CAA News Today
CWA Picks: Summer 2025
posted by CAA — June 05, 2025
Marisol, The Party, 1965–66, Toledo Museum of Art
Several important exhibitions of works by women and femme-identifying artists are being presented across the globe this summer. From Buenos Aires and Dallas (where Marisol’s The Party, above, will appear at the Dallas Museum of Art); Mexico City to Minneapolis; and Tokyo to Sydney, the CAA Committee on Women in the Arts encourages you to add some of these noteworthy exhibitions to your summer travel itinerary.
UNITED STATES
Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour
Through July 13
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
In mixed-media works made from 1997 to 2001, feminist artist Carole Caroompas (1946–2022) sent the self-inspired, dangerously sexual figure of the femme fatale on a journey of desire and destruction with a rock-star version of Heathcliff, the male protagonist of Emily Brontë’s 1847 Wuthering Heights. Caroompas’s series draws from art history, rock music, zines, film, advertisements, and other sources to simultaneously depict and subvert contemporary gendered power dynamics.
Fanny Sanín: Geometric Equations
Though July 26
Americas Society, New York
This exhibition reasserts the importance of Colombia-born, New York-based painter Fanny Sanín (b. 1938) in the development of abstract art in Latin America and the United States. The twenty-one monumental acrylic paintings and two dozen preparatory studies shown here chart how Sanín explored geometry’s possibilities through subtle variations in color and form, obliquely evoking the structure and solidity of Mesoamerican architecture yet inducing a powerful sense of vibration.
Helina Metaferia: When Civilizations Heal
Through August 17
Project for Empty Space, Newark
This latest project of interdisciplinary artist Helina Metaferia (b. 1983) reconstitutes archival materials from the last sixty years of activism as art objects, underscoring the role(s) played by women-identifying people of color. Metaferia deploys collage, sculpture, printmaking, video performances, and installation to visually articulate the power of organizing as a political, communal, and artistic act.
Kandis Williams: A Surface
Through August 24
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Kandis Williams (b. 1985) wields collage as a transformative tool of Black feminist resistance. By fragmenting and layering images, Williams interrogates and offers alternatives to the othering, exploitation, and control of nonwhite bodies. A Surface offers more than fifty collages incorporating video, works on paper, installation, and sculpture that dismantle entrenched power systems and reconfigure dominant narratives.
Liz Collins: Motherlode
July 19–January 11
Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence
This exhibition is the first survey in the United States of work by New York-based queer feminist fiber artist Liz Collins (b. 1968), known for her bold abstract patterns and radical experiments with the medium. Many of Collins’s dazzling works grapple with the complexities of power and intimacy. Motherlode brings together sculpture, fashion, needlework, drawings, performance documentation, and ephemera by Collins from the late 1980s to the present.
Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body
Through August 23
Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, New York
This first large-scale solo exhibition in New York of work by pioneering feminist Mexican artist Magali Lara (b. 1956) focuses on Lara’s output from 1977 to 1995. In these paintings, drawings, collages, photostats and artist’s books, Lara considers how tensions between the individual, private, and domestic on one hand and the public sphere on the other intersect with the themes of desire, violence, growth, decay, and loss. (See also Magali Lara: Five Decades in a Spiral, MUAC, Mexico City, below.)
Margarita Cabrera: Space in Between + CARE
Through December 13
The Fine Arts Center, Colorado College, Colorado Springs
These two ongoing collaborative projects led by Margarita Cabrera (b. 1973) address locally resonant themes of border politics, labor, and environmental preservation. The Space in Between (begun 2010) features soft sculptures of plants native to the Southwest crafted from United States Border Patrol uniforms by Cabrera and Colorado Springs community members with personal ties to immigration. CARE (begun 2021) builds on Cabrera’s recent collaboration with Ollin Farms to explore food sustainability in Colorado, culminating in a feast performance.
Marisol: A Retrospective
Through July 6
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
This internationally touring retrospective is the most comprehensive survey ever assembled of work by the Paris-born Venezuelan artist Marisol (1930–2016), perhaps the most enigmatic artist associated with Pop Art. It includes signature and lesser-known large-scale mixed-media works by Marisol from the 1950s to the early 2000s that contend with such wide-ranging subjects as the life of the oceans, hunger, interpersonal violence, and modern gender norms.
