media, they explore their experience of inherited memories and unveil personal stories of family and heritage while inviting us all to consider the deeper themes that connect us with the past and with each other. Engaging with culturally significant materials and symbolism, these works examine the vicarious nature of memory and present implicit meanings carried in ancestral artifacts that are passed from one generation to the next. Each artist
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection
Through April 20
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, CA
Making Their Mark brings together more than seventy artworks by women artists from the Shah Garg Collection, illuminating transgenerational affinities, influences, and methodologies among pathbreaking artists from the postwar era to the present.
Pablita’s Wardrobe: Family & Fashion
Through April 12
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, NM
Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin, and Margarete Bagshaw—mother, daughter, and granddaughter—have a defining role in our understanding of painting traditions in New Mexico. All are tied to, and descended from, the Tewa people of Kha’p’o Owingeh, Santa Clara Pueblo. Each was independently known as one of the finest painters of her generation. Each struggled to be recognized in an artistic field still predominantly defined as Anglo and male. As women artists, defining and holding their own space was important. A means of achieving this was the careful cultivation of self-image while holding onto cultural values beyond the reach of a commercial art scene.
Tamara de Lempicka
Through February 9
de Young Museum, San Francisco
With works that exuded cool elegance and transgressive sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980) helped define Art Deco. Her paintings captured the glamor and vitality of postwar Paris and the cosmopolitan sheen of Hollywood celebrity. This exhibition—the first major museum retrospective of Lempicka in the United States—explores the artist’s distinctive style and unconventional life through four major chapters. More than one hundred works are on display and range from her post-Cubist work in 1920s Paris to her famous nudes and portraits to the melancholic still lifes and interiors of her final days in the United States and Mexico.
Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art
Ongoing
Brooklyn Museum, New York
How might American art be experienced at this moment? In honor of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary, a transformative reinstallation of the American Art galleries reorients the ways that the Brooklyn Museum exhibits—and audiences rediscover—this acclaimed collection. Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives act as throughlines in this vast presentation of more than four hundred works.
MEXICO
Myra Landau: Sensitive Geometry
Through February 23
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City
Born in Bucharest, Myra Landau (1926–2018) escaped Nazi persecution as a teenager and settled first in Río de Janiero, then in Mexico City (in the early 1970s) and Veracruz (1974–1994) before moving to Rome, Jerusalem, and finally the Netherlands. This exhibition brings much-needed attention to the geometric abstractions Landau produced during the nearly fifty years after her arrival in Mexico. Landau pastels, artists’ books, and works in other media reflect her relatively loose, free handling of abstract form, an approach of the type described by Brazilian critic Roberto Pontual as Geometria sensível.
SOUTH AMERICA
Circumambulatio: Anna Bella Geiger
Through July 27
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paolo, Brazil
The process piece Circumambulatio (in Latin, “a walk around”) by Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933) and four students has been reassembled here for the first time since its initial presentation in 1972. The group spent three months interrogating the notion of the center by making large-scale imprints in the sand of Rio de Janeiro’s Marapendi Reserve and by asking pedestrians what they thought of as the city’s center. The slides, photographs, experimental music, and handwritten records in this installation treat the theme of the center from scientific, psychoanalytic, philosophical, religious, visual, linguistic, and other perspectives.
EUROPE & UK
Chiharu Shiota: Between Worlds
Through April 20
Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey
Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) evokes Istanbul’s position as a port city at the crossroads of Asia and Europe—and her own position as an Osaka-born artist working in Berlin—in “Between Worlds,” her full-gallery installation of an enveloping net punctuated by suitcases. Humanizing the net are its red threads, which suggest blood vessels; the suitcases, too, stand in for people, signifying the memories and feelings we carry through space and time. The exhibition celebrates the hundredth year of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Japan.
Kamilla Szíj: The Path of the Sun
Through January 17
Vintage Galéria, Budapest, Hungary
In these new drawings, Hungarian artist Kamilla Szíj (b. 1957) uses gently applied yet arresting patterns of overlapping, interlocking, cascading ovals to capture the play of light through circular openings in the blinds of her home studio. The works are musings on the passage of time and on the often unaddressed centrality of the sun in human existence.
Nicola L.: I Am the Last Woman Object
Through December 29
Camden Art Centre, London
This is the first in-depth exploration of Nicola L.’s multilayered practice, which encompassed cosmology, environmental concerns, spirituality, mortality, sexuality, and political resistance, and is typically contextualized within Pop art, nouveau realism, feminism, and design. The show includes textile sculptures intended to be participatory as a political gesture—all people united in one skin, regardless of ethnicity or gender. Oversized and caricatured sculptures are imbued with political commentary on equality, collectivity, and place, particularly for women, within society. A series of works on bed sheets memorialize women whose lives ended in tragedy or violence, among them Eva Hesse, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, and Ulrike Meinhof.
ASIA
The Elemental You: Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi and Hajra Waheed
Through January 9
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India
In The Elemental You, works in a wide range of media by South Asian diaspora artists Simryn Gill (b. 1959), Neha Choksi (b. 1973), and Hajra Waheed (b. 1980) explore the geological and cultural relationship of human activity to the Earth’s landscapes. Addressing themes of deep time and of reconciling oneself to loss, the exhibition exposes humanity’s destructive interventions but also reveals the importance of explorations and chronicling by artists, the latter engagements constituting, in curator Akansha Rastogi’s view, acts of care.
Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.
Through January 19
Mori Art Museum, Roppongi, Tokyo
This first solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois in Japan in the twenty-first century takes place at the Mori Art Museum in the Roppongi Hills development in Tokyo, home to one of the artist’s enormous bronze mother spider sculptures, Maman (1999/2002). The show features paintings from Bourgeois’s first decade in New York, 1938–48, and puts Maman in conversation with other Bourgeois spiders as well as with other large and small-scale sculptures. Passages from the artist’s psychoanalytic writings appear in a new set of projections by Jenny Holzer, here with Japanese translations.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Zeinab Al Hashemi: Metempsychosis
Through January 15
Al Serkal Avenue, Dubai, UA
Metempsychosis is a reflection on transformation, where the raw materials of industry and history meet personal healing. This body of work represents Zeinab Alhashemi’s ongoing exploration of the elements that shape her artistic practice while also responding to the trauma of a life-altering car accident. Metal, now a permanent part of her body in the form of screws and hardware, is exposed in her sculptures as a metaphor for the structures that define contemporary existence. These elements highlight the impact of human intervention in reshaping the environment. At the heart of the exhibition are sculptures made from PVC Roman pillar molds, enveloped in camel hides, a material that symbolizes the tension between heritage and industrialism, death, and rebirth. The visible screw bolts serve as both functional elements and symbols of mechanization, echoing the hardware in her own body. These bolts, a recurring motif in Alhashemi’s work, ground her in the industrial era while transforming personal trauma into art.
AFRICA
Annamieke Engelbrecht: Between Worlds: Fragments of a Cosmic Reality
Through January 16
Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Between Worlds: Fragments of a Cosmic Reality by Engelbrecht invites you to set aside preconceived notions of reality and enter a space where familiar ideas dissolve into something vast and unknowable. Through abstract forms and shifting compositions, each work draws us into a liminal space where the finite and infinite converge, offering a sense of cosmic unity that transcends human constructs. Each artwork is a fragment of a larger whole, narrating the landscapes within and the distant strata beyond. These pieces present not a linear story but a layered experience—a vision of boundaries that define and connect us to an ever-expanding cosmos.
OCEANIA
Julia Trybala: Wide Eyed
Through January 25
Station Gallery, Sydney, Australia
In Wide Eyed, Julia Trybala continues to explore relationship dynamics through figurative painting. Her work, inspired by personal conversations with friends and family, captures an emotive response to the social dynamics of contemporary life while also referencing traditional Western painting practices. In this new body of work, the figures step into the spotlight becoming main characters in their own narrative rather than obscured amongst the setting. Hints of objects and landscapes emerge to ground the figures to time and place, suggesting an unfolding story.
CWA Picks: Fall 2024
posted by CAA — September 23, 2024
Cheryl Pagurek, Winter Garden interactive digital collage, 2023
The exhibitions and other events selected for the Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Fall Picks highlight the multitude of technologies–old and new–that artists have used to bring attention to overlooked communities including fellow creatives: groups sidelined for reasons of race, region, gender, sexuality, and other marginalizing factors and non-human entities with whom we share space.
UNITED STATES
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit
September 28–February 9
SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit presents the first West Coast retrospective on the work of this critical yet overlooked figure in the history of modern photography. Over the course of six decades, Kanaga championed the artistic value of photography and documented urgent social issues, from urban poverty and labor rights to racial terror and inequality. Her work remains as relevant today as it was during her own lifetime. Organized from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, this exhibition charts the artist’s vision, which spans pathbreaking photojournalism, modernist still lifes, and celebrated portraits of Black Americans.
Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968-72
Through December 1
The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
In 2023, the Block Museum acquired a group of photographs by folk musician and photographer Bev Grant. In the late 1960s and early 70s, Grant participated in and photographed left-wing and radical protests in and around New York City. She was a member of the group New York Radical Women and documented events associated with the group, as well as the Moratorium on the Vietnam War and other anti-war protests, pro-abortion rallies, and the Miss America Pageant protest. Her work presents a view of events reflecting broad political engagement and social justice demonstrations that defined the late 1960s and 70s in the US.
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Through January 19
Brooklyn Museum, NYC
Prolific Black social realist printmaker, sculptor, and painter Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), who was born in Washington, DC, but worked primarily in Mexico, devoted her oeuvre and activism to uplifting the Black and Mexican women and other working-class individuals who so often formed her subjects. The Brooklyn Museum show includes more than 150 works by Catlett.
Ja’Tovia Gary: The Giverny Suite
Through December 7
The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Ja’Tovia Gary uses documentary film and experimental video to address representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Gary was at the Terra Foundation for American Art’s residency program in Giverny, France during the summer of 2016 when several widely-publicized police-involved killings of African Americans took place in the United States. An immersive, three-channel film installation, The Giverny Suite, (2019) centers the voices and bodies of Black women in an experimental film essay that is a meditation on the interconnected themes of insecurity/safety, isolation/respite, autonomy, and love. Gary presents a complicated and nuanced portrait of the diversity and complexity of Black women’s relationship to physical and emotional security.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour
October 10–Spring 2025
MoMA PS1, NYC
The monumental mixed-media figural and abstract canvases of Zurich-based American artist Jasmine Gregory (b. 1987) draw from art history and popular culture to critique commodification, consumerism, and the systems of cultural patrimony, including the racism and misogyny that dwell therein.
Kandy G Lopez: (In)visible Threads
Through March 2
Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA
Kandy G Lopez, a multidisciplinary Afro-Caribbean American artist, critically engages with the complexities of identity and marginalization. Lopez’s fiber-based artworks serve as a powerful medium to navigate the intricacies of ancestry, race, class, and gender. As an artist, Lopez is driven by a desire to represent marginalized individuals who inspire and move her, constantly seeking challenges both materialistically and metaphorically. Her works are born from a deep-seated need to learn about her people and culture, fostering a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. This exhibition features her large-scale fiber works – portraits “painted” with yarn.
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature
Through January 5
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature celebrates the work of photographer Laura Aguilar (1959-2018) and her series of intimate portraits of nude, large-bodied women in natural settings. Nudes in Nature brings together nearly 60 photographic works from the most recognized of Aguilar’s series. Featured works depict the Southwestern region of the United States and highlight the inherent connections between nature and the female form. Exhibited in conversation, they encourage reflection on the ways female bodies are perceived within the natural world in comparison to how they are viewed in social and cultural spaces.
Through October 13
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
November 16–May 18, 2025
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
When she worked in her New York studio, said painter Martha Diamond (1944–2023), she was “thinking of infinity: to the time of religion, of history, … using shapes that have been significant to people for thousands of years.” A selection of Diamond’s drawings and monotypes appears in this exhibition alongside examples of her better-known large-scale abstracted city views and full abstractions in oil on canvas, all engaging with the notions of cyclicality and disruption that are central to the geological and anthropological theories of deep time.
