CAA News Today
CWA Picks: Spring 2025
posted Mar 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.