CAA News Today
CWA PICKS: WINTER 2025-26
posted Dec 23, 2025
Visually arresting, thought-provoking, innovative art nourishes our souls. The exhibitions listed here offer the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the unique visions of important women and femme-identifying artists who challenge norms, call for change, encourage community, uplift underrepresented subjects, and ignite our aesthetic sensibilities.
UNITED STATES
Amy Usdin: After All
Through February 22
Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN
From abstract landscapes woven onto ragged fishing and horse-fly nets to digitally woven sculptures that evoke the endless tread of feet on airport floors, Minnesota-based artist Amy Usdin speaks to loss, longing, and the dissonance of nostalgia. After All urges viewers to strengthen our fragile ties to one another and to the earth.
Ang manok na hindi nakikita, hindi rin nakakain: The chicken you don’t see, you cannot eat
Through January 11
Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis
In this interactive sculptural installation, Filipinx American artist Maeve Leslie interrogates the paradox of our cultural dependence on immigrant labor and the systemic erasure of those who provide it. As suggested by the exhibition’s title, a Filipino proverb that roughly equates to “out of sight, out of mind,” Leslie seeks to provoke conversations that lead to greater empathy and understanding.
Artemisia Gentileschi: Naples to Beirut
Through May 31
Columbus Museum of Art, OH
This exhibition centers on two large-scale narrative scenes painted in Naples in the later 1630s by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1654): the museum’s own Bathsheba, and the recently rediscovered Omphale and Hercules, in which the mythological Lydian princess subjugates the Greek hero as her domestic servant. Long considered lost, the latter work resurfaced in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2020 after a devastating explosion and underwent a lengthy conservation at the Getty Museum before going on public view this year.
Ayoung Kim: Delivery Dancer Codex
Through March 16
MoMA PS1, Queens, NY
Korean artist Ayoung Kim (b. 1979) presents the US debut of her three-part Delivery Dancer video installation, which examines the evolving relationships between data, human beings, and the environment. Using generative AI, videogame engines, and live-action footage, Kim centers the labor of fictional female delivery drivers En Storm and Ernst Mo (anagrams of “monster”), challenging capitalist pressures to meet increasing global market demands through self-optimization.
Eliza Au: Squaring the Circle
Through March 1
Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas
In this new site-specific installation by Eliza Au (b. 1982), ceramic tiles, blocks, and screens draw from the geometry of lines and circles. Au’s abstract ornamental patterns pay homage to many types of sacred architecture, from Buddhist caves to grottos to Islamic houses of worship. At the same time, the artist’s application of Rhino CAD 3D and other technologies to the ancient medium of clay illuminates the potential of architectural ornament to ignite our imaginations in new ways.
Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone
February 14–June 7
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
The marble statues of Black and Mississauga Ojibwe sculptor Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844–1907) are stylistically classicizing—the artist spent much of her career in Rome—but relate frequently to Lewis’s experience as a person of color: Her subjects include an allegory of liberation from slavery, portraits of social reformers, and the regal figure of a dying Cleopatra. This first retrospective of the acclaimed yet underrecognized artist also features works by later-generation artists she influenced.
Enough Already
Through February 15
MOCA/CT (Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut), Westport
Featuring eighty works by modern and contemporary women artists from the private collection of Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell, Enough Already reflects the collectors’ interests in LGBTQ+ communities and in feminist social issues like reproductive rights. The exhibition presents works by, among others, Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Butterfield, Barbara Kruger, Ana Mendieta, Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems as well as several emerging artists.
Gabrielle Goliath: Personal Accounts
Through March 16
MoMA PS1, Queens, NY
This acclaimed video series (2024–) by South African artist Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983), shown here in its US premiere, responds to the impact of patriarchal violence in a range of global contexts. Collaborating with survivors to document their stories, the artist exclusively presents the moments in between the words: breaths, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter. Goliath’s sonic cycles trouble false binaries of the “voiced” and “voiceless,” revealing the enormity of what can be conveyed by perceived silence.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture
Through January 3, 2027
Detroit Institute of Arts, MI
This groundbreaking exhibition argues that the architectural paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) bear as much visual potency and personal meaning as her better-known landscapes and flower images. In the roughly three dozen paintings shown here, O’Keeffe applies her signature volumetric yet reductive style to a wide range of built environments, from rural farms to Manhattan skyscrapers to the adobe homes of New Mexico.