Ming Smith: Wind Chime
Through January 5
The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH
Ming Smith: Wind Chime explores spirituality, movement, and feminism in a solo exhibition pairing recent work by the Columbus-raised artist Ming Smith with the photographic series that started her career in 1972. The centerpiece of the exhibit, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs using projection, marks an entirely new direction in her practice. Also on view are recent collages and color photographs—all set to an ambient soundscape created by Smith’s son, Mingus Murray. The exhibition also includes nearly 30 black-and-white photographs from Smith’s Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt over the span of three decades.
Nicole Eisenman: Fixed Crane for Madison Square Park
October 24–March 9
Madison Square Park Conservancy, NYC
Nicole Eisenman, best known for incisive works that capture the human experience in unexpected, grim, and humorous scenes, continues her innovation through sculpture with a new commission that destabilizes familiar heroic objects associated with exploration and advancement. On view in the park’s Oval Lawn, Eisenman offers visitors the opportunity to explore and engage with a toppled 100-foot-long industrial crane embellished with roughhewn sculptural “barnacles.” The artist draws inspiration from art history—referencing Duchamp’s readymades, Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and Rodin’s figures. Eisenman’s project lends humanity and humor to these references, challenging our notions of progress and achievement.
Rosalie D. Gagné: A Contemporary Alchemist
Through December 22
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY
Combining organic materials like glass, clay, and live plants with inorganic matter like plastics and computers, Montreal-based artist Rosalie D. Gagné produces large-scale sculptural installations that examine our perceptions of nature and technology and the interactions of organic systems with human-built ones, including simulation in the form of biomimicry. The Neuberger retrospective will include a re-creation of Gagné’s 2020 Artificial Kingdom IV comprising forty-five suspended, tentacled polyethylene forms that respond to viewer movements.
Steina: Playback
October 25–January 12
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
In fall 2024, the List Visual Arts Center will present the first solo exhibition in over a decade of Steina, the pathbreaking media artist whose work traverses video, music, and technology through a commitment to spontaneity and play. Steina’s nearly five decades of video work queries the possibilities of sound-image exchange, machine vision, and electronic abstraction. This exhibition will trace Steina’s creative practice from early collaborative works with Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics, machine vision, and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. The show seeks to both bring renewed recognition to the artist’s innovative vision and argue for her influence and relevance today as a younger generation of artists consider modes of art-making that resist easy commodification and question the place of technology and the human in relation to larger ecological and planetary concerns.
Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter
Through January 12
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Combining richly colored textiles, found objects, beads, and more, multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana) explores themes of history, identity, and belonging. The forces that lead certain stories to be remembered, or forgotten, are central to her art. Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean roots, Mattai weaves together personal narratives, collective mythologies, and colonial history. Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC. Large-scale textile installations, sculptures, collages, and paintings by Mattai are presented with a selection of related historical artworks from Europe and Southeast Asia.
MEXICO
Ana Gallardo: Tembló acá un delirio
Through December 15
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Since the end of the 90s, a time when globalization instrumentalized precarity and the feminization of labor beyond the scope of care and the domestic, the work of Ana Gallardo has problematized the privatization of feelings and social relationships through a perspective that centers the open wound of violence against women.
¡Hija de su madre! Una exposición de Mónica Mayer
Through September
Galería de Arte Contemporáneo de Xalapa, Mexico
The exhibition Her Mother’s Daughter! An exhibition of Mónica Mayer traces a fascinating journey through the artist’s different creative stages, encompassing more than one hundred historical and recent pieces created over the last five decades around themes such as family, motherhood, and gender. Since the 1970s, Mónica Mayer (Mexico, 1954) has held two central convictions: that the personal is political and that art is inseparable from life itself. In her works, she uses irony and performance to examine the evolution of family structures and question the persistence of exploitation and sexist norms affecting women.
Myra Landau: Sensitive Geometry
Through February 23
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Although Myra Landau’s work is substantial to the development of geometric abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century, her work is little known. This retrospective responds to the urgency to not only investigate and give visibility to female artists who have been left out of the hegemonic historiographic discourse, but also to understand their contributions to the history of geometric abstraction, particularly sensitive geometry, an approach that has been excluded by the art canon in Mexico.
CANADA
Cheryl Pagurek: Winter Garden
Through December 8
Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC
Using machine learning software, Winter Garden mirrors the presence and movement of viewers via a webcam, creating an ever-changing collage composed of motifs of lively indoor plants against a desolate winter landscape. The concept began from a series of still-life photographs depicting a small oasis of indoor plants that the artist tended to during the lockdown in the winter of 2021. As a woman in the cross-over area of art and tech, Pagurek aims to broaden approaches and themes presented in the field.
Lucy Qinnuayuak
Opening October 9
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON
One of the first artists to ever begin creating works at the print studio in Kinngait, Nunavut in the 1960s, Lucy Qinnuayuak’s colorful depictions of birds and scenes of domestic life bring to life the world as she saw it. In this exhibition of 20 works on paper, the viewer is invited to explore the evolution of Qinnuayuak’s style, from her concept drawings to stonecut prints, many of which include her much-loved owls.
SOUTH AMERICA
Cronotopías: Silvia Rivas
Through October 6
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia
Cronotopías is the first solo exhibition in Colombia dedicated to the work of Argentine artist Silvia Rivas. The exhibition explores the relationship between time and space through video installations, animations, and liminal environments. Rivas has developed extensive work in this field since the late 1990s and her work has been internationally recognized for its ability to create immersive and emotionally resonant experiences.
Desde la ventana: Ana Mercedes Hoyos. Una retrospective
Through October 6
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia
Through the Window: Ana Mercedes Hoyos. A Retrospective is the fourth exhibition of the artist at MAMBO, her second retrospective, and the most comprehensive to date, showcasing the entirety of Hoyos’ work (1942–2014), particularly the period between 1968 and 1984. This period constitutes one of the most important contributions of the artist to contemporary Colombian and Latin American art, during which she developed her unique form of pop, landscape, and abstraction.
Musa. Perspectivas femeninas en las Colecciones del MAMM y MAC Panamá
Through May 4
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia
This exhibition brings together works from the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panama and seeks to make visible the works of female artists who historically have had less prominence than their male counterparts.
EUROPE & UK
Against All Odds: Historical Women and New Algorithms
Through December 8
Statens Museum for Kunsts, Copenhagen, Denmark
During the years 1870–1910, a number of Nordic female artists achieved success against all odds. However, despite their success, they were later forgotten and quietly disappeared from history. What happened? We investigate this question, bring the artists back into the spotlight and explore how artificial intelligence can be used to understand and communicate history in new ways. All 24 artists in the exhibition have one thing in common: they left their Nordic home countries to pursue their artistic ambitions abroad in places such as Germany, Italy, France and Greece. There, they met other women in the same situation, forming networks across national borders. In the exhibition, you will encounter both spectacular artworks by the 24 artists and digital installations based on artificial intelligence. These installations use the women’s artworks, biographies and research to tell their collective story.
Gabriele Münter: the Great Expressionist Woman Painter
November 12–February 9
Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Spain
Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) was one of the founders of The Blue Rider [Der Blaue Reiter], the legendary group of Expressionist artists based in Munich. The exhibition, which includes more than one hundred paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, aims to reveal an artist who rebelled against the limits imposed on women of her day and who succeeded in becoming one of the most notable figures of German Expressionism in the early 20th century.
Hilary Heron: A Retrospective
Through October 28
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
Presenting the work of pioneering Dublin-born, modernist sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977), this is the first major retrospective exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964. Bringing together work from national and international collections, the exhibit includes Heron’s carvings, welding and castings. A master welder, Heron’s practice was highly unusual for an Irish artist, let alone a woman in the 1950s. Her work tactfully and skillfully broaches themes of gender, relationships, deep histories and religion through impressive, varied mediums including stone, lead, steel and wood. Hilary Heron: A Retrospective seeks to correct the ways that her work has been overlooked in Irish and international histories of modern sculpture.
Zanele Muholi
Through January 26
Tate Modern, London, UK
Zanele Muholi is one of the most acclaimed photographers working today, and their work has been exhibited all over the world. With over 260 photographs, this major exhibition presents the full breadth of their career to date. Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities.
ASIA
Tosh Basco: No Sky
Through October 15
Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China
The Filipino-American performance artist Tosh Basco (b. 1988), a nonbinary trans artist who for years has performed under the drag persona boychild, receives her first survey exhibition in No Sky. Her movement-based practice–informed by research into a wide range of experimental and improvisational performance styles, from Japanese Butoh to shamanism–finds expression in paintings created by impressing her body on the canvas after coating it with theatrical materials like clown paint, as well as in paintings and works on paper.
Akutagawa Saori: 100th Anniversary of Her Birth
Through October 20
Yokosuka Museum of Art, Yokosuka, Japan
Avant-garde painter and dye artist Akutagawa (Madokoro) Saori (1924–1966) exhibited extensively in her native Japan starting in 1954, when she won the Newcomer Award at the 4th Modern Art Association Exhibition in Tokyo, and twice while living in Los Angeles and New York in 1958–62. Akutagawa deployed bold forms and a vivid palette in abstractions and in works evoking expressive female figures (Woman series), monsters, and deities (Myths/FolkTales series). Her oeuvre reflects influences as varied as her travels in the Soviet Union and the 1955 Mexican Art Exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum. The Yokosuka Museum show, held in the centennial year of the artist’s birth, features works from the institution’s permanent collection.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Alia Ahmad: Aspects [مظاهر]
Through October 22
Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, UAE
Alia Ahmad is a Saudi Arabian painter (b.1996). Her color palette is influenced by an upbringing in Riyadh’s industrial/desert landscape. She seeks, in Aspects to peel back layers, exposing her personal vocabulary. Ahmad’s point of departure – the rapidly changing environment of her home city, Riyadh, where traditional ways of life exist alongside industrialization and modernization, where native plant life and cultural art forms thrive within one of the world’s fastest-growing urban settings. Ahmad’s segmented compositions, with their tonal contrasts, modulated colors, sinewy brushwork, and gestural forms provide a sense of constant growth.
Mouza Al Hamrani: Homepage
Through October 24
Tashkeel, Dubai, UAE
Mouza Al Hamrani is an Emirate illustrator and multimedia artist whose work is rooted in the pop culture of the GCC region. Her work explores the intricate and often exhausting reality of contemporary life, delving into themes of cultural inheritance and the human condition. Homepage reinterprets early “Khaleeji” cyberspace’s digital ephemera into a tangible, immersive experience. This exhibition bridges the virtual and physical worlds, capturing the impact of Khaleeji cyberspace as it entered modern culture. By bringing these digital relics into the real world, Al Hamrani celebrates the online anonymity afforded during a time when the GCC was wary of the World Wide Web. The exhibition explores questions such as: How did this foreign technology affect a conservative culture? What does it signify when digital artifacts are removed from their original context? How does viewing them outside their intended space change their meaning? How did people express themselves while remaining anonymous?
Zainab: The Weight of Snow on Her Chest
Through December 6
Gulf Photos Plus, Dubai, UAE
Zainab (b. 1998, Srinagar, Kashmir) is a visual artist based in Kashmir, India. Her engagements with photography are mostly personal, reflecting her experiences of surviving in a militarized region. The Weight of Snow on Her Chest renders a portrait of a home in Kashmir—moving through the constant sieges enforced in the region. Zainab’s photographs carry the everyday feelings of suffocation and anxiety in a place where both identity and existence are threatened by a colonizing power. The photographs are accompanied by verses that draw upon her role as a photojournalist documenting property destructions and encounters in other Kashmiri homes. The combination of image and text within this work skillfully recasts photographs as metaphors.
OCEANIA
Julie Rrap: Past Continuous
Through February 16
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia
A major figure in Australian contemporary art for over 40 years, Julie Rrap (b. 1950, Widjabul Wia-bal Country/Lismore) works across photography, video, performance, sculpture, and drawing to examine representations of the body in art and popular culture. Julie Rrap: Past Continuous features the artist’s landmark installation Disclosures: A Photographic Construct (1982), as well as newer works using the artist’s body 42 years later. Rrap uses the camera as a powerful feminist tool to give agency to the model (often herself) as both the object and subject of her works. In recent years, Rrap has reflected on the invisibility of the aging female body and how we look or look away when confronted by certain bodies.
