CAA News Today
CWA Picks: Fall 2024
posted by CAA — September 23, 2024
Cheryl Pagurek, Winter Garden interactive digital collage, 2023
The exhibitions and other events selected for the Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Fall Picks highlight the multitude of technologies–old and new–that artists have used to bring attention to overlooked communities including fellow creatives: groups sidelined for reasons of race, region, gender, sexuality, and other marginalizing factors and non-human entities with whom we share space.
UNITED STATES
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit
September 28–February 9
SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit presents the first West Coast retrospective on the work of this critical yet overlooked figure in the history of modern photography. Over the course of six decades, Kanaga championed the artistic value of photography and documented urgent social issues, from urban poverty and labor rights to racial terror and inequality. Her work remains as relevant today as it was during her own lifetime. Organized from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, this exhibition charts the artist’s vision, which spans pathbreaking photojournalism, modernist still lifes, and celebrated portraits of Black Americans.
Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968-72
Through December 1
The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
In 2023, the Block Museum acquired a group of photographs by folk musician and photographer Bev Grant. In the late 1960s and early 70s, Grant participated in and photographed left-wing and radical protests in and around New York City. She was a member of the group New York Radical Women and documented events associated with the group, as well as the Moratorium on the Vietnam War and other anti-war protests, pro-abortion rallies, and the Miss America Pageant protest. Her work presents a view of events reflecting broad political engagement and social justice demonstrations that defined the late 1960s and 70s in the US.
Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies
Through January 19
Brooklyn Museum, NYC
Prolific Black social realist printmaker, sculptor, and painter Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012), who was born in Washington, DC, but worked primarily in Mexico, devoted her oeuvre and activism to uplifting the Black and Mexican women and other working-class individuals who so often formed her subjects. The Brooklyn Museum show includes more than 150 works by Catlett.
Ja’Tovia Gary: The Giverny Suite
Through December 7
The Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Ja’Tovia Gary uses documentary film and experimental video to address representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Gary was at the Terra Foundation for American Art’s residency program in Giverny, France during the summer of 2016 when several widely-publicized police-involved killings of African Americans took place in the United States. An immersive, three-channel film installation, The Giverny Suite, (2019) centers the voices and bodies of Black women in an experimental film essay that is a meditation on the interconnected themes of insecurity/safety, isolation/respite, autonomy, and love. Gary presents a complicated and nuanced portrait of the diversity and complexity of Black women’s relationship to physical and emotional security.
Jasmine Gregory: Who Wants to Die for Glamour
October 10–Spring 2025
MoMA PS1, NYC
The monumental mixed-media figural and abstract canvases of Zurich-based American artist Jasmine Gregory (b. 1987) draw from art history and popular culture to critique commodification, consumerism, and the systems of cultural patrimony, including the racism and misogyny that dwell therein.
Kandy G Lopez: (In)visible Threads
Through March 2
Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA
Kandy G Lopez, a multidisciplinary Afro-Caribbean American artist, critically engages with the complexities of identity and marginalization. Lopez’s fiber-based artworks serve as a powerful medium to navigate the intricacies of ancestry, race, class, and gender. As an artist, Lopez is driven by a desire to represent marginalized individuals who inspire and move her, constantly seeking challenges both materialistically and metaphorically. Her works are born from a deep-seated need to learn about her people and culture, fostering a dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. This exhibition features her large-scale fiber works – portraits “painted” with yarn.
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature
Through January 5
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature celebrates the work of photographer Laura Aguilar (1959-2018) and her series of intimate portraits of nude, large-bodied women in natural settings. Nudes in Nature brings together nearly 60 photographic works from the most recognized of Aguilar’s series. Featured works depict the Southwestern region of the United States and highlight the inherent connections between nature and the female form. Exhibited in conversation, they encourage reflection on the ways female bodies are perceived within the natural world in comparison to how they are viewed in social and cultural spaces.
Through October 13
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
November 16–May 18, 2025
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT
When she worked in her New York studio, said painter Martha Diamond (1944–2023), she was “thinking of infinity: to the time of religion, of history, … using shapes that have been significant to people for thousands of years.” A selection of Diamond’s drawings and monotypes appears in this exhibition alongside examples of her better-known large-scale abstracted city views and full abstractions in oil on canvas, all engaging with the notions of cyclicality and disruption that are central to the geological and anthropological theories of deep time.