Mary Sully: Native Modern
Through September 21
Mia: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis
Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, the reclusive artist Mary Sully (1896–1963) created striking patterned and figural colored pencil drawings informed by her Native American and European ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully’s groundbreaking production in the 1920s to 1940s highlights recent MIA acquisitions that complicate traditional distinctions between Native American and modern art.
Otobong Nkanga: Each Seed a Body
Through August 17
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX
The large-scale sculptures and installations of Antwerp-based Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974) reconsider our relationship with the land and the resources we extract from it. Nkanga adapts major recurring projects to respond to their setting, in this case North Texas, such as Carved to Flow (begun 2017), whose circular lattice-like configuration evokes a biosphere or an effective resource distribution system.
Risham Syed: Destiny Fractured
Through March 2027
The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ
Risham Syed (b. 1969), a professor of Fine Arts at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan, uses painting and a wide range of other media to explore questions of history, sociology, and politics. In Destiny Fractured, Syed addresses colonialism, capitalism, and climate change, drawing inspiration from artworks in The Newark Museum of Art’s collection, including American landscapes, Chinese scroll paintings, and The Ballantine House period rooms.
Rosana Paulino: The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night
Through December
Adjacent to the High Line at 22nd Street, New York City
The work of Rosana Paulino (b. 1967) confronts Brazil’s colonial past and its ongoing impact on Black and Indigenous communities. Her enormous High Line commission expands on her Mangrove series, portraying tree-women–identified with Brazil’s marginalized peoples, both mistreated and exploited–as reimagined mythological archetypes symbolizing resilience and transformation. In this way, the mangrove becomes a sacred site where life and death, like day and night, exist in cyclical balance.
Rituals for Remembering: María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Ana Mendieta
Through February 15
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
This exhibition brings together works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959) and Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) for the first time, highlighting the artists’ shared exploration of exile, memory, and spirituality through the lens of their Cuban heritage. Central to the show are Campos-Pons’s A Town Portrait (1994), a multimedia installation evoking colonial legacies and Black Cuban histories, and Mendieta’s iconic Silueta series of “earth-body” works, which reflect themes of loss, ritual, and cultural connection across distance.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
Through September 2
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
More than three hundred works produced over six decades by artist, educator, and civic leader Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) appear in this first posthumous retrospective of the artist, including not only Asawa’s famous suspended looped-wire sculptures but also her lesser-known miniatures, drawings, paintings, clay masks, and cast bronzes.
Leilah Babirye: We Have a History
Through October 26
DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA
Born in Kampala, Uganda, and based in New York, Leilah Babirye (b. 1985) is known for her highly expressive, ambiguously gendered sculptures in ceramic, wood, and discarded objects, shown here in the artist’s first solo museum show in the United States. Ranging in scale from towering totemic forms to busts, talismans, and masks, and executed using ceramic and wood-carving traditions from Western and Central Africa, Babirye’s works are portraits of her LGBTQ+ community that reclaim personal and cultural identity.
Women in Focus
Through July 13
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA
Photography has attracted women artists from its inception because of its freedom from male-dominated training systems, relatively low costs, and suitability to home studio practice, even as gender norms have loomed over its practice by women. In Women in Focus, photographs by Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971), and other women artists from the mid-nineteenth century to today highlight how women have shaped this major art form.
MEXICO
Adela Goldbard: Bi xa ra ndumu̱i, aya p’ampay. Enterrar un cadáver / suspender la aflicció (To Bury a Corpse/The Suspension of Grief)
Through September 14
Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City
This solo exhibition brings together immersive video installations, site-specific sculptures, textiles, and pyrotechnic paintings that reflect the collaborations of Mexican artist-scholar Adela Goldbard (b. 1979) with members of the Hñähñu and Quechua communities of Mexico and Peru respectively. The title employs Hñähñu and Quechua phrases relating to funerary rites, and the works reflect on the enactment of resistance in Latin America through ritual, epistemological, and other cultural practices as well as political acts.