An Indigenous Art: Huipiles from Mia’s Collection
February 14–August 2
Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), MN
Composed of two or three handwoven rectangular panels stitched together into a blouse or tunic, the huipil has been worn by Indigenous women throughout Mesoamerica for more than five hundred years and remains popular today among descendants of the Maya in Guatemala’s highland regions. The examples in An Indigenous Art, drawn from a significant textile donation to the museum, showcase the colorful embroidered and appliquèd motifs by which wearers identified their village affiliation and social standing.
Jana Marie Cariddi: Amygdala
Through January 19
Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, GA
Taking its name from the brain’s processing center for memory and emotion, this debut museum exhibition of SCAD alumna Jana Marie Cariddi includes new examples of the artist’s signature colorful sculptural paintings, which unsettle viewers by their uncanny resonances with pop-cultural touchstones. Cariddi’s graphite drawings likewise privilege feeling over logic, their abstract pseudoscientific ecosystems coalescing into an alphabet of idiosyncratic petroglyphs.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
Through January 18
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX
Rendered in thickly layered brushstrokes, the bodies and heads of Jenny Saville (b. 1970), one of the world’s foremost contemporary figure painters, challenge conventional ideals of female beauty. This first major museum exhibition in the US of Saville’s work traces her practice to date, from the monumental nudes that first garnered the artist acclaim in 1992 to a recent series of portraits interrogating the intersections of the physical and the virtual in our image-saturated age.
Joyce Pensato
Through March 15
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL
Her most comprehensive museum survey yet, Joyce Pensato examines five decades of recurring characters in the work of the New York–based artist (1941–2019), from her Batman drawings of 1976–81 and vividly colored gestural oil abstractions of the 1980s to her early enamel paintings of the 1990s and charcoals, pastels, and paintings of the 2000s. Pensato’s treatments of iconic cartoon and live-action figures reflect on the history of American popular culture and on the transformations of technology.
METAMORPHOSIS! Butterflies and Botanicals by Maria Sibylla Merian
Through January 3
Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK
The exquisitely drawn and hand-colored illustrations of artist-scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (German, 1647–1717) revolutionized entomology in two ways: by documenting live insects at every stage of development, and by including the plants consumed at each stage. METAMORPHOSIS! presents a selection of prints from a privately owned 1718 Dutch edition of Merian’s The Marvelous Transformation of Caterpillars and Their Strange Diet of Flowers (Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung).
New Work: Sheila Hicks
Through August 9
San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA), CA
For nearly seven decades, Sheila Hicks (b. 1934) has redefined the expressive possibilities of fiber as a sculptural form. Hicks’s first solo exhibition at SFMOMA features recent works in natural and synthetic materials on a range of scales inspired by objects, textures, and patterns in places that hold personal significance for the artist, from the cobblestones of her courtyard in Paris to the rugged landscape and towering lighthouses of the island of Ouessant, France.
Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold
Through March 14
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, FL
These large-scale sculptures by Petah Coyne (b. 1953) forge dialogues with an array of women authors and female literary figures. Using her signature wide range of unorthodox materials, from human hair and wax flowers to steel wire spun from the body of an Airstream trailer, Coyne hauntingly invokes the experiences of, among others, Zelda Fitzgerald, a fragment of whose poetry provides the exhibition’s title; the grieving Joan Didion in My Year of Magical Thinking; and the objectified young women of Yasunari Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties.
Radius: Helen Frankenthaler Prints in Context
Through February 15
Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington, IN
While best known as an Abstract Expressionist painter, Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) also produced a large body of inventive prints over five decades, imbuing a wide range of print types with unusual energy and immediacy. Radius places select works side-by-side with prints from the museum’s collection by other Ab Ex artists, including Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock
Ruth Orkin: Women on the Move
Through March 29
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
Women project confidence in these postwar photographs by the American Ruth Orkin (1921–1985). Some subjects are Hollywood celebrities or Broadway actresses, others live on an Israeli kibbutz or walk Italian streets as tourists, while still others populate American classrooms, homes, parks, or cities. By capturing their lively facial expressions and dynamic poses, Orkin vividly conveys the women’s sense of agency.
Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know–2020s
Through January 25
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH
This exhibition comprises the full Ghostwriter series by Iranian American artist Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990): tableaux executed in photography, sculpture, and video that piece together the remarkable escape from Iran’s totalitarian regime by Soleimani’s parents in the 1980s. Employing a surreal, metaphorically resonant, collagic visual language, the artist frames this deeply personal story as a larger meditation on political trauma, resistance, diaspora, identity, and memory.
The View From Here honors the fortieth anniversary of Deborah Bright’s influential essay “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men,” which argued that male American landscape photographers constructed and reinforced contemporary cultural ideals under the guise of pure aesthetics. The women photographers in this exhibition represent a wide range of approaches to the same landscape while lending themselves to an acknowledgement of cultural situatedness, from Imogen Cunningham and Laura Gilpin to Suzanne Camp Crosby and Stephanie Dinkins.
Uman: After all the things…
Through May 10
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
Somalia-born artist Uman (b. 1980) expresses feelings through color in a hybrid abstract-metaphorical mode that is intuitive, multilayered, adaptable, and free. Influenced by memories of her homeland and by her diasporic experiences in Kenya, Denmark, New York, and beyond, Uman’s practice is “its own activism, just painting my life, existing, living.” The new and recent works in After all the things. . ., her first institutional solo exhibition, include paintings, works on paper, and a sculpture.
Una Kirkpatrick
Through February 21
Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX
Having studied disparate subjects at two institutions in the city where this exhibition appears, biochemistry at the University of Houston and ceramics at the Glassell Studio School, Una Kirkpatrick (b. 1952) found clay to be the perfect medium for articulating “the elegance [of] biological design.” Kirkpatrick’s sculptures echo the rhythmic grouping, layering, and spiraling of organic forms within diverse ecosystems.
Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product
Through March 2
MoMA PS1, Queens, NY
Spanning five decades of Vaginal Davis’s practice as a performer, visual artist, author, filmmaker, musician, educator, self-proclaimed “Blacktress,” and countercultural icon, Magnificent Product spotlights Davis’s role as an underground trailblazer in culture and queer politics. Organized thematically, the exhibition features major installations, video, paintings, zines, audio works, sculptures, and extensive archival materials as well as cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Women Artists in Ascendance
Through July 2
The Jule Museum, Auburn University, AL
Featuring works from the university art collection alongside loans from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Women Artists in Ascendance celebrates twelve women artists who were goliaths of modern American art, including Joan Brown, Dorothy Dehner, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Lee Krasner.
MEXICO
Chantal Peñalosa Fong: Loom Tales / Cuentos de presagio
Through January 4
Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), Jalisco
In this multimedia exhibition, Chantal Peñalosa Fong (b. 1987) examines the phenomenon of Chinese immigration to northern Mexico, drawing on her ancestors’ traumatic personal histories as well as on official versions of the narrative and on current xenophobic discourse. Landscapes and floral elements evoke the uncanny qualities of a liminal place shot through with memory and forgetting.
Hablando se entiende la gente: interviniendo el archivo Pinto mi Raya a partir del texto, la imagen y la palabra (“People Understand One Another Through Talking: Intervening in the Pinto mi Raya Archive Using Text, Image, and Words”)
Through February 14Celda Contemporánea, University of the Cloister of Sor Juana, Mexico City
This exhibition brings together works created by the prolific feminist artist, writer, and activist Mónica Mayer (b. 1954) over the past three years. These works emerged from Mayer’s reactivation of her vast archive, a territory of aesthetic, pedagogical, and political experimentation. Operating in this field where power, affection, memory, silences, and possibilities are intertwined, Mayer’s works collectively activate the intersections of intimate personal memories with political and artistic histories.
Lilia Carillo. Todo es sugerente (Everything Is Suggestive)
Through February 8
Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City
Lilia Carrillo (1930–1974) was a prolific painter whose contributions were central to the development of non-figurative painting in Mexico. Todo es sugerente features more than a hundred works produced over twenty-six years of Carrillo’s short life, not only paintings in oil and acrylic but also drawings, collages, and lithographs. Documentary materials additionally highlight Carillo’s collaborations in set design, costume design, illustration, and curation as well as her activism and participation in major cultural movements.