CWA Picks: Spring 2024
posted by CAA — March 13, 2024
Rosana Paulino, Garça Branca from the Mangrove-Women series, 2023
The exhibitions, screenings, projects, and talks selected for CWA’s Spring Picks hint at the fleeting, ephemeral nature of memory and intimacy. The creatives highlighted here have left their mark, interpreting and imbuing their materials with meaning, often leaving behind evidence of their process.
UNITED STATES
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures
Through April 28
Art on Hulfish Gallery, Princeton, NJ
Princeton University Art Museum’s Art on Hulfish presents a survey of work by Christina Fernandez, a Los Angeles–based artist who has spent more than thirty years conducting a rich exploration of migration, labor, gender, and her Mexican American identity through photography. Whether staged or candid, Fernandez’s photographs record touch and mark making, engaging the medium’s distinct ability to convey surfaces—the surfaces of bodies, architecture, and the images themselves. Multiple Exposures traces the development of the artist’s work from the late 1980s to now.
April 4–August 4
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
Since 2015, the Zagreb-born Miletić has worked almost exclusively with hand-produced textiles across several ongoing series.
Her Materials series is comprised of works hand woven on a 1970s loom. As an extension of her formal training as a photographer, their idiosyncratic shapes and color-schemes are based on Miletić’s snapshots of temporary repairs to buildings and objects in urban public spaces. Though never exhibited, her photographs of responsive, ad-hoc constructions become templates for seemingly abstract textile pieces. Her meticulous and time-consuming use of hand work to document the ephemeral repairs reproduces this ethos of care and provides a slowness and material intimacy that Miletić found lacking in photography. Across her various series, Miletić also calls attention to the gendered associations of textile craft, subtly relating forms of historically undervalued labor, like the “women’s work” of weaving, to other narratives of social and economic struggle and the larger political forces that give shape to them.
Through June 15
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan
Jane Catlin’s career as an artist and teacher has lasted more than forty years. During that time she has produced figural paintings to semi-abstract images of biological forms and processes. Throughout her career, Catlin’s style and content have shifted due to the profound influence of her travels through Japan, Korea, Africa, and Canada. This overview reveals her fascination with biology, ecology, and the environment. The mysterious imagery that results from her visual meditations evokes our mutating world and serves as a reminder of both the beauty and fragility of nature. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see some of her most significant works presented together for the first time.
Joan Jonas: Good Night, Good Morning
March 17–July 6
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Joan Jonas creates meditations on bodies, space, time, and nature. As she has explained, “The performer sees herself as a medium: information passes through.” The most comprehensive retrospective of Jonas’s work in the United States, this exhibition provides new insights into the artist’s process, unprecedented access to archival materials, and fresh historical perspectives on Jonas’s work. Drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations, drawn from MoMA’s collection and institutions around the world, will trace the development of Jonas’s career, from works made in the 1960s and 1970s exploring the confluence of technology and ritual to more recent ones dealing with ecology and the landscape.
Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams
March 24–July 14
Baltimore Museum of Art
This fifty-year career retrospective celebrates one of the most significant artists of our time. Best known for her virtuosic use of beads and glass, Scott’s work across varying media beguiles viewers with beauty and humor while confronting racism, sexism, ecological devastation, and complex family dynamics. The exhibition includes more than 120 objects ranging from woven tapestries and soft sculpture from the 1970s and audacious performances and wearable art in the 1980s to sculptures of astonishing formal ingenuity and social force from the late 1970s to the present moment.
On April 11, 6:30–8:30 p.m. Joyce J. Scott will appear with longtime collaborator Kay Lawal-Muhammad, in a conversation moderated by Tracey Beale, BMA Director of Public Programs.
May 3–August 11
The Power Plant, Toronto
June Clark: Witness is the first survey in Canada of the Toronto-based artist June Clark, who, since the late 1960s, has developed a unique and groundbreaking practice spanning photo-based work, text, collage, installation, and sculptural assemblages. In this deeply personal exhibition, she explores how history, memory, and identity—both individual and collective—have established the familial and artistic lineages that shape her work.
Witness brings together four significant bodies of work that stretch from the 1990s to the present, many of them seen here for the first time. These include her iconic installations Family Secrets (1992) and Harlem Quilt (1997); a series of photo-based works from 2004 titled 42 Thursdays in Paris; Perseverance Suite (a new project); and Homage, a collection of sculptural assemblages that, in Clark’s words, “gave me permission to be the artist I am today.”
June Clark: Witness will be presented in tandem with another solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario titled June Clark: Unrequited Love.
Thorugh July 21
Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time presents the series Carving Out Time (2020–21), a life-size suite of woodcuts by the Arkansas-born, Baltimore-based artist. Unfolding over five scenes, the work depicts a day in Hobbs’s life with her husband and children. Hobbs shares the labor and intimacy of her private life in these prints, centering the negotiations she brokers daily to balance her manifold responsibilities—as a wife, mother, educator, and artist. The series is also a powerful statement about her influences and self-fashioning as an artist: references to paintings, sculptures, and prints by prominent artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Valerie Maynard, and Kerry James Marshall appear throughout. Carving Out Time is a part of Hobbs’s ongoing Salt of the Earth project, which she characterizes as “the personification of Black women as salt in relation to their role as preservers of family, culture and community.”
Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy
Through May 25
Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, La Jolla
Bodily Autonomy is Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest US solo exhibition to date. For the past fifteen years, McCarthy has worked in performance, video, installation, software, artificial intelligence, and other media to address how an algorithmically determined world impacts human relationships and social life. The show brings together two major series of works—Surrogate and Saliva—to examine the current state of bio-surveillance in times of rapid technological development and increased corporate and government surveillance.
Loie Hollowell: Dilation Stage
Through April 20
Pace Gallery, New York
Hollowell will present ten new pastel drawings that document the dilation stage of labor. Displayed sequentially on a rounded wall, these drawings feature depictions of Hollowell’s own pregnant abdomen, rendered to scale. Below each belly is a circle the exact size of the effaced cervix as it expands. The cervical “circles” at the bottom of each drawing seem to pulse as the series progresses, culminating in a blazing cadmium red.
In addition to these drawings, the exhibition will include a unique birthing bench that Hollowell created collaboratively with her husband, sculptor Brian Caverly. The birthing chair has been used by women in labor throughout millennia and the rendition here, which visitors are invited to sit on, is created not just for the birther, but also for the partner, midwife, doula, doctor, or any other witness to the transcendent journey of birth.
Dilation Stage will coincide with Hollowell’s first museum survey, on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through August 11.
Modern Art for an Old Tale: Fuku Akino’s Illustrations for “The Dwarf Pine Tree”
Through July 31
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
This exhibition presents more than twenty illustrations for The Dwarf Pine Tree by Fuku Akino (1908–2001), a Kyoto-based painter and teacher who was one of Japan’s most prominent woman artists during her lifetime. Published in 1963, The Dwarf Pine Tree is a modern retelling of a Japanese folk tale whose main character is a pine tree, an important symbol in Japanese culture representing love and endurance. The book is one of several collaborations between Akino, the author Betty Jean Lifton, and the editor Jean Karl, who promoted her vision to publish complex and culturally diverse stories for young American readers such as those written by Lifton, an American resident of Japan, and illustrated by Akino.
Through July 7
Brooklyn Museum, New York
“What does a Black person look like today in those places where Africans were once sold, a century and a half ago?” asks artist Nona Faustine (b. 1977). Using her own body, she interrogates this question in her photographic series White Shoes. Forty-two self-portraits show Faustine standing in sites across New York City, from Harlem to Wall Street to Prospect Park and beyond, that are built upon legacies of enslavement in New York—one of the last Northern states to abolish slavery. On her feet are a pair of sensible white pumps, which speak to the oppressions of colonialism and assimilation imposed on Black and Indigenous peoples locally, nationally, and globally. Otherwise nude, partially covered, or holding props, Faustine is at once vulnerable and commanding, standing in solidarity with ancestors whose bodies and memory form an archive in the land beneath her shoes. White Shoes is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and the first complete installation of this consequential series.
April 11–September 22
Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park, New York
Seed explores the personal and collective experiences that have influenced artist Rose B. Simpson’s life and work with a series of new large-scale sculptures appearing in two major public parks in Manhattan. In Madison Square Park, Simpson assembles seven monumental androgynous sentinel figures fabricated in steel with bronze adornments around a central sculpture of a young female figure emerging from the earth. In addition, two life-size bronze sentinels stand watch in Inwood Hill Park, a contested space in Native American history as the site where Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit “purchased” Manhattan Island from the Lenape in 1626. This marks Madison Square Park Conservancy’s first collaboration with another New York City public park.
Sarah Maldour: Tricontinental Cinema
Through April 28
Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus
Tricontinental Cinema explores Maldoror’s five-decade career as a maker of revolutionary cinema, tracing her involvement with Black liberation movements in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. Through an immersive, multisensory landscape of films, photographs, poetry, and letters, the exhibition invites you to experience the full scope of Maldoror’s radical practice.
A legendary filmmaker, Maldoror completed more than forty-five shorts, documentaries, and feature films before her death in 2020. Many of these works rewrite the rules of films focusing on resistance and rebellion, casting women as protagonists in movements dominated by men.
The exhibition includes several large-scale works by contemporary artists, including a monumental fiber sculpture by renowned Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. It also features a newly commissioned mural, painted on-site, from Paris-based artist Maya Mihindou. Framing Maldoror’s films and archives, these works form a constellation of Black and Afro-Surrealist practices while amplifying the continued resonance of her work today.
Through August 18
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
Always attuned to the built environment, Sze’s new site-specific installations across three gallery spaces integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture to create intimate systems that reference the rapidly changing world. This extraordinary new exhibition will blur the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, digital and material ultimately to question how objects acquire their meaning.
Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art: The 6000 Circle Project
Through April 6
Arc Project Gallery, San Francisco
In collaboration with The Calling (artists Yasmin Lambie-Simpson, Chantelle Goldthwaite, and Sheila Metcalf-Tobin) and the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), anyone interested in participating in this international art initiative is welcome! The 6000 Circle Project focuses on the circle as a symbol of balance and unity, a never-ending container of feminine energy and light. The Calling envisions 6000 circles created by a multitude of artists from around the globe. The 6000 Circle Project opens with more than 300 circles on the walls at Arc. Through the course of the exhibition, the public will be invited to make circles to add to the walls.
March 15, 6 –9 p.m.
MIT Bartos Theater, Cambridge, MA
Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter has led a lifelong fight for the rights of her people. But while launching an effort to establish an Indigenous forum at the European Union, Aaju finds herself facing a difficult, personal journey to mend her own wounds after the unexpected passing of her son. In this “powerful exploration of cultural trauma” (The Film Stage), director Lin Alluna follows alongside Aaju Peter as she strives to reclaim her language and identity after a lifetime of whitewashing and forced assimilation.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A discussion. Free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Panel: Vision is a Battlefield: Histories of Race and Media
March 26, 6:30 p.m.
Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
How is our basic perception of the world influenced by concepts of racial identity? Join moderator Claire Bishop, professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, for an illuminating discussion with the authors of four recent books exploring the intertwined histories of photography, media, and race. The panel features Brooke Belisle, associate professor of art at Stony Brook University, speaking on computational imagery and AI; Emilie Boone, assistant professor of art history at New York University, on Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee; Monica Huerta, assistant professor of English and American studies at Princeton University, on the aesthetics of racial capitalism; and Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, on the visual politics of whiteness.
April 18, 6:30 p.m.
Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Natalie Dykstra’s Chasing Beauty is the vivid and masterful biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums and a true American original. A wealthy Boston socialite at the turn of the twentieth century, Gardner was misunderstood for her eccentric lifestyle, but found her niche as a patron and friend to artists, including John Singer Sargent, who painted her portrait. Dykstra illuminates how the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir created with objects, displayed per Gardner’s wishes, including not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture. Dykstra speaks about the new book with Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.
MEXICO
War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture
Through June 30
Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Beatriz González is one of the most renowned living Latin American painters and one of the key references of her country’s culture. War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture is a new review of Beatriz González’s work. This is the first monographic exhibition of the painter’s work to be held in Mexico: it will offer both an overview of her work and an original investigation of her approach to the figure and gestures as a vehicle for emotional communication.