Diálogos: Artistas mujeres en la colección Ella Fontanals-Cisneros / Dialogues: Women Artists in the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection
Through September 28
MARCO: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey
Organized into three themes surrounding art’s relationship to abstraction, social issues, and the body, this survey draws from the outstanding collection of Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) founder Ella Fontanals-Cisneros. Among the seventy-one artists from twenty-three countries represented here are Marina Abramovic, Chantal Akerman, Ellen Gallagher, Gego, Carmen Herrera, Jenny Holzer, Anna Maria Maiolino, Ana Mendieta, Marta Minujín, Lygia Pape, Liliana Porter, Mira Schendel, Regina Silveira, Lorna Simpson, and Greta Stern.
Ellas diseñan (They Design): 1965–2025
Through September 7
Franz Mayer Museum, Mexico City
Through publications and independent projects, including artist books, this exhibition traces the contributions of twenty-seven key women to editorial design in Mexico over the past six decades. It highlights the diversity of female voices, trajectories, and approaches that have shaped national publishing design, such as in the longtime Free Textbooks initiative of the Mexican government and in the iconic logo of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
La imagen interceptada (The Intercepted Image): Carla Rippey
August 2–November 2
Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City
These recent works by Kansas-born, Mexico City-based feminist printmaker, draftswoman, and painter Carla Rippey (b. 1950) are based on her collection of both analog and digital images. Rippey unites the artisanal with the technological and the archaic with the contemporary, approaching the archive as a basis for thinking about, organizing, and understanding the past in order to interpret the present.
Magali Lara: Cinco décadas en espiral/Five Decades in a Spiral
Through October 19
MUAC: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
This retrospective of work by major Mexican feminist artist Magali Lara (b. 1956) moves backwards in time, beginning with murals made for MUAC and closing with Lara’s earliest drawings (1970s–80s). It offers a reverse narrative of Lara’s use of an expressive, often humorous visual language of lines, pigments, white spaces, and vegetal and corporeal forms to address themes like fragility, violence, and the erotic in contemporary female experience. (See also Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body, ISLAA, NY, above.)
Pensar lo escultórico, habitar lo público (Think About the Sculptural, Inhabit the Public): Ángela Gurría y Helen Escobedo
Through August 23
Proyectos Monclova Gallery, Mexico City
Mexican artists Ángela Gurría (1929–2023) and Helen Escobedo (1934–2010) transcended preconceptions about women sculptors through the monumental scale and difficult-to-work materials of their public sculpture projects. Drawings, models, collages, and other related preparatory works of the 1970s onward show the artists’ attunement to the material, symbolic, spatial, visual, social, and affective impact of sculpture on viewers in urban environments.
CANADA
Joyce Wieland: Heart On
Opening June 21
AGO: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the humorous and biting artistry of Joyce Wieland (1931–1998) helped give shape to changing ideas in Canada about gender, nationhood and ecology. In this retrospective, over half a century of artistic output in textile, collage, printmaking, drawing, and film attests to the breadth and originality of Wieland’s practice and attests to the many ways she anticipated current debates about feminism, social equity, and ecology.
Surusilutu Ashoona
Opening June 28
AGO: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
The irreverent prints and drawings by Surusilutu Ashoona (1941–2011) of Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, illustrate a fantastical yet banal world where animals wear Inuit clothing and women sew, juggle, or mediate with the spiritual world. Featuring seventeen works from the AGO’s foundational Inuit art collection, this exhibition is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the AGO.
SOUTH AMERICA
Dalila Puzzovio: Autorretrato (Self-portrait)
Through November 30
Museo Moderno Buenos Aires, Argentina
In a career spanning more than six decades and fusing fine art with fashion design, Argentine artist Dalila Puzzovio (b. 1942) has framed identity as a creative performance or theatrical construction enacted by the body. This retrospective includes a restoration of the monumental Pop Art self-portrait Dalila autorretrato (1966), which assimilated Puzzovio to the fashion model Veruschka and earned the artist a Premio Nacional from the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires.
Liliana Porter: Travesía (Journey)
July 12–October 13
MALBA: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Currently based in New York, Liliana Porter (b. 1941) returns to her hometown of Buenos Aires for a retrospective that showcases the breadth of her oeuvre, including her collaborations with The New York Graphic Workshop (1964–70); her narrative paintings, videos, and installations of the 1990s onward that feature flea-market figurines and toys; and her theatrical productions, among them new stage pieces for MALBA’s auditorium. Porter’s printmaking practice, the exhibition shows, helped lead to her explorations of storytelling and performance.