Ming Smith: Wind Chime
Through January 5
The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH
Ming Smith: Wind Chime explores spirituality, movement, and feminism in a solo exhibition pairing recent work by the Columbus-raised artist Ming Smith with the photographic series that started her career in 1972. The centerpiece of the exhibit, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs using projection, marks an entirely new direction in her practice. Also on view are recent collages and color photographs—all set to an ambient soundscape created by Smith’s son, Mingus Murray. The exhibition also includes nearly 30 black-and-white photographs from Smith’s Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt over the span of three decades.
Nicole Eisenman: Fixed Crane for Madison Square Park
October 24–March 9
Madison Square Park Conservancy, NYC
Nicole Eisenman, best known for incisive works that capture the human experience in unexpected, grim, and humorous scenes, continues her innovation through sculpture with a new commission that destabilizes familiar heroic objects associated with exploration and advancement. On view in the park’s Oval Lawn, Eisenman offers visitors the opportunity to explore and engage with a toppled 100-foot-long industrial crane embellished with roughhewn sculptural “barnacles.” The artist draws inspiration from art history—referencing Duchamp’s readymades, Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and Rodin’s figures. Eisenman’s project lends humanity and humor to these references, challenging our notions of progress and achievement.
Rosalie D. Gagné: A Contemporary Alchemist
Through December 22
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY
Combining organic materials like glass, clay, and live plants with inorganic matter like plastics and computers, Montreal-based artist Rosalie D. Gagné produces large-scale sculptural installations that examine our perceptions of nature and technology and the interactions of organic systems with human-built ones, including simulation in the form of biomimicry. The Neuberger retrospective will include a re-creation of Gagné’s 2020 Artificial Kingdom IV comprising forty-five suspended, tentacled polyethylene forms that respond to viewer movements.
Steina: Playback
October 25–January 12
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
In fall 2024, the List Visual Arts Center will present the first solo exhibition in over a decade of Steina, the pathbreaking media artist whose work traverses video, music, and technology through a commitment to spontaneity and play. Steina’s nearly five decades of video work queries the possibilities of sound-image exchange, machine vision, and electronic abstraction. This exhibition will trace Steina’s creative practice from early collaborative works with Woody Vasulka to her independent explorations of optics, machine vision, and a liberated, non-anthropocentric subjectivity. The show seeks to both bring renewed recognition to the artist’s innovative vision and argue for her influence and relevance today as a younger generation of artists consider modes of art-making that resist easy commodification and question the place of technology and the human in relation to larger ecological and planetary concerns.
Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter
Through January 12
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Combining richly colored textiles, found objects, beads, and more, multidisciplinary artist Suchitra Mattai (b. 1973, Georgetown, Guyana) explores themes of history, identity, and belonging. The forces that lead certain stories to be remembered, or forgotten, are central to her art. Drawing on her Indo-Caribbean roots, Mattai weaves together personal narratives, collective mythologies, and colonial history. Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC. Large-scale textile installations, sculptures, collages, and paintings by Mattai are presented with a selection of related historical artworks from Europe and Southeast Asia.
MEXICO
Ana Gallardo: Tembló acá un delirio
Through December 15
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Since the end of the 90s, a time when globalization instrumentalized precarity and the feminization of labor beyond the scope of care and the domestic, the work of Ana Gallardo has problematized the privatization of feelings and social relationships through a perspective that centers the open wound of violence against women.
¡Hija de su madre! Una exposición de Mónica Mayer
Through September
Galería de Arte Contemporáneo de Xalapa, Mexico
The exhibition Her Mother’s Daughter! An exhibition of Mónica Mayer traces a fascinating journey through the artist’s different creative stages, encompassing more than one hundred historical and recent pieces created over the last five decades around themes such as family, motherhood, and gender. Since the 1970s, Mónica Mayer (Mexico, 1954) has held two central convictions: that the personal is political and that art is inseparable from life itself. In her works, she uses irony and performance to examine the evolution of family structures and question the persistence of exploitation and sexist norms affecting women.
Myra Landau: Sensitive Geometry
Through February 23
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Although Myra Landau’s work is substantial to the development of geometric abstraction in the second half of the twentieth century, her work is little known. This retrospective responds to the urgency to not only investigate and give visibility to female artists who have been left out of the hegemonic historiographic discourse, but also to understand their contributions to the history of geometric abstraction, particularly sensitive geometry, an approach that has been excluded by the art canon in Mexico.