Marina Vargas: Revelaciones (Revelations)
Through January 18
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Querétaro
This exhibition centers on the feminist investigation by Spanish artist Marina Vargas (b. 1980) into the visibilities of women in visual culture, particularly in the history of the sacred and the spiritual. With the figure of Mary Magdalene as a starting point, Vargas employs sculpture, silver-ink printmaking, photography, and other media to explore how women have been relegated to the background in art and religion, presenting new works that reveal what has been concealed by patriarchal silences.
CANADA
Allison Katz: Inner Momentum
Through April 26
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
The paintings of UK-based artist Allison Katz (b. 1980) merge realism with the fantastical, incorporating wordplay as well as literary, historical, and autobiographical references. Anchoring this exhibition of new and recent works is the emblematic Truth (2023), in which Katz’s grandmother regards an Alberto Giacometti sculpture given substance by modeling paste; the tableau embodies the artist’s, and viewer’s, complex relationship to the history of modern art.
Charlotte Zhang: Tireslashers
Through March 8
The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver
For Los Angeles–based artist Charlotte Zhang (b. 1999), the figures of petty criminals who haunt materials as old as Elizabethan-era moralizing pamphlets simultaneously threaten upright society’s notions of property/propriety and personify fantasies of individualism and heroic citizenship. Tireslashers presents Zhang’s readymade sculpture series Bloodsport/Playground Rules (2023–) of interventions to public benches and her image-dyed fabric collage series Rogue Pamphlets (2025–).
Diasporic Worldings: Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
Through February 16
Urban Screen, Libby Leshgold Gallery, Emily Carr University, Vancouver
This 2025 experimental video by Guadalajara-born, Vancouver-based artist Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda (b. 1973) explores the experiences of people who belong to a forced or voluntary diaspora as they form relationships with land, place, territories, and ecosystems. Inspired in part by Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza’s use of frottage drawing to recover an embodied connection to place, Diasporic Worldings features actions performed on camera and images involving different approaches to map-making.
Emily Carr: Navigating an Impenetrable Landscape
Through January 20–February 24
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto
Experiencing a painting by Emily Carr (1871–1945) can be like looking at a dense forest: the environment seems inviting yet impenetrable. This exhibition uses the metaphor of physical closeness to or distance from nature to probe Carr’s thinking about the forests she painted. It also examines the white Canadian artist’s representation of Indigenous villages and totem poles in relation to the forest, given the tendency in Carr’s era (as often still today) to conflate Indigenous cultures with nature.
Issokawo’taan (Faye HeavyShield)
Through February 22
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto
Kanai (Blood) Nation artist Faye HeavyShield (b. 1953; in Blackfoot, Issokawo’taan), recipient of the AGO’s 2021 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, has for more than three decades created powerful installations and sculptures characterized in many cases by repeating spirals, circles, grids, or lines. This exhibition presents several works by the Alberta-based artist, including a restaging of her acclaimed 1995–96 Venus as Torpedo, in which an arm draped in clothing items extends across the museum floor.
Jesse Mockrin: Echo
Through March 6
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto
In her first solo museum exhibition, American artist Jesse Mockrin (b. 1981) radically reenvisions familiar art-historical subjects—Bathsheba, Solomon, and Daphne among them—through her own contemporary feminist lens. Urgent and subversive, Mockrin’s closely cropped compositions reveal the unsettling, uncanny dramas buried in traditional depictions of these figures. Echo features new large-scale paintings and works on paper installed alongside paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the AGO’s European collection.
Nan Goldin: Stendhal Syndrome
Through April 12
Art Gallery of Vancouver
The moving-image works of Nan Goldin (b. 1953), originally created as slideshows on carousels set to music, invite visceral responses. Evoking the metaphor of the Stendhal Syndrome—dizziness, confusion, or even hallucinations triggered by exposure to intense beauty—Goldin’s 2024 work of this title, presented here in single-channel video format, juxtaposes the artist’s photographs of famous classical, Renaissance, and Baroque mythological works with recreations by queer and otherwise nonconforming bodies.