EUROPE & UK
Abstract Erotic: Bourgeois, Hesse, Adams
June 20–September 14
Courtauld Institute, London
Sculptures by the three women artists in Lucy Lippard’s groundbreaking 1963 show Eccentric Abstraction feature here: Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), Eva Hesse (1936–1970), and, in her first-ever UK exhibition, Alice Adams (b. 1930). Lippard sought in Eccentric Abstraction to blur boundaries between minimalism and “something more sensuous and sensual”; she later characterized the show as feminist. The Courtauld promises to fill the galleries “in bold and unconventional ways,” using humor and abstraction to ask questions about sexuality and bodies.
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood
Through July 13
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London
Featuring self-portraits and other works by more than sixty artists from the mid-twentieth century to the present, Acts of Creation celebrates the figure of the artist mother while challenging the conventional idealizations of traditional mother-and-child iconography. Organized around the themes of creation, maintenance, and loss, the exhibition explores the lived state of motherhood and addresses connections between art and contemporary issues of gender, caregiving, and reproductive rights.
Emily Kam Kngwarray
July 10–January 11
Tate Modern, London
Only starting to paint in her seventies, the Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (1910–1996), who hailed from Australia’s Utopia desert region, gained international acclaim for her vibrant palette and complex abstract compositions. Drawing on deeply rooted ancestral knowledge, including women’s ceremonial traditions of song, dance, and ground-ocher body painting, Kngwarray paved the way for generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. This first major presentation of Kngwarray’s work in Europe has been organized with the National Gallery of Australia.
Euforia (Euphoria): Tomaso Binga
Through July 21
Museo madre/Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Naples, Italy
Tomaso Binga (b. 1931) is a central figure in the histories of Italian feminist art and of phonetic sound performance poetry. This survey brings together over 120 works, many previously unexhibited, across visual poetry, installation, photography, collage, and performance scores. Highlights include Alfabetiere Murale (Alphabet Mural, 1976), in which Binga’s naked body spells out each letter, and photographs of Oggi Spose (Today Brides), the 1977 performance in which she married her male alter ego.
Helen Chadwick, Life Pleasures
Through October 27
Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK
The inventive explorations of matter out of place by British feminist artist Helen Chadwick (1953–1996) encompass sculptural, photographic, and performance-based experiments with such materials as animal viscera, flowers, compost, and chocolate. This retrospective, the first in twenty-five years, includes Chadwick’s graduate show project In the Kitchen (1997), a photograph series of the naked artist posing with various gendered domestic appliances, and Piss Flowers (1991–92), bronze casts of indentations made by Chadwick and her male partner peeing in deep snow.
Lubaina Himid with Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter
July 12–November 2
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK
This exchange between Turner Prize-winning Lubaina Himid (b. 1954) and her partner in art and life, Magda Stawarska (b. 1976), considers questions raised by the early twentieth-century correspondence between artists Sophie Brzeska and Nina Hamnett: who and what is missing from the telling of life stories, what we choose to leave behind as clues, and what we do to fill in the gaps. Among the works are new paintings and interventions in the little-seen domestic interiors of Kettle’s Yard House. (See also Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska: Nets for Night and Day, Mudam, Luxembourg, below.)
Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska: Nets for Night and Day
Through August 24
Mudam: The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg, Luxembourg City
Conceived as a performance, this first full-scale European survey of the decade-long artistic collaboration between British Black Artists Movement trailblazer Lubaina Himid (b. 1954) and Polish artist Magda Stawarska (b. 1976) combines Himid’s paintings and drawings with Stawarska’s sound installations, silkscreen prints, photography, and sculpture. Centered on a new presentation of Himid’s Zanzibar (1999–2023), nine diptychs suspended in space, here accompanied by a Stawarska libretto, the exhibition explores memory, belonging, and loss through layered narratives evoking personal and collective histories. (See also Lubaina Himid with Magda Stawarska: Another Chance Encounter, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, above.)
Marta Palau. Mis caminos son terrestre (My Paths Are Earthly)
Through August 17
Museu Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain
Spanish Mexican artist Marta Palau (1934–2002) was especially notable for her conceptual, feminist deployment of textiles as a medium for political and spiritual resistance. Organized with the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporanea in Mexico City, this large retrospective of Palau’s drawings, paintings, and textile installations deviates from a chronological-biographical format to consider how these works intersect with different themes and spheres of influence, bringing to bear never-before-seen objects and materials from the artist’s personal archive.