CANADA
Cheryl Pagurek: Winter Garden
Through December 8
Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC
Using machine learning software, Winter Garden mirrors the presence and movement of viewers via a webcam, creating an ever-changing collage composed of motifs of lively indoor plants against a desolate winter landscape. The concept began from a series of still-life photographs depicting a small oasis of indoor plants that the artist tended to during the lockdown in the winter of 2021. As a woman in the cross-over area of art and tech, Pagurek aims to broaden approaches and themes presented in the field.
Lucy Qinnuayuak
Opening October 9
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON
One of the first artists to ever begin creating works at the print studio in Kinngait, Nunavut in the 1960s, Lucy Qinnuayuak’s colorful depictions of birds and scenes of domestic life bring to life the world as she saw it. In this exhibition of 20 works on paper, the viewer is invited to explore the evolution of Qinnuayuak’s style, from her concept drawings to stonecut prints, many of which include her much-loved owls.
SOUTH AMERICA
Cronotopías: Silvia Rivas
Through October 6
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia
Cronotopías is the first solo exhibition in Colombia dedicated to the work of Argentine artist Silvia Rivas. The exhibition explores the relationship between time and space through video installations, animations, and liminal environments. Rivas has developed extensive work in this field since the late 1990s and her work has been internationally recognized for its ability to create immersive and emotionally resonant experiences.
Desde la ventana: Ana Mercedes Hoyos. Una retrospective
Through October 6
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia
Through the Window: Ana Mercedes Hoyos. A Retrospective is the fourth exhibition of the artist at MAMBO, her second retrospective, and the most comprehensive to date, showcasing the entirety of Hoyos’ work (1942–2014), particularly the period between 1968 and 1984. This period constitutes one of the most important contributions of the artist to contemporary Colombian and Latin American art, during which she developed her unique form of pop, landscape, and abstraction.
Musa. Perspectivas femeninas en las Colecciones del MAMM y MAC Panamá
Through May 4
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia
This exhibition brings together works from the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panama and seeks to make visible the works of female artists who historically have had less prominence than their male counterparts.
EUROPE & UK
Against All Odds: Historical Women and New Algorithms
Through December 8
Statens Museum for Kunsts, Copenhagen, Denmark
During the years 1870–1910, a number of Nordic female artists achieved success against all odds. However, despite their success, they were later forgotten and quietly disappeared from history. What happened? We investigate this question, bring the artists back into the spotlight and explore how artificial intelligence can be used to understand and communicate history in new ways. All 24 artists in the exhibition have one thing in common: they left their Nordic home countries to pursue their artistic ambitions abroad in places such as Germany, Italy, France and Greece. There, they met other women in the same situation, forming networks across national borders. In the exhibition, you will encounter both spectacular artworks by the 24 artists and digital installations based on artificial intelligence. These installations use the women’s artworks, biographies and research to tell their collective story.
Gabriele Münter: the Great Expressionist Woman Painter
November 12–February 9
Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, Spain
Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) was one of the founders of The Blue Rider [Der Blaue Reiter], the legendary group of Expressionist artists based in Munich. The exhibition, which includes more than one hundred paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, aims to reveal an artist who rebelled against the limits imposed on women of her day and who succeeded in becoming one of the most notable figures of German Expressionism in the early 20th century.
Hilary Heron: A Retrospective
Through October 28
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
Presenting the work of pioneering Dublin-born, modernist sculptor Hilary Heron (1923 – 1977), this is the first major retrospective exhibition of Heron’s work since 1964. Bringing together work from national and international collections, the exhibit includes Heron’s carvings, welding and castings. A master welder, Heron’s practice was highly unusual for an Irish artist, let alone a woman in the 1950s. Her work tactfully and skillfully broaches themes of gender, relationships, deep histories and religion through impressive, varied mediums including stone, lead, steel and wood. Hilary Heron: A Retrospective seeks to correct the ways that her work has been overlooked in Irish and international histories of modern sculpture.
Zanele Muholi
Through January 26
Tate Modern, London, UK
Zanele Muholi is one of the most acclaimed photographers working today, and their work has been exhibited all over the world. With over 260 photographs, this major exhibition presents the full breadth of their career to date. Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities.
