CAA News Today
CWA Picks: Winter 2023/2024
posted Dec 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.