ASIA
Shiho Saito & Miki Morioka: Pictura super Pavimentum
Through July 31
18, Murata in collaboration with Toga Triangle, Tokyo
Its Latin title meaning “[a] painting upon the floor,” this exhibition presents works by Shiho Saito (b. 1988) and Miki Morioka (b. 1989). Saito juxtaposes paintings made with Washi paper, acrylic, and silkscreen with such everyday domestic elements as shelves, wallpaper, and desks, inviting the viewer to ruminate on intimate, lived-in spaces as contexts for encountering art. Morioka instead roots installations in the floor, summoning physical experiences and memories shaped by religious and educational institutions.
Echoes Unveiled: Art by First Nations Women from Australia
June 24–September 21
Artizon Museum, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
Featuring works by one collective and seven artists, this exhibition is the first in Japan to focus on First Nations women artists from Australia. It explores the complex and multifaceted ways in which the participating artists creatively engage with traditional culture to practice decolonization in contemporary Australian society.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Hannan Abu-Hussein: Kasr Hdoud / Broken Barriers
Through October 18
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
This exhibition of works by sculptor Hannan Abu-Hussein (b. 1972) spans three decades of artistic creation and is the first to feature large-scale installations by the artist. Abu-Hussein employs a wide range of materials, from raw sheep’s wool to video to tubes of flowing olive oil, and often duplicates a basic form or object to express her painful experience of–and defiance against–the cycles of coercion she has undergone as a Palestinian woman artist in a patriarchal, traditional society.
Nazgol Ansarinia: Instruments of Viewing and Obscurity
Through September 6
Green Art Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Born and raised in Tehran, Nazgol Ansarinia (b. 1979) examines the routines, events, objects, and experiences that underpin her daily life, reflecting upon the ways that local iterations of a culture can articulate individual hopes and fears within a larger social context, and indeed within the (faltering) globalized world. Ansarinia’s recent projects, which range across sculpture, installation, drawing, and video, consider the role of architecture in delineating interior and exterior spaces and private and public spheres.
AFRICA
Strange Flesh: Na Chainkua Reindorf
Through October 12
Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Dakar, Senegal
Na Chainkua Reindorf (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the construction of world and myth through the art of masquerade. Inspired by the predominantly masculine traditions of masquerade in West Africa, the artist offers a feminist reinterpretation through her long-running series Mawu Nyonu (begun 2020), named after an imaginary secret society invented by the artist that means “God is a woman” in the Ewe language of Ghana.
OCEANIA
The Intelligence of Painting
Through July 20
MCA: Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia
Throwing a spotlight on the energy of contemporary painting in Australia, this exhibition includes recent MCA Collection acquisitions as well as new and recent paintings by fourteen living Australian women artists: Karen Black, Angela Brennan, Eleanor Louise Butt, Prudence Flint, Maria Madeira, Thea Anamara Perkins, Kerrie Poliness, Jude Rae, Jessica Rankin, Julie Nangala Robertson, Gemma Smith, Jelena Telecki, Jenny Watson, and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu.
Juanita McLauchlan: Yilaa Minyaminyabal Maaru-ma-lda-y (Soon Everything Will Be Healing)
July 5–October 19
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
In her first state art museum exhibition, Wagga Wagga–based Gamilaaray artist Juanita McLauchlan presents an ambitious new body of work that draws upon the intimacy of personal belongings and body adornments. Working with leaves, animal pelts, and other organic materials as she prints, eco-dyes, and embroiders vintage blankets and other domestic textiles, McLauchlan produces works that project out from the wall and convey the power of unity, connectedness, and cultural reclamation to soothe historical burdens and strengthen optimism.
Veiled Grounds: Antonia Perricone in 2025
Through June 7
Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, Australia
Each energized brushstroke by Sydney-based artist Antonia Perricone (b. 1968) offers a visual meditation on the unseen dimensions of labor. Grounded in physicality, Perricone’s new body of work speaks to the endurance and determination displayed by the majority-migrant workforce of the engineering infrastructure project known as the Australian Snowy Mountains Scheme (1949–74), prompting a reevaluation of narratives that have defined Australian history.