SOUTH AMERICA
Margarita Paksa: Ideas correspondientes (Corresponding Ideas) 1964–1984
Through February 16
Museo de Arte de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Argentina
A key figure in Argentine and Latin American art, Margarita Paksa (Buenos Aires, 1932–2020) embodied the transformation art underwent in the 1960s in response to a globalized world. Corresponding Ideas, 1964–1984 reviews two decades of this prolific artist’s work, bringing together more than sixty graphic and object-based works and installations as well as documentary materials relating to her projects.
Suspensión (Suspension)
Through March 8
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires (MACBA), Argentina
In the practice of São Paolo–based artist Carla Chaim (b. 1983), which moves between performance and drawing, the body becomes measure, tool, and limit—a sensitive surface that interrupts the logic of control and productivity. The artist’s first solo exhibition in Buenos Aires brings together a selection of representative recent works where the trace is a breath and movement, a form of thought.
Ahora (Now): Claudia Vásquez Gómez
Through January 25
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Parque Forestal, Santiago, Chile
Characterized by extensive logistical efforts, limited duration, and rigorous design, the actions and interventions of Santiago-based Claudia Vásquez Gómez (b.1981)—some solo, others collaborative—in natural and urban landscapes recall North American land art of the 1960s onward. The projects represented in Ahora highlight diverse geographical regions of Chile, from deserts to forests to the mountainous valleys of Elqui, as well as the frozen terrain of Antarctica.
¿Qué saben las cotorras de especies exóticas? (What Do Parakeets Know of Exotic Species?): Valentina Soto
Through March 29
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) Quinta Normal, Santiago, Chile
Valentina Soto (b. 1988), a Chilean artist, tells stories about nature by asking unconventional questions, using a wide variety of materials to replicate, test, and transform observed phenomena. This exhibition treats the history of the monk parakeet, which is considered invasive in Chile. Sculptures and audiovisual recordings serve as a speculative ethnography concerning what the term “exotic species” might mean to the parakeet.
Ritos Corpóreos (Corporeal Rites): Gabriela Carmona Slier, Isidora Kauak Aguad, and Fernanda Núñez Camus
Through March 29
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) Quinta Normal, Santiago, Chile
Corporeal Rites brings together the multidisciplinary practices of Chilean artists Gabriela Carmona (b. 1980), Isidora Kauak (b. 1995), and Fernanda Núñez (b. 1989), who update ancestral traditions and challenge social and patriarchal orders as they explore the ritual power of objects and the body. Their works constitute a spiritual practice and a source of knowledge, becoming a locus of invocation, memory, and community.
EUROPE & UK
Dove le liane s’intrecciano (Where the Vines Intertwine): Binta Diaw
Through March 8
Parco Arte Vivente, Turin, Italy
This project by Senegalese Italian artist Binta Diaw (b. 1995) investigates Afro-descendant diasporic memory, ecological survival, and female resistance. Key works include Dïà s p o r a (2021), in which plants grow amid a weblike structure of braided hair, evoking the practice by enslaved women on plantations of concealing seeds from their homeland and escape maps in their hair, turning their bodies into storehouses of memory and resources for survival.
Emilija Škarnulytė
ThroughApril 12
Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK
In her films and immersive installations, Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987) assumes half-human, half-fish form to explore submarine tunnels, hydroelectric plants, and other hidden elements of infrastructure associated with mechanical and societal power. For Škarnulytė “future archaeologist” character, these built environments are relics of a lost human culture, parts of new mythologies for our currently endangered planet.
Larissa Sansour: These Moments Will Disappear Too
Through February 15
Kuntshal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
Past, present, and imagined futures come together in the meticulously crafted video works and installations of London-based Palestinian Danish artist Larissa Sansour (b. 1973). These Moments Will Disappear Too takes the history of Palestine as its point of departure while offering a space to reflect on broader themes of national identity, shared human experience, collective memory, and potential environmental catastrophe.