CANADA
un/tangling, un/covering, un/doing
Through March 17
Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia
From the moment of birth, hair takes on multifaceted meanings. Rooted within storytelling by families and communities, the politics of hair have been both intimately personal and profoundly social.
Artists from across Canada—including Audie Murray, Becky Bair, Wally Dion, Clare Yow, Sharon Norwood, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Karin Jones, Baljit Singh, Kiranjot Kaur, and Natasha Kianipour—offer reflections on how hair embodies the importance of culture. In this exhibition, artists employ compelling storytelling that express connections intertwined with familial teachings and their own informed experiences.
SOUTH AMERICA
March 22–June 10
Fundación Malba Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
This is the first comprehensive exhibition to be held outside Brazil of the work of Rosana Paulino (b. 1967). It includes works made between 1994 and 2024, and approaches her oeuvre from the concept of “Amefricana” as proposed by the Brazilian philosopher Lélia Gonzáles.
Paulino’s poetic interventions reinscribe the archives of the African diaspora in South America. They do so through constant dialogue between personal and historical archives, reconceptualizations of Brazilian art, interrogations of the matrixes of Western science, and through an approach to the circumstances of black women in Brazilian and Latin American societies. The exhibition includes five large installations, displayed together with drawings, engravings, and video organized into four conceptual hubs that are not separate zones, but rather axes of meaning that run through almost all of Paulino’s works.
ASIA
Jorinde Voigt and Xiyadie: 2.0
Through May 4
Gallery P21, Seoul
In 2.0 paper transcends its two-dimensional origins to become a silent narrator telling tales of delicacy, rebellion, and existence. The title of the show is tri-fold: the exhibition is the first in the gallery’s new “2.0” space; the show comprises the work of two artists; and the binary symbolism behind the numbers: 2, which represents existence and material, and 0, which represents absence or the subconscious. The overlap of these artists’ practices is predominantly material, but presenting them alongside one another brings out conceptual overlap, allowing alternate readings of each artist’s works. For both artists the fragility of each cut or fold becomes a poetic marker of time, capturing moments in the evolution of the artwork. Both artists, through their engagement with paper, participate in a form of archiving, be it of cultural narratives or conceptual explorations.
EUROPE & UK
May 17–August 11
Kunsthalle Basel
For her first institutional exhibition in Switzerland, the Swedish artist Ghislaine Leung (b. 1980) presents a new, site-specific project. Leung’s artistic practice is characterized by a rigorous, conceptual approach that often traces physical and economic circuits as much as institutional and societal mechanisms. The result are artworks—which she considers “events”—that emerge from her interest in the various structures underlying commodities, sites, and human relations.
Leung’s work is also on view in the Turner Prize 2023 Shortlist Exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, UK, and in a solo show at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, both through April 14.
March 20–June 9
Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) chose prints and drawings as her essential media, finding in them an independent visual language of great immediacy. This exhibition presents more than 110 works on paper, sculptures, and early paintings by the artist from the collection as well as from leading museums and Kollwitz collections. Surprising, unconventional works and selected sculptures will be presented together with loans from around Germany to highlight her independent pictorial language that was distinguished by an incisive immediacy to respond to the essential questions of humanity and address troubling topics.
A major Kollwitz retrospective exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, March 31 – July 20.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior
April 20–October 20
Venice Biennale
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, bringing together more than thirty works made over the past thirty-five years, including new site-specific drawings and glasswork created for this exhibition.
Collective Behavior traces Sikander’s ever-evolving explorations of gender, race, and colonial histories. The exhibition includes her breakthrough work The Scroll (1989–90), which established her position at the vanguard of the neo-miniature movement. Collective Behavior also debuts new works by Sikander that respond to the architecture and history of the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, the city of Venice, and global histories of trade and artistic exchange.
Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art
May 15–October 6
The Courtauld Project Space, London
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was one of the leading artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group, the avant-garde assembly of artists, writers, and philosophers who pioneered literary and artistic modernism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. This focused display will be the first devoted to the Courtauld’s significant collection of Bell’s work. It will include paintings such as her masterpiece A Conversation, as well as the bold, abstract textile designs she produced for the Omega Workshops, led by influential artist and critic Roger Fry in London, which aimed to abolish the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts and bring the arts into everyday life. The exhibition will highlight one of the most cutting-edge artists working in Britain in the early twentieth century.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Ana Mzzei: How to Disappear
Through April 20
Green Art Gallery, Dubai
How to Disappear marks the conclusion of Ana Mazzei’s ongoing project Love Scene Crime Scene, a three-part exhibition series centered around the fictional disappearance of a ballerina. In this latest installment presented by Green Art Gallery in Dubai, the Brazilian artist deepens the enigma by introducing a collection of bronze sculptures and oil paintings that leave the spectator wanting to play the role of investigator. Her sculptures, featuring half human, half animal creatures placed on raw concrete plinths, take center stage against an entire wall displaying approximately fifty paintings. The selection of paintings is divided into six themes: stage, vases, landscape, cages, beings, and the joker. Together, they form a vocabulary or alphabet of symbols put together in an attempt to illustrate how to disappear, if we ever wanted to.
Through December 6
Gulf Photo Plus Gallery, Dubai
Lara Chahine and Reem Falaknaz subvert a common documentary landscape in Swallow This! with works in photography and digital media. The exhibition explores the rampant pathologization of women’s bodies, where the politically absurd, visually surreal, and humorous converge. Drawing on the uncanny collective experience of womanhood, Chahine and Falaknaz veer into a kind of performance art, becoming the subjects of their own work at times.
Swallow This! weaves narratives where the clinical or scientific, the grotesque or bodily, the divine or occult coexist as contemporary reflections on a post-internet, Arab feminism. Both photographers seek to unpack “erotic capital,” where the strange is made familiar, and the familiar, strange.
OCEANIA
Through April 20
Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland
Material, action, trace. In myriad ways and with a diverse body of tools, Judy Millar applies and removes paint in order to explore embodied acts of making and how these enact particular forms of consciousness. With a palette made up of unexpected combinations of color, Millar often plays with the tension between background and foreground. Millar’s works are often large-scale, dwarfing those who encounter them, acting as a reminder that people belong to gestures and that painting can be a shift away from the self.
CWA Picks: Winter 2023/2024
posted by CAA — December 08, 2023
Diane O’Leary (Comanche), Watching the Weather, 1973, gouache on artist’s board, Great Plains Art Museum
The exhibitions selected for the CWA Winter Picks address issues of visibilities and invisibilities, particularly concerning artists coming from communities that have historically been marginalized for reasons that include race, ethnicity, region, religion, sexual identity, and gender. Works on view in the exhibitions on this list collectively evince a diverse set of creative practices, making visible the dynamic cultural production of groups that are often overlooked in art histories past and present. Artists represented include makers of previous eras whose works have been elided in accounts of their time periods as well as contemporary practitioners whose works grapple with continuing invisibilities—in the art world and beyond. The set of exhibitions on this Picks list underscore the critical importance of these artists and their works, insisting on their visibility.
Exhibitions have been organized by the regions where the hosting venues are located. These regions are by no means meant to be comprehensive and reflect Picks submissions by CWA members and colleagues. We are always looking to broaden the scope of these seasonal lists–please consider submitting exhibitions, lectures, grants, residencies, and other events and opportunities to future lists!
United States
Impressive: Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella
October 21, 2023–October 20, 2024
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Antoinette Bouzonnet-Stella’s ambitious series of 25 prints, The Entrance of the Emperor Sigismond into Mantua (engraved 1675; published 1787), reproduces an Italian Renaissance stucco frieze designed by Giulio Romano (1499 to 1546) for the Palazzo Te in Mantua. This exhibition examines the context in which Bouzonnet-Stella (1641 to 1676) created these engravings, commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, advisor to King Louis XIV. Her work at the French court was part of Colbert’s plan as vice-protecteur of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture to promote a “French style,” based in classical art. Exquisitely executed, the engravings by Bouzonnet-Stella demonstrate how the power of classical art was borrowed from antiquity, employed in 16th-century Italy, and sought by the 17th-century French court
October 21, 2023–January 28, 2024
SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA
The first retrospective of Pacita Abad features more than 40 works. Over a 32-year career, the prolific artist made a vast number of artworks that traverse a diversity of subjects—from colorful masks to intricately constructed underwater scenes to abstract compositions—revealing visual, material, and conceptual concerns that still resonate today. Abad’s embrace of quilting and other kinds of needlework confounded critics, who dismissed her works as naïve, childlike, and ethnic. In fact, Abad’s multifaceted practice articulated a powerful material politics, reflecting her vision of a nonhierarchical world. This exhibition celebrates Abad’s bold self-determination, commitment to social justice, and radical artistic experimentation.
Colonial Colonnade by Doris Bittar
November 9, 2023–June 1, 2024
Arab American National Museum, Dearborn, MI
Pattern, repetition, and text are the foundation for Doris Bittar’s installation and other works in her first solo exhibition at the Arab American National Museum. Living in San Diego, Bittar draws inspiration from the Arab, Indigenous, and Latinx communities there. Colonial Colonnade is a visual, textual, aural, architectural, and cognitively rich space for interdisciplinary explorations of the Arabic language. In this site-specific installation, Bittar explores how colonization has affected language, among other aspects of culture, while creating a space for reflection and free movement.
Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!
November 17, 2023–March 31, 2024
The Jewish Museum, NYC
Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte! Is the first survey exhibition in the United States of Marta Minujín, a defining force of Latin American art whose trajectory intersected with the major artistic developments of the postwar period. Arte! Arte! Arte! includes nearly 100 works organized to reflect Minujín’s bold experimentation over six decades, charting Minujín’s influential career in Buenos Aires, Paris, New York, and Washington, DC. Works include her pioneering, mattress-based soft sculptures; fluorescent large-scale paintings; psychedelic drawings and performances; and vintage film footage. Ephemeral works—happenings, participatory installations, and monumental public art—are presented through rarely seen photographs, video, and other documentation.
January 27–March 16, 2024
The Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA
(Re)FOCUS: Then and Now is an exhibition in two parts that aims to celebrate a historically significant 1974 feminist show that was called FOCUS by 1) bringing artworks created by the original 81 participating artists together in one space and 2) presenting new & recent work/s by Philadelphia-based artists who are exploring ideas of gender identity, representation, marginalization, social justice, violence, equality, and empowerment in their contemporary studio practices.
Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale
September 15, 2023–January 7, 2024
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale invites viewers to consider how space, size, scale, and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists. Inspired by a 2021 exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), Taking Space features 10 works from that original show alongside 13 works from the collection of the Montclair Art Museum. Together these works reveal the varied approaches of women artists for whom space is a critical feature of their work.
October 12, 2023–January 14, 2024
New Museum, NYC
Judy Chicago: Herstory spans Judy Chicago’s sixty-year career to encompass the full breadth of the artist’s contributions across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking. Expanding the boundaries of a traditional museum survey, the exhibition places six decades of Chicago’s work in dialogue with work by other women across centuries in a unique Fourth Floor installation. Entitled The City of Ladies, this exhibition-within-the-exhibition features artworks and archival materials from over eighty artists, writers, and thinkers.
Fruits of Labor– Reframing Motherhood and Artmaking
November 3–December 23, 2023
apexart, NYC
Fruits of Labor– Reframing Motherhood and Artmaking brings together women artists unpacking the vastly personal yet universal experience of mothering. Encompassing painting, sculpture, video, installation, photography and text-based work, the exhibition evokes motherhood thematically, but also explores the countless tangential ways in which this subject appears in artists’ practice, as a mode of work and being. The artists ultimately make a compelling argument: it is not motherhood that is in conflict with artmaking but the prevailing narratives defining both caregiving and artistic expression.
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800
October 1, 2023–January 7, 2024
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400-1800 aims to correct the broadly held but mistaken belief that women artists in Europe were rare and less talented than their male counterparts. With over 200 works, from royal portraits and devotional sculptures to embroidered objects, tapestries, costumes, wax sculptures, metalwork, ceramics, graphic arts, furniture, and more, Making Her Mark features objects from the 15th to 18th centuries that reflect the multifaceted and often overlooked ways that women contributed to the visual arts of Europe.