ASIA
Tosh Basco: No Sky
Through October 15
Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China
The Filipino-American performance artist Tosh Basco (b. 1988), a nonbinary trans artist who for years has performed under the drag persona boychild, receives her first survey exhibition in No Sky. Her movement-based practice–informed by research into a wide range of experimental and improvisational performance styles, from Japanese Butoh to shamanism–finds expression in paintings created by impressing her body on the canvas after coating it with theatrical materials like clown paint, as well as in paintings and works on paper.
Akutagawa Saori: 100th Anniversary of Her Birth
Through October 20
Yokosuka Museum of Art, Yokosuka, Japan
Avant-garde painter and dye artist Akutagawa (Madokoro) Saori (1924–1966) exhibited extensively in her native Japan starting in 1954, when she won the Newcomer Award at the 4th Modern Art Association Exhibition in Tokyo, and twice while living in Los Angeles and New York in 1958–62. Akutagawa deployed bold forms and a vivid palette in abstractions and in works evoking expressive female figures (Woman series), monsters, and deities (Myths/FolkTales series). Her oeuvre reflects influences as varied as her travels in the Soviet Union and the 1955 Mexican Art Exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum. The Yokosuka Museum show, held in the centennial year of the artist’s birth, features works from the institution’s permanent collection.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Alia Ahmad: Aspects [مظاهر]
Through October 22
Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, UAE
Alia Ahmad is a Saudi Arabian painter (b.1996). Her color palette is influenced by an upbringing in Riyadh’s industrial/desert landscape. She seeks, in Aspects to peel back layers, exposing her personal vocabulary. Ahmad’s point of departure – the rapidly changing environment of her home city, Riyadh, where traditional ways of life exist alongside industrialization and modernization, where native plant life and cultural art forms thrive within one of the world’s fastest-growing urban settings. Ahmad’s segmented compositions, with their tonal contrasts, modulated colors, sinewy brushwork, and gestural forms provide a sense of constant growth.
Mouza Al Hamrani: Homepage
Through October 24
Tashkeel, Dubai, UAE
Mouza Al Hamrani is an Emirate illustrator and multimedia artist whose work is rooted in the pop culture of the GCC region. Her work explores the intricate and often exhausting reality of contemporary life, delving into themes of cultural inheritance and the human condition. Homepage reinterprets early “Khaleeji” cyberspace’s digital ephemera into a tangible, immersive experience. This exhibition bridges the virtual and physical worlds, capturing the impact of Khaleeji cyberspace as it entered modern culture. By bringing these digital relics into the real world, Al Hamrani celebrates the online anonymity afforded during a time when the GCC was wary of the World Wide Web. The exhibition explores questions such as: How did this foreign technology affect a conservative culture? What does it signify when digital artifacts are removed from their original context? How does viewing them outside their intended space change their meaning? How did people express themselves while remaining anonymous?
Zainab: The Weight of Snow on Her Chest
Through December 6
Gulf Photos Plus, Dubai, UAE
Zainab (b. 1998, Srinagar, Kashmir) is a visual artist based in Kashmir, India. Her engagements with photography are mostly personal, reflecting her experiences of surviving in a militarized region. The Weight of Snow on Her Chest renders a portrait of a home in Kashmir—moving through the constant sieges enforced in the region. Zainab’s photographs carry the everyday feelings of suffocation and anxiety in a place where both identity and existence are threatened by a colonizing power. The photographs are accompanied by verses that draw upon her role as a photojournalist documenting property destructions and encounters in other Kashmiri homes. The combination of image and text within this work skillfully recasts photographs as metaphors.
OCEANIA
Julie Rrap: Past Continuous
Through February 16
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia
A major figure in Australian contemporary art for over 40 years, Julie Rrap (b. 1950, Widjabul Wia-bal Country/Lismore) works across photography, video, performance, sculpture, and drawing to examine representations of the body in art and popular culture. Julie Rrap: Past Continuous features the artist’s landmark installation Disclosures: A Photographic Construct (1982), as well as newer works using the artist’s body 42 years later. Rrap uses the camera as a powerful feminist tool to give agency to the model (often herself) as both the object and subject of her works. In recent years, Rrap has reflected on the invisibility of the aging female body and how we look or look away when confronted by certain bodies.