Maruja Mallo: Máscara y compás (Mask and Compass)
Through March 16
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
This retrospective brings greater visibility to the work of Maruja Mallo (1902–1995), a leading figure of modern art in Spain and a member of the avant-garde Generation of ’27. Máscara y compás traces the artist’s practice from the Surrealist compositions of her early years to the fantastical geometric configurations of her final works. Whether her settings are the working-class neighborhoods of Madrid or the remote countryside, Mallo invests the relationship of humans to nature with cosmic significance.
ASIA
Almagul Menlibayeva: I Understand Everything
Through May
Almaty Museum of Arts, Almaty, Kazakhstan
This inaugural exhibition of the Almaty Museum of Arts showcases works from the late 1980s to the present by Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969), one of the most prominent voices in Central Asian contemporary art. Across painting, printmaking, photography, video, performance, textiles, and multimedia installations, Menlibayeva addresses the complex cultural, historical, and sociopolitical history of Kazakhstan, weaving in Indigenous mythologies and confronting such issues as women and identity, ecology, energy, and neocolonialism.
Anti-Action: Artist-Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan
Through February 8
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Art criticism of the 1950s and 1960s in Japan rarely addressed women’s contributions to the action painting movement. This exhibition adopts the gender studies perspective of Nakajima Izumi’s 2019 book Anti-action: Post-war Japanese Art and Women Artists, focusing on Yayoi Kusama, Hideko Fukushima, and less well known women artists working in this era.
Ayesha Sultana: Fragility and Resilience
Through January 5
Jaipur Centre for Art, India, in collaboration with the Ishara Art Foundation
Against the backdrop of social, ecological, and personal upheavals, Fragility and Resilience brings together works by Bangladesh-born, US-based artist Ayesha Sultana (b. 1984): hand-blown glass sculptures, oil paintings, watercolors on Japanese silk tissue, works on clay-coated paper, and photographs that explore the delicate balance between our planet’s vulnerability and its strength.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Ghadeer Saeed: Undefined
Through January 1
Dar Al-Anda Gallery, Amman, Jordan
Ghadeer Saeed (b. 1981, Libya), a Palestinian diasporic artist living in Amman, digitally and physically interweaves photographs—many of them her own—to create predominantly monochromatic collages punctuated by vivid bursts of color. By focusing on iconic “Oriental” and global subjects, Ghadeer explores human disorientation in an era when technology overwhelms our humanity and themes of war and chaos intersect with questions of identity.
AFRICA
Cauleen Smith: Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted
Through October 4
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), Cape Town
In this first major presentation on the African continent of African American artist Cauleen Smith (b. 1967), films and videos interact with drawings, sculpted objects, colorful textile banners, and sound to offer visitors a layered sensory experience. Smith meditates here on myriad ongoing interests, including Black experimental cinema, Afrocentric aesthetics, Black feminism, non-Western cosmologies, the emancipatory uses of the utopic, and what the artist calls “the everyday possibilities of the imagination.”
I’m Not Governed By My Flesh
Through January 17
Affinity Art Gallery, Lagos
In the quiet rumble of pigment pressed into rough canvas, Johannesburg-based artist Lulama Wolf (b. 1993) elevates her subjects—women crowned with horns, sometimes drawing the gaze of a horned cow—to the threshold between heaven and earth. Animated by ritual, myth, and ancestral memory, Wolf’s figures are delicate and restful yet full of power.
Rachel Marsil: Ce que la mer murmure (What the Sea Whispers)
Through January 17
Galerie Cécile Fakhoury at Hotel Sokhamon, Dakar, Senegal
Senegalese French painter and sculptor Rachel Marsil (b. 1995) draws on the history of the exhibition venue, originally built as a maternity hospital and spiritual site, and on the Afrofuturist mythology of 1990s Detroit-based electronic music duo Drexciya to evoke an underwater world inhabited by the children of pregnant Black women thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade.
OCEANIA
Yasmin Smith: Elemental Life
Through June 8
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney
Relying on field research, community collaboration, and technical experimentation, ceramic artist Yasmin Smith (b. 1984) formulates unique glazes whose chemical signatures echo the environments from which she draws the plants and minerals she burns to create them. Elemental Life presents the major wall-based installation Seine River Basin (2019), commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris and acquired for the MCA Collection in 2020, alongside new and recent works investigating waterways in relation to deep geological time.