May 27, 2023–January 1, 2024
National Museum of the American Indian, Bowling Green, NY
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch is the first major retrospective of Shelley Niro’s paintings, photographs, mixed-media works, and films. Accessible, humorous, and peppered with references to popular culture, Niro’s art delves into the timeless cultural knowledge and generational histories of her Six Nations Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community; addresses stereotypes associated with Native people, particularly women; and ultimately provides purpose and healing.
Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers
June 25, 2023–January 7, 2024
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
Working mainly in portraiture, Caddo Nation painter and sculptor Raven Halfmoon fuses Caddo pottery traditions (a history of making mostly done by women) with populist gestures—often tagging her work (a reference to Caddo tattooing). Her palette is specific and matches both the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with—reds (after the Oklahoma soil and the blood of murdered Indigenous women), blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and creams. Her works reference stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically her feminist lineage and the power of its complexities.
No Rest: The Epidemic of Stolen Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2Spirits
January 12, 2023–Extended through 2024
Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, Evanston, IL
The exhibition features 35 original works from 12 collaborating Indigenous artists and draws attention to the crimes perpetrated against Native women and two-spirit individuals in the United States. Rather than present the impacted individuals and communities as statistics, the Mitchell Museum employs an interdisciplinary approach that includes visual stories, interactive content, educational programming, community events, and an awareness campaign to humanize and honor the lives of Indigenous women and two-spirit individuals.
From Paintbrushes to Camera Lenses: Creative Women of the Great Plains, Part II
July 25–December 16, 2023
Great Plains Art Museum, Lincoln, NE
In fall 2018, the Great Plains Art Museum mounted From Paintbrushes to Camera Lenses: Creative Women of the Great Plains, an exhibition that highlighted exceptional work created by female artists from the museum’s permanent collection. To complement other female-focused exhibitions on view during fall 2023 (see below), the museum is organizing part two of this exhibition to showcase many recent acquisitions and other works from the collection by women that were not shown in the first installation.
Supporting Indigenous Sisters: An International Print Exchange
July 25–December 16, 2023
Great Plains Art Museum, Lincoln, NE
Supporting Indigenous Sisters is a print portfolio exchange involving sixteen artists from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds. The portfolio was created to help begin conversations on many levels about missing and murdered Indigenous women. Each artist was asked to reach into their own experiences as a female walking this earth. The images from all of the artists advocate for change and for voicing this dark present history.
Threads & Trails: Contemplations of Our Herstories
July 25–December 16, 2023
Great Plains Art Museum, Lincoln, NE
Threads & Trails: Contemplations of Our Herstories is a collaborative exhibition created by five female-identifying artists who connect their personal histories to the conquest of the American West and Indigenous dispossession.
November 3–December 23, 2023
DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL
Natani Notah is a Diné (Navajo) interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores contemporary Native American existence through the lens of Indigenous Feminism. In Thoughts on Being Thrown, Notah connects maps, bodies, and objects to reflect on the larger social issues that repeatedly intersect the lives of women and men alike.
Form, Growth, and Variation: The Experimental Prints of Helen Phillips
November 16, 2023–February 24, 2024
Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College, Beloit, WI
California-born sculptress Helen Phillips found printmaking in the 1930s at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris. Though she remained primarily a sculptor, this exhibition chronicles her body of intaglio work—and it is the first solo exhibition of Phillips’s work in the US. From her early, transformative years in Paris, through her move to New York in 1940—when she became a mother—and back to Paris in the 1950s where she produced daring work in color, the prints showcase the artist’s constant affinity to three dimensions, growth in printmaking, and experimentation in line and color.
Nancy Baker Cahill: Through Lines
October 28, 2023–May 19, 2024
Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA
This solo exhibition highlights the artist’s interdisciplinary artistic practice and the role of emerging technologies in contemporary art. This mid-career survey exhibition is Baker Cahill’s first solo museum show. Expanding upon her background in traditional media, the artist redefines the possibilities of drawing in contemporary art by using augmented reality to transform her graphite-on-paper drawings into immersive environments.
Public Works: Art by Elizabeth Olds
February 3–July 14, 2024
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Elizabeth Olds portrayed Depression-era conditions in the United States and was part of a group that promoted the affordability and accessibility of silkscreen printing. This first critically-engaged solo exhibition of her work considers Olds’s lifelong advocacy—from her depictions of labor conditions in the US mining and meatpacking industries, to her satirical social commentary, to her illustrated books for children.
Jen Everett: Could you dim the lights?
February 1–October 5, 2024
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL
Artist and educator Jen Everett remixes images of herself in conversation with materials she collects to talk about Black life, kinship, and collective gathering. Could you dim the lights? at Krannert Art Museum is her first solo museum presentation. Revisiting childhood photographs, Everett deeply engages rupture—upheaval too familiar in Black life—and recognizes the private, intimate aspects of vernacular images, creatively negotiating ways to maintain their insistent, quiet power. The show is comprised of photographs, moving images, and sound. Inspired partly by her 2022 residency on Fire Island, the exhibition surfaces Black lesbians and queer presence in Black vernacular archives.
Sketch: Contemporary Artists in Conversation with Emily Grace Hanks
October 25–December 6, 2023
Doris Ulmann Galleries at Berea College, Berea, KY
In the summer of 2023, Sara Olshansky and Esther Sitver partook in a residency at the Doris Ulmann Galleries during which they studied the work and personal papers of Emily Grace Hanks (American, 1886-1962) housed in the Berea College Art Collection—and then created a series of artworks in response to what they found. Seeking to “activate” Hanks’ historical artworks for a contemporary, largely undergraduate audience, this exhibition explores the connections that can be made between artists across time and raises questions about what it means to leave an artistic “legacy.” What can we find when we look to the past? What can an archive reveal… and what does it leave obscured? And how can we fill in the gaps?
Deborah Butterfield: P.S. These are not horses
October 1, 2023–June 24, 2024
Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at University of California, Davis, CA
For more than 50 years, Deborah Butterfield has explored the horse—both its form and presence. And yet, P.S. These are not horses encourages viewers to understand her sculpture as more than representations of the equine world. Taken from the closing line of a poem by Butterfield’s mentor, William T. Wiley, the title emphasizes the sculptor’s commitment to abstraction and her profound investment in material experimentation. The exhibition surveys Butterfield’s career from her most recent wildfire sculptures to rare early works including ceramics made while studying at UC Davis.
Shiva Ahmadi: Strands of Resilience
January 28–May 6, 2024
Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at University of California, Davis, CA
Shiva Ahmadi uses painting as a form of storytelling, combining luminous colors and mystical beings with violent imagery to draw attention to global issues of migration, war, and brutality against marginalized peoples. Ahmadi’s first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast of new works continues her exploration of alternate worlds where women have agency beyond the binary of the beautiful victim or ugly villain. Through her experimentation with the medium of watercolor, Ahmadi probes what lies hidden beneath the surface of the stories we are told, from ancient myths and childhood memories to the modern news cycle.
Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy
February 10–June 9, 2024
Sidney and Louis Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Samia Halaby is a pioneer in twentieth-century abstraction and computer-generated art. Born in Jerusalem, Halaby trained as a painter, earning an MFA at Indiana University, where she joined the faculty before becoming the first woman associate professor at the Yale School of Art. This exhibition is her first American survey, featuring more than forty paintings, prints, drawings, and computer-generated works of art from across six decades. The exhibition presents a chronological development of her artistic approach to abstraction, examining formal and thematic relationships across bodies of work.
Yvette Molina: A Promise to the Leaves
October 21, 2023–September 7, 2025
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
Yvette Molina: A Promise to the Leaves transforms the mezzanine into a museum community space with new art and designs in a site-specific and evolving installation centered around the four elements—earth, air, water, fire—and a fifth constituent, the cosmos. Molina encourages us to consider care as entangled within circles of life—care for one another, whether human or non-human, is care for ourselves and for all. Throughout the exhibition’s two years, Molina is inviting other artists to present their work in the space, regularly re-energizing the installation’s balance between comfort and provocation.
Mary Bauermeister: Fuck the System
November 11, 2023–January 20, 2024
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, NYC
Mary Bauermeister: Fuck the System is a memorial exhibition and the first solo show to open since the artist’s death in March 2023. It surveys the diverse, interdisciplinary oeuvre of Bauermeister’s seven-decade career. A child of totalitarian Germany who rejected the Constructivist mandates of the country’s postwar schools of art and design, Bauermeister’s art and worldview were always explicitly anti-tradition. Taking its title from a significant assemblage piece, Fuck the System features works from each of her major series. The artist’s fascination with paradox and its potential to reveal fissures in the foundations of entrenched conventions is apparent throughout her work, which both embodies and challenges contradictory binaries.
Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence
October 4, 2023–January 11, 2024
Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College, CUNY, Flushing, NY
Godwin-Ternbach Museum is pleased to announce Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence, a spectacular overview of a new form of bead art, the ndwango (“cloth”), developed by by women with a shared vision working together in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The plain black fabric that serves as a foundation for the Ubuhle women’s exquisite beadwork is reminiscent of the Xhosa headscarves and skirts that many of them wore growing up. By stretching this textile like a canvas, the artists use colored Czech glass beads to transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form of remarkable visual depth. Using skills handed down through generations and working in their own unique style “directly from the soul” (in the words of artist Ntombephi Ntobela), the women create abstract as well as figurative subjects for their ndwangos.
Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus
October 13, 2023—January 21, 2024
Japan Society Gallery, New York
This exhibition will be the first to fully explore the essential role of Japanese women in Fluxus, a movement instigated in the 1960s that helped contemporary artists define new modes of artistic expression. Near the 60th anniversary of the movement’s founding, this exhibition highlights the contributions of four pioneering Japanese artists — Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), Yoko Ono (1933–), Takako Saito (1929–), and Mieko Shiomi (1938–) — and contextualizes their role within Fluxus and the broader artistic movements of the 1960s and beyond.
The exhibition is organized by Midori Yoshimoto, Guest Curator, and Tiffany Lambert, Curator and Interim Director, Japan Society, with Ayaka Iida, Assistant Curator, Japan Society.
Canada
Being and Belonging: Contemporary Women Artists from the Islamic World and Beyond
July 1, 2023–January 7, 2024
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON
Being and Belonging: Contemporary Women Artists from the Islamic World and Beyond is a bold exhibition exploring the defining issues of our time from the perspective of 25 women artists from or connected to the broader Islamic world spanning across West Africa to Southeast Asia or living in diaspora. Deftly interrogating themes of identity, power, sexuality, and home, this exhibition resists simple stereotypes with outstanding artworks from both emerging and well-established artists.
Swapnaa Tamhane: No Surface is Neutral
September 23–November 26, 2023
Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC
Swapnaa Tamhane’s work challenges the colonial hierarchical separation between art, craft, and design in India. Her artworks include sweeping textile installations where space is transformed by fabric, colour, and light, and works on handmade paper.
Diaspora Dialogues: Archiving the Familiar
October 4, 2023–December 2, 2023
Sur Gallery, Toronto, ON
This exhibition establishes an ongoing dialogue with Latin American diaspora women who are working within the Canadian settler-nation-state, using archives as a strategy of inquiry and resistance. Through dialogic meaning-making processes, these artworks highlight how our social, and political situatedness in the world intersects with memory and power. The artworks in Diaspora Dialogues make visible the living political memory of the diaspora through diverse media art languages, manifesting affective approaches to the archive as a site of interpretation, contestation, and negotiation.
Mexico
Coordenadas móviles: Redes de colaboración entre mujeres en la cultura y el arte (1975-1985)
September 30, 2023–January 14, 2024
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico
This exhibition responds to the urgency of developing new methodologies to rethink the history of recent art in Mexico and the place of women in it. The focus is on collaborative networks that built a creative field forged in differences, dialogue, conflict, complicity, vulnerability, rumor, secrecy, silences, frustration, and friendship, particularly between the years 1975 and 1985. Coordenadas móviles gathers research based on conversations with artists and the study of archives and personal and institutional collections in the country. It also includes commissioned pieces that perform contemporary readings of some historical materials.
Poéticas feministas: Ana Victoria Jiménez / Alicia D’Amico
November 30, 2023–February 11, 2024
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico
The exhibition puts in dialogue the documentary and artistic work of photographers Victoria Jiménez and Alicia D’Amico, protagonists of the feminist movement in their respective countries—Mexico and Argentina—who, through a look that ranges from the intimate and poetic to the social, incorporated into their photographic work their social commitment with a feminist aesthetic. The exhibition shows the scope and contacts between Latin American women’s movements, while at the same time situating the trajectory of these two artists in the context of Latin American art.
Europe + The UK
September 16, 2023–January 18, 2024
CO Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Since the 1960s, the US documentarian and portraitist Mary Ellen Mark has advocated for people on the fringes of society. This show features five iconic projects created by the photographer in the 1970s and 1980s. Ward 81 collects her documentation of women in a state mental institution in Oregon, Falkland Road is a reportage on sex workers in Mumbai, Mother Teresa’s Missions of Charity is an eponymous exploration both of the woman and her mission, Indian Circus reproduces a series depicting traveling circus families, and Mark’s award-winning Streetwise project and subsequent Tiny: Streetwise Revisited show her ongoing commitment to telling the story of Erin Charles.
Women In Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990
November 8, 2023–April 7, 2024
Tate Britain, London, UK
This exhibition is the first of its kind – a major survey of feminist art by over 100 women artists working in the UK between 1970 and 1990. It explores how networks of women used radical ideas and rebellious methods to make an invaluable contribution to British culture. Through their creative practices, women’s liberation was forged against the backdrop of extreme social, economic and political change.
September 20, 2023–January 22, 2024
Pinault Collection, Paris, France
This exhibition at the Pinault Collection in France features works on rice paper made by noted feminist artist Mira Schor in the second half of the 1970s, along with a recent painting made in 2022. With a fragile, solitary presence, masks and dresses are covered with highly personal, handwritten texts about the artist’s dreams and her interpretations of them, along with reflections on the Holocaust, to which she lost some of her family, and political writings. “In these works on paper, all that remains of the body are traces of its active, thoughtful character: writing,” notes Schor, “which thus complicates women’s legibility.”
MIDDLE EAST
Afra Al Dhaheri – Give Your Weight to the Ground
November 14, 2023–January 5, 2024
Green Art Gallery, Dubai
This solo exhibition of Afra Al Dhaheri’s work focuses on the concept of grounding: slowing down and observing; becoming conscious of our surroundings; and absorbing and processing. The exhibition is the accumulation of material language developed over time through practice and inquiry. It is layered with the artist’s research into the relation between materiality and the body (a tangible construct), as well as with labour, time, inherited ideologies, and the study of inhabited spaces (intangible constructs).
Roshanak Aminelahi: Faces of Resilience
November 14, 2023–January 2, 2024
Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
In this solo show, Iranian artist Roshanak Aminelahi illuminates diverse stories of women who navigated a male-dominated society and persevered through adversity. Using pointillism and color-blocking techniques, Roshanak captures the distinctive features of these remarkable women. Despite the faceless portrayal, the women are still identifiable, and the portraits symbolize feminine energy and stand as a testament to societal advancement forged through years of resilience and fight for equality by women worldwide.
CWA Picks: Fall 2023
posted by CAA — October 23, 2023
The exhibitions chosen for the Fall CWA Picks collectively highlight the power of art to engage with medium and memory in diverse and thought-provoking ways. Each exhibition showcases artists who engage with the concept of memory, whether by challenging societal norms and values, redefining perfection, or addressing historical and environmental legacies. Together, these exhibitions emphasize the power of art to shape our understanding of the past and how it shapes our present.
September 7–21 November, 2023
HackelBury, London
Medium and Memory is an exhibition featuring conversations between eight diverse artists whose work centers on memory in its various forms. The work in the show aims to challenge the act of forgetting and harness the potential of art to aesthetically transform traumatic historical legacies, including war, famine, genocide, colonialism, deindustrialization, and the memory-altering effects of the digital age.
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology
October 5, 2023–January 14, 2024
Barbican Art Gallery, London
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology showcases the work of nearly fifty international women and gender nonconforming artists. Through film, photography, and installations, the exhibition delves into the interconnectedness of gender and ecology, advocating for a just and equitable society where both people and the environment are valued and treated fairly.
The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University: Three Decades, 1986–2017
September 13–December 22, 2023
Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ
In 1986, Rutgers Distinguished Professor Emerita Judith K. Brodsky established the Brodsky Center to provide opportunities for women, gender nonconforming artists, and artists of color who were marginalized in the art world. This center, originally focused on print and papermaking, evolved into a hub of innovation, addressing contemporary concerns such as race, gender, climate, language, and immigration. The exhibition showcases artworks emblematic of the Brodsky Center’s mission to introduce new narratives into American culture and is organized thematically into sections reflecting its impact on art and society.
Alison Croney Moses: The Habits of Reframing
September 1–October 22, 2023
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston
The Habits of Reframing is a solo exhibition by Boston-based artist Alison Croney Moses, featuring two new series of wooden artworks. These pieces encourage viewers to consider their ability to shape their sense of self and their understanding of the world, while also challenging societal values, celebrating imperfections, and redefining perfection through sensory engagement with the materials and forms used by the artist.
September 16–November 26, 2023
The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago
In the fall of 2023, the Renaissance Society will host the first solo exhibition of Beirut-based artist Dala Nasser, featuring a site-specific commission designed to fill the Ren’s expansive exhibition space. Nasser’s interdisciplinary approach encompasses painting, performance, and film, with a focus on abstraction and alternative image-making. Her artwork, created by directly engaging with landscapes, offers a unique perspective by highlighting the marks of political and environmental erosion and toxicity, exploring themes of ecological decay, historical narratives, and the consequences of capitalist and colonial practices. The exhibition centers on the Adonis River, where Nasser produced her paintings inside the cave associated with the mythical figure Adonis, utilizing locally sourced materials, and incorporating three-dimensional spatial environments that evoke the Adonis temple and its surroundings.
Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist
July 7–October 29, 2023
San José Museum of Art
This is the first solo museum presentation of the work of Yolanda López, the pathbreaking Chicana artist and activist whose career in California spanned five decades. The exhibition presents a compendium of López’s work from the 1970s and 1980s, when she created an influential body of paintings, drawings, and collages that investigate and reimagine representations of women within Chicano/a/x culture and society at large.
Yolanda M. López: Women’s Work is Never Done
August 31–November 12, 2023
Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco
Curated by her archivist, Angelica Rodriguez, and son, Rio Yañez, this body of work reveals López’s inquisitive approach to artistic mediums and the feminist and political sensibilities that emerged in her practice from life experiences, research, and community activism. Artworks include drawings from her youth, protest designs, preparatory studies for her iconic 1978 Guadalupe series, photography, collage, and xerox art from 1980 and 1990s Mission, prints from her Women’s Work is Never Done series, as well as her final reflective works. This body of work reveals López’s inquisitive approach to artistic mediums and the feminist and political sensibilities that emerged in her practice from life experiences, research, and community activism.
Hung Liu: Capp Street Project, 1988
September 16–November 18, 2023
Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco
This collection of paintings and artifacts re-imagines the 1988 exhibition Hung Liu: Resident Alien, the culmination of Liu’s two-month artist residency at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, presented at the downtown Monadnock Building, a sprawling, under-construction office space that offered Hung Liu a liberating and engaging opportunity. The original exhibition, which took place just five years after Liu immigrated to the US from her native China, was instrumental in bringing her work to the attention of the larger art world. The multimedia installation—composed of paintings, wall drawings, Chinese calligraphy, ceremonial objects from Chinatown, a pile of abacuses, and small mounds of fortune cookies—addressed the history and complexities of the immigrant experience, looking specifically at the history of Chinese immigration to San Francisco from the Gold Rush of 1849 to her own immigration to the US in 1984 and her subsequent status as a “resident alien.” This exploration was both a central theme of the 1988 show, and a focus Liu would pursue for the rest of her career.
June 30–December 10, 2023
SFMOMA, San Francisco
Chinese-born artist Hung Liu (1948–2021) created richly layered portraits and installations that interweave memory and history. This exhibition features works from SFMOMA’s collection, from her most significant paintings made in China during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution between 1966–76 to those created in the US during the 1990s and 2000s. Intimate and large-scale works blend landscapes and images from historical and family photographs with dripping brushwork. Together, they reveal Liu’s enduring commitment to “be a witness of my time” as she elevated her subjects to “mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting.”
August 26–November 4, 2023
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco
Born in Mexico and based in California’s Napa Valley, Arleene Correa Valencia creates paintings, textiles, and drawings that reflect on patterns of migration and family separation. Her recent work is inspired by the letters that she wrote to her father as a child, during a period when her father had migrated to the United States while Correa Valencia remained in Mexico. Correa Valencia draws on her family’s archives and correspondence to craft a visual language that considers the politics of visibility and the complexities of undocumented immigration.
Mika Rottenberg: Spaghetti Blockchain
May 18–October 22, 2023
Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco
New York–based Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires) employs a disarmingly absurd sense of humor to confront the paradoxes of global capitalism and uncover the surprising ways in which we are all connected. This exhibition presents Rottenberg’s most prominent videos, installations, and sculptures of the past decade in the first museum survey of her work ever to be presented on the West Coast. Explore a collection of vividly colorful video installations and kinetic sculptures that uncover the surreal qualities of mass production and consumption.
Women In Revolt! Art And Activism In The UK 1970-1990
November 8, 2023– April 7, 2024
Tate Britain, London
This exhibition is a major survey of feminist art by over 100 women artists working in the UK. It explores how networks of women used radical ideas and rebellious methods to make an invaluable contribution to British culture. Through their creative practices, women’s liberation was forged against the backdrop of extreme social, economic, and political change.
Women in Revolt! brings together a wide variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, and photography. It explores and reflects on issues and events such as: the British Women’s Liberation movement, the fight for legal changes impacting women, maternal and domestic experiences, punk, and independent music, Greenham Common and the peace movement, the visibility of Black and South Asian Women Artists, Section 28 and the AIDS pandemic.
The show celebrates the work and lived experiences of a hugely diverse group of women. Many who, frequently working outside mainstream art institutions, have largely been left out of artistic narratives. Women in Revolt! presents many of these works for the first time since the 1970s.
The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity
September 13, 2023–January 21, 2024
REDCAT, Los Angeles
In 1970, artist Judy Chicago pioneered a feminist model for art and education with her students at Fresno State College. Chicago was invited by Miriam Schapiro to collaboratively expand this program at CalArts in 1971, where they would go on to develop radical and now influential forms of art, pedagogy, and performance. The program began a cycle of collective activity with the contribution of numerous students, faculty, artists, and designers, many of whom are now considered pivotal artists in feminist art history.
This exhibition acknowledges the many generations of women, trans, queer, and non-binary faculty, students, and artists at CalArts who have stewarded these histories through teaching, archiving, and experimenting. Engaging with these initial moments, while also drawing connections with subsequent contributions, The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity brings together these histories through its diverse feminisms, gender theories, and transfeminismos. The exhibition gathers materials from institutional and personal archives, joining them with new responsive artworks by CalArts alumni ak jenkins, Andrea Bowers, Gala Porras-Kim, and Suzanne Lacy. The show includes a special presentation of The Performing Archive by Leslie Labowitz Starus and Lacy. The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity presents an ever-growing feminist contribution to art and pedagogy with a multiplicity of voices, contexts, and identities, with an intergenerational collective of scholars, artists, activists, and curators contributing to the research, memory, syllabi, and artworks on display.
Joanne Leonard, Artemesia’s Suzanna and the Elders and Men Conspiring, 2006
(From Medium & Memory)
CWA Picks: Summer 2023
posted by CAA — May 31, 2023
CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) curates a seasonal list of must-see exhibitions. The CWA Summer 2023 picks highlight the rich contributions of women-identifying African, Latinx, and Indigenous artists, bringing their voices to the forefront. These artists explore the legacies of their respective mediums and their enduring significance in contemporary art. Unafraid to tackle pressing social issues, their works offer a powerful lens through which to examine themes of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. By amplifying marginalized perspectives, these exhibitions provoke meaningful conversations and challenge existing narratives in the art world.
Tender Loving Care
July 22, 2023–July 28, 2025
Museum of Fine Art, Boston
This exhibition explores the theme of care through contemporary art. The act of creating and appreciating art is a form of care, and the exhibition highlights how artists address this concept through their materials, ideas, and processes. The exhibition showcases around 100 works from the museum’s collection, organized into five thematic groupings: threads, thresholds, rest, vibrant matter, and adoration. Examples of care in art can be seen in Gisela Charfauros McDaniel’s portrait of her mother, Nick Cave’s Sound Suit, and textiles and fiber art by Sheila Hicks, Howardena Pindell, and Jane Sauer. Through these works and others, visitors are invited to consider how care can inspire new models for living and feeling in the present and the future.
Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art as a Tool for Combatting Inequity and Injustice
August 25–September 30, 2023
Buffalo NY: Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo Arts Studio + Buffalo Game Space
In collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Michigan State University, and SUNY Buffalo’s Amatryx Lab & Studio, this exhibition features a range of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Buffalo-based artists and creatives to center marginalized experiences of the pandemic and social justice concerns.
Black Venus
Through August 20, 2023
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
BLACK VENUS, curated by Aindrea Emelife is an exhibition that surveys the legacy of Black Women in visual culture – from fetishized, colonial-era caricatures to the present-day reclamation of the rich complexity of Black womanhood by 18 artists (of numerous nationalities and with birth years spanning 1942 to 1997). This exhibition is a celebration of Black beauty, an investigation into the many faces of Black femininity and the shaping of Black women in the public consciousness – then and now.
In BLACK VENUS, archival depictions of Baartman and other historical Black women pair with the vibrant, narrative portraiture by some of today’s most influential Black image-makers whose work deals with layered narratives of Black femininity.
This exhibition reckons with difficult visual histories. It features some themes and images that are derogatory and many that are empowering. Sensitive visitors should be aware that several artists in the exhibition employ nudity and sexual imagery to explore their ideas.
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archeology of Memory
Through August 13, 2023
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley
Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains’s important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally.
Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest
Through July 9, 2023
Bard Graduate Center, NYC
Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest invites you to explore the world of Navajo weaving. This dynamic gallery and online experience presents never-before-seen textiles created by Diné artists. These historic blankets, garments, and rugs from the American Museum of Natural History are situated alongside contemporary works by Diné weavers and visual artists, such as Barbara Teller Ornelas and Lynda Teller Pete. Shaped by the Loom highlights seasonal cycles that guide the harvesting of dye plants, the cosmologies that inform a weaver’s work, and the songs, stories, and prayers that are woven into every piece. The items in the exhibition will be accompanied by artist interviews, interactive storytelling, and stunning panoramic views of the Navajo Nation. Shaped by the Loom elevates the voices of Indigenous artists and makers to express the cultural legacy and continued vibrancy of weaving traditions in the American Southwest.
The Figure, Reclaimed
A Renaissance of the female body in visual culture
July 5–August 4, 2023
Carolla Arts Exhibition Center, Missouri State University
Throughout the history of visual culture, figurative painting has been regarded as one of the highest forms of Western art. Dazzling displays of hyper-realistic anatomical mastery and expansive narrative scenes depicting multiple figures through complex perspectives dominated as the pinnacle of art-making for centuries. While the artists of these historic images were all white male painters, it was the female body that was often leveraged for these narratives. Further, female artists were also excluded from painting these historic scenes and denied access to nude models to even attempt to study the art of figural painting.
The Figure, Reclaimed, seeks to celebrate and explore the Renaissance of the female body and the female figurative painter in visual culture. Through the work of Aneka Ingold and Livia Xandersmith, this exhibition explores how female figurative painters have combined the traditional art of figurative painting with contemporary, stylized approaches to redefine and expand upon what it means to be a figurative painter, ruminate on the female experience, and how representations of the female body are consumed.
As women face losing bodily autonomy in today’s contemporary society, what does it mean to be a female figurative painter in today’s context? What stories must be told on the scale of figurative painting about what it means to identify as a woman today? Why is the female body a contested landscape, and why does this form hold a sense of home base for visual culture? Is it the embodied connection to humanity and life?
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Too Bright to See
Perez Art Museum, Miami
Through January 7, 2024
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (b. 1987) is a filmmaker and artist whose work blends narrative and documentary traditions to explore stories and experiences of Black women in the Americas.
Hunt-Ehrlich’s experimental narrative artwork Too Bright to See (Part I) draws on her extensive research on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial and feminist activist from Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude movement during the first half of the 20th century. Roussi-Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Breton. However, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, until recently much of her work was overlooked.
Too Bright to See (Part I) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts.
Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now
Barbican Art Gallery, London
June 21–September 3, 2023
Opening 22 June 2023, Barbican Art Gallery is proud to present the first major solo exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems in a UK institution. Widely considered to be one of the most influential American artists working today, Weems (b.1953) is celebrated for her exploration of cultural identity, power structures, desire, and social justice through a body of work that develops questioning narratives around race, gender, history, class and their systems of representation.
Highlighting her remarkably diverse and radical practice, this survey brings together an outstanding selection of photographic series, films, and installations spanning over three decades, many of which have never been seen before in the UK. Presenting the development of her unique poetic gaze and formal language from the early 1990s to the present day, this exhibition reflects on Weems’s pioneering career. On display are works from her early iconic Kitchen Table Series (1990) which explores how power dynamics are articulated in the domestic sphere and the potential of the home as a space for resistance, to her acclaimed series Roaming (2006) and Museums (2016) where Weems’s muse confronts architecture as the materialisation of political and cultural power. Her oeuvre challenges dominant ideologies and historical narratives created by and disseminated within science, architecture, photography, and mass media.
The exhibition is accompanied by Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now, the first publication devoted to the artist’s writings. It will highlight Weems’s influence as an intellectual, reflecting the dual nature of her career as an artist and activist. A public programme of events, including a programme of films in Barbican cinema, will also run throughout the course of the exhibition.
Gio Swaby: Fresh Up
Through July 3, 2023
Art Institute of Chicago
Gio Swaby is a multidisciplinary artist whose textile-based practice explores the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. Her embroidered portraits are anchored in the connections she forges with her subjects: each portrait begins with a photo shoot in which her sitters are captured in a moment of self-awareness and empowerment. In her textile interpretations, Swaby foregrounds their hair, clothing, and jewelry—highlighting and celebrating the subjects’ use of fashion as unapologetic self-definition and self-expression.
This exhibition—Swaby’s first solo museum show—brings together seven of Swaby’s series from 2017 through 2021, such as My Hands Are Clean, Love Letters, and Pretty Pretty, along with approximately 15 new works, including her largest work to date, a commission for the US Embassy in Nassau, Bahamas. The title of the show, Fresh Up, developed with the artist, is a Bahamian phrase often used as a way to compliment someone’s style or confident way of being. Swaby has remarked, “It holds a lot of positivity and joy. It also speaks to the tone of confidence and power that I want to create with these works. I love that it is a way to form connections through a simple phrase.”
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Phantom Limb
Through July 8, 2023
Altman Seigel, San Francisco
Altman Siegel proudly presents a historical exhibition of works from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series, which was created in the 1980s. At the time that it was created, the Phantom Limb collages illustrated the more insidious impacts of mass media and technology on women’s bodies. Created prior to the advent of Photoshop, this body of work borrows from the visual language of advertising, fusing female forms with technology. Seductively posed women merge with cameras, TV screens, and electrical plugs, pointing to ways in which gendered mass media representations shape and distort women’s self-image. At once alluring and disarming, these black-and-white photo collages grapple with the absorption of female identity into modern media at a time when the depths of this issue were just beginning to be explored.
In this series Hershman Leeson was already musing on the implications of surveillance when she describes cameras as a “capture system”:
“This photographic series…suggests that we are not only being watched by surveillance systems, but that ‘capture’ systems are endemic to our society. The series questions individual complicity in a system that simultaneously steals images and warps personal identity. The seductive alliance of surveillance and capture inspired the sexually provocative positions in the anthropomorphic images.” – Lynn Hershman Leeson
My Hands Are Clean 4, 2017 Gio Swaby. Courtesy of Claire Oliver and Ian Rubinstein. © Gio Swaby
CWA Picks: Winter 2023
posted by CAA — January 12, 2023
The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Winter Picks include exhibitions and events that explore language through form, abstraction, the archive, and narrative. The artists included in this season’s picks investigate language and how it shapes our vision and experience of the world. They also reveal the systems of power embedded within language and how it often acts as a mediator.
Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Until August 31, 2023
Put It This Way includes almost a century of work from fifty women and nonbinary artists in the Hirshhorn’s collection. The exhibit presents a range of media from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular emphasis on the Hirshhorn’s mission to highlight global voices.
Caroline Kent
Until January 28, 2023
Figge Art Museum
Language and invented vocabulary made up of geometric shapes, marks, and colors are central to Caroline Kent’s practice. Her work challenges the viewer to consider how the indecipherable might play a role in their understanding of the world.
The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America
Until March 4, 2023
Conference: “The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America”
Friday January 27, 2023
This two-day conference at Harvard Radcliffe Institute will explore how Roe v. Wade and its aftermath shaped the United States and the world beyond it for nearly half a century. The conference will include lectures and panel discussions from experts in constitutional law, historians, health policy advocates, and other scholars. An accompanying exhibition curated by Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law, will also be on view through March 4, 2023.
Until April 23, 2023
re:collection includes the work of five artists—Ali Cherri, Nicole Cherubini, Lily Cox-Richard, NIC Kay, and SANGREE—whose work reconsiders the Tufts University collection. Specifically, the artists explored about 200 objects from the fifth century BCE to the seventh century CE, including early Greco-Roman ceramics, stone carvings, pre-Columbian vessels, jewelry, and textiles. The exhibition has a range of approaches, from performance and installation to sculpture and painting.
Valiant postures/A ruse! A ruse!
2021
Acrylic on Belgian linen, acrylic on walnut
63 × 74 × 2 1/2 in
CWA Picks: Fall 2022
posted by CAA — November 17, 2022
Toni Pepe, Mothercraft, Archival Inkjet, 28″ x 35″, 2020
This fall, there are wonderful exhibitions devoted to the work of women artists. We have linked a few of them here through the theme of care and care’s connection to the urgent crisis in which legal protections for women’s bodily autonomy have been taken away right before our eyes. The artwork featured in the exhibitions below does not explicitly take up abortion bans and restrictions. Still, they provoke viewers to see women with complexity, and not as natural resources of care. With their inventive imagery, forms, materials, and ideas, each artist implicitly asserts that women’s bodies are not transparent containers for other people’s purposes. Rather, the artists create images that are layered sites, dense with women’s singular desires to imagine and place themselves in worlds of their own making.
Toni Pepe: An Ordinary Devotion
Danforth Art Museum, Framingham State University, Massachusetts
October 8, 2022—January 29, 2022
Artifacts of caregiving and its complications, these archival inkjet prints by Toni Pepe explore the tension between the analytic mind and the tenderness of touch that maternal care encompasses. Each image depicts an ordinary scene in which care is needed or expressed, but Pepe’s textual markings and imprints index care’s contradictions instead of suffusing them in the aura of idealization and satisfaction. Pepe suggests motherhood is equally about violence and abuse as it is about devotion and nurturing. All are ordinary, but when framed together in such intimate proximity, these dimensions of maternal care trouble societal expectations about what a woman should sacrifice in the name of motherhood and challenge the accepted visual tropes of a woman as a caregiver.
52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
June 6, 2022—January 8, 2023
Proving that we can both revisit feminist art’s dynamic past and witness its ongoing pertinence in an equally dynamic and transformative future, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone celebrates the fifty-first anniversary of the historic exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, curated by Lucy R. Lippard and presented at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 1971. 52 Artists showcases work by the artists included in the original 1971 exhibition alongside a new roster of twenty-six female-identifying or nonbinary emerging artists, tracking the evolution of feminist art practices over the past five decades. 52 Artists encompasses the entirety of the museum (approx. 8,000 sq. ft)—the first exhibition to do so in The Aldrich’s new building, which was inaugurated in 2004. The result is an exhilarating array of styles, forms, mediums, and subjects, which creates an archive of feminist expression that is, according to curator Amy Smith-Stewart, “inclusive, expansive, elastic, and free.”
Lippard’s original 1971 exhibition at The Aldrich was one of the first institutional responses to the issue of women artists’ invisibility in museums and galleries. More specifically, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists offered a rejoinder to the protests by the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee (founded by Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, Faith Ringgold, and Lucy Lippard) over the absence of women in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1970 Sculpture Annual. Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists opened the floodgates to a host of other feminist exhibitions throughout the 1970s, signaling Lippard’s emergence as a visionary feminist curator and critic and marking the debut of many groundbreaking artists. Lippard viewed curating this landmark exhibition as an activist gesture. As she explains in the catalog, “I took on this show because I knew there were many women artists whose work was as good or better than that currently being shown, but who, because of the prevailingly discriminatory policies of most galleries and museums, can rarely get anyone to visit their studios or take them as seriously as their male counterparts.” With this radical exhibition, Lippard arguably founded the feminist curatorial practice in this country, and 52 Artists underscores its ongoing influence.
Amy Sherald. The World We Make
Hauser & Wirth, London
October 12—December 23, 2022
Amy Sherald is acclaimed for her paintings of Black Americans that have become landmarks in the grand tradition of social portraiture—a tradition that for too long excluded the Black men, women, families, and artists whose lives have often placed to the side of public narratives even as they have been inextricable from them. Quiet and still but also bright with vibrant, dynamic colors, Sherald’s portraits place her subjects in everyday settings that ultimately elude viewers’ full grasp but also immortalize their depth and significance. In this new body of work on display at Hauser & Wirth, she continues confronting the Western canon of portrait painting by drawing from iconic images and deploying them to carefully reveal the worlds Black people have made for themselves.
Carolee Schneeman, Body Politics
Barbican Centre, London
September 8, 2022—January 8, 2023
Carolee Schneemann, Body Politics is the first survey in the UK of the work of American artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) and the first major exhibition since her death in 2019. Tracing Schneemann’s diverse, transgressive, and interdisciplinary work over six decades, the show celebrates a radical and pioneering artist who remains a feminist icon and point of reference for many contemporary artists and thinkers. Body Politics reveals that Schneeman addressed urgent topics from sexual expression and the objectification of women to human and animal suffering and the violence of war. It shows that she explored the precarity of existence and art as a model of care. Spanning the range of Schneeman’s output and exhibiting rarely seen archival material that includes scores, sketches, scrapbooks, programs, and costumes, Carolee Schneeman, Body Politics positions her as one of the most relevant, provocative, and inspiring artists of the last century.
Mickalene Thomas: Avec Monet
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
October 13, 2022—February 6th, 2023
Mickalene Thomas has created a distinct visual vocabulary of Black erotica, Black sexuality, and Black queer aesthetics centered around joy and pleasure. This exhibition highlights the sensuous depths of her art historical imagination and the intimacy of her collaborations with the past. On display in Mickalene Thomas: Avec Monet are three new large-scale collages, one monumental painting, and an immersive site-specific installation featuring her 2016 video/sculpture Me As Muse. These works deepen our view of Thomas’ vivid, celebratory style and attest to her time as an artist-in-residence at Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France, in 2011.
Martine Syms: She Mad Season One
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
July 2, 2022—February 12, 2023
This solo exhibition features Martine Syms’s She Mad series. This ongoing conceptual project takes the form of a semi-autobiographical sitcom about a young woman trying to make it as an artist in Los Angeles. Drawing from a range of sources, including early cinema, television shows, advertisements, and internet memes, Syms, known for her humor and biting social commentary, dissects the ways Black experiences are mediated on television, in film, and online. The show marks the US premiere of the fifth and newest episode of She Mad—and the first time that the series is shown in its entirety.
Martine Syms: She Mad Season One situates the five video artworks within an immersive sculptural installation constructed from exposed aluminum studs painted in the artist’s signature shade of purple—a reference to both the chroma key backdrops frequently used in post-production of films and television shows and Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. Like the exposed walls of the installation, Syms’s videos lay bare the structures that shape the images and videos we consume.
Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers at Magnum
International Center of Photography, New York
September 29, 2022—January 9, 2023
Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum presents pivotal projects in the careers of 12 contemporary women photographers of Magnum Photos, the pioneering photography collective. With a title inspired by Magnum co-founder Robert Capa’s quote “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” Close Enough presents more than 150 works, including Sabiha Çimen’s explorations of the experiences of young Islamic women in Turkey; Alessandra Sanguinetti’s long-term collaboration with the rural Argentinean cousins Guille and Belinda as they evolve from childhood into adulthood; Bieke Depoorter’s multiyear, multiform project Agata, about a young club performer in Paris; and Susan Meiselas’ work with women who sought refuge from domestic violence in the Midlands, UK. The exhibition also creates space for the photographers to narrate their creative journeys, providing vantage points into the extraordinary relationships they create within global situations, communities, and individual subjects.
Silvia Kolbowski: Who will save us?
Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland
September 4, 2022–November 27, 2022
In the two exhibition spaces at Kunsthaus Glarus, Silvia Kolbowski presents the video work Who will save us? (2022) and Missing Asher (2019) The work Who will save us? was created especially for this exhibition. The video is a “mashup” of two films: Metropolis (1927, directed by Fritz Lang) and THX 1138 (1971, directed by George Lucas), both futuristic science-fiction films about life in hierarchical two-class societies. Distilling over three hours of film into a 14-minute film loop, Kolbowski’s experimental compilation of footage creates a new narrative that resonates with the prescience of the original films but relates to the present political moment, in which the psychological aspects of group dynamics interact with neoliberal capitalism’s embrace of technology and polarized wealth. Another video, Missing Asher (2019), also makes time into a medium. This artwork, which includes Kolbowski’s correspondence with the influential conceptual artist Michael Asher – raises the question of whether the de facto stipulations of the art market are permanently aligned against conceptual, research-based works.
CWA Picks: Summer 2022
posted by CAA — June 30, 2022
Vlada Ralko, Lviv Diary No. 020, 2022, ink and watercolor on paper, 11.5 x 8.5 inches, ©Vlada Ralko, courtesy of Voloshyn Gallery and Fridman Gallery
Exhibitions and Scholarship Selected by the Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA)
If trauma names the psychic impact of damaging events, it also points to the possibility of working through the mute immobility that is trauma’s primary effect. Gender hierarchies are part of trauma and the recovery from it. In What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (1993), Shoshana Felman makes a broad and provocative claim: “every woman’s life contains explicitly or in implicit ways, the story of trauma.” The scholarship and exhibitions featured here substantiate Felman’s insight. In a few exhibitions, trauma is pronounced and linked to specific events, such as Russia’s assault on Ukraine. In others, trauma must be discerned in portrayals that attest to the diffuse reality of gender inequity. All of the work tells us that the current historical moment is rife with danger and violence and thereby underscores the necessity of feminism’s insights.
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed.
Trauma-Informed Pedagogy: Addressing Gender-Based Violence in the Classroom
Jocelyn E. Marshall and Candace Skibba (eds.)
Emerald Publishing, 2022
What role can teaching play in the effort to address gender-based violence? This collection offers practical, creative, and theoretical strategies for addressing this specific form of trauma in the classroom. The editors assert that teaching can create spaces that counter the “silence” and “unempathetic discourse” that gender-based violence most often meets when it is brought into the open. Featuring the artwork of and scholarship on the indigenous artist Julia Rose Sutherland, as well as a conversation between curators Monika Fabijanska and Dineke Van der Walt, Trauma-Informed Pedagogy foregrounds visual art practices as tools for exploring trauma and finding possibilities for recovery. This makes perfect sense, given the “troublesome visual representations” that block out the fact that gender-based violence is pervasive but systematically denied, a trauma in and of itself.
Women Painting Women
Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, Texas
Through September 25, 2022
Feminist art tends to be associated with practices that defy medium, genre, and the art historical canon, but what about the women painters who situate their work firmly in the figurative tradition? Curated by Andrea Karnes, Women Painting Women features the work of forty-six painters who have made women their subjects since the 1960s and illuminates the feminism that can animate figuration. Creatively rendering women’s “bodies, gestures, and individuality,” together these portraits play with a range of scales that move from the modest (Somaya Critchlow) to the gigantic (Jenny Saville) and suggest the spaces allotted to women and the spaces they want to claim. Women Painting Women is a refreshingly straightforward but decidedly necessary theme, given how rare it is to see women as artists and artistic subjects at the same time.
Martine Syms, Neural Swamp
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Through October 30, 2022
Martine Syms’ multi-channel video installation Neural Swamp deploys the tactics of surveillance, cinema, and sport to investigate what it means to be a Black woman in a hyper-digitized world. Blurring the line between horror and humor, Syms works with algorithms and artificial intelligence to question the technologies that erase and exploit Black bodies, voices, and narratives. Accompanied by Kit’s World, a series of videos that also explore technological mediation, Neural Swamp was commissioned by the Future Fields commission in Time-Based Media.
Women at War
Fridman Gallery, New York
July 6 through August 26, 2022
In collaboration with Voloshyn Gallery in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monika Fabijanska curated this timely exhibition that documents how Ukrainian women artists explore the gendered dimensions and consequences of war. Several artworks were made after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, others date from the eight years of war following the annexation of Crimea and the creation of separate ‘republics’ in Donbas in 2014. Together the artwork in Women at War poses questions about women as the natural victims of war and creates a nuanced picture, both of Ukrainian feminism, and the visual practices that have accompanied it. Through a wide array of themes, mediums, styles, Women at War narrates a nuanced history of women in Ukraine and is, more broadly, a historiographic project that meditates on how women become visible when history is written as a war against their agency.
Cornelia Parker
Tate Britain, London
Through October 16, 2022
One of Britain’s most beloved contemporary artists, Cornelia Parker works with domestic objects and reconfigures their scale through playful visual storytelling that often defies gravity. By doing so, Parker’s sculptures materialize the violence that undergirds everyday life and suspends it in the field of vision for all to see.
Ancestors Know Who We Are
Online
National Museum of the American Indian
The Smithsonian, Washington D.C.
Ancestors Know Who We Are is the Smithsonian’s first exhibition to feature Black-indigenous women artists. The title is borrowed from Storm Webber’s 2016 letterpress print, a statement she crafted in black sans serif letters in response to comments that she is neither Black nor Native enough. Across a range of mediums that trouble distinctions between tradition and the contemporary , the artists in this exhibition challenge assumptions that Native and Black experiences have essential and easily discernible features. In so doing, they unsettle the visual economy of race and the permission it gives to question who people are.
Andrea Bowers
Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles
Through September 4, 2022
This is Andrea Bowers’ first museum retrospective and it surveys two decades of her artwork’s intimate connection to activism. A large part of Bowers’ work reframes protest banners and posters to show that political address is a form of creative expression that seeks to imagine and write more just worlds. Isolation and despair haunt this artwork, but the austerity Bowers brings to her images of protest ultimately draws attention to the bravery of individual activists as they seek collectivities that can confront and transform the regressive politics of twenty-first century mobs.
Yayoi Kusama, A Poem in My Heart
Yayoi Kusama Museum
Tokyo, Japan
Through August 28, 2022
This exhibition highlights the Surrealism that pulsates through Yayoi Kusama’s hallucinatory visions. Featuring paintings from the 1950s, viewers can see further into the artist’s inner landscapes and psychic worlds. The artwork overflows with organic, idiosyncratic forms that twist and undulate to reveal the poetics of Kusama’s creative heart.
Suzanne Lacy, The Medium is Not the Only Message
Queens Museum
Queens, New York
Through August 14, 2022
The Medium is Not the Only Message is a major survey of an artist who helped define feminist performance in the 1970s. Lacy has consistently put social issues—sex work, violence against women, racism, labor rights, poverty, and aging—at the center of her work. In recent years, she has become an artist who expands the reach of the museum, bringing institutions into the public worlds in which they are situated. This exhibition focuses on two dimensions of Lacy’s practice: personal narrative and conversation. Both underscore the value she places on relationality, co-creation, and mutual learning, all of which rebuff the presumption that technological mediums really allow people to communicate with each other. Featured projects were selected for their connections to Queens and demonstrate Lacy’s commitment to community-based practices that move “Between the Door and the Street,” the title of a 2013 project that featured women talking about the issues that impact their lives.