CAA News Today
CWA Picks: Winter 2024–25
posted Dec 20, 2024
Chiharu Shiota, Between Worlds
Art, like memory, is rarely linear. It ebbs and flows, reshaping itself in the way we consider it. The exhibitions that were chosen for CWA Winter 2024–25 Picks ask us to engage in the act of looking both forward and back while reflecting on how the passage of time, shifting perspectives, and evolving experiences transform our understanding of the artists’ work. Through these acts of reconsideration and reevaluation, we notice that meaning is not static—it is shaped by context, perception, and the continuously shifting relationship between the artist and the audience.
UNITED STATES
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
Through March 9
SFMOMA, San Francisco
This exhibition presents nearly fifty of Amy Sherald’s luminous paintings, including her iconic portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, poetic early works, and new works on view for the first time. Sherald’s artworks convey the quiet power of everyday people and invite viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of American identity.
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
February 8–July 2025
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
California-born, Berlin-based sound artist Christine Sun Kim’s playful, politically resonant infographics on paper, murals, sculptures, performances, and other works address her lived experience as a Deaf individual and speaker of American Sign Language. This first museum survey covers the artist’s works from 2011 to the present.
Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape: Dana Fritz
February 4–August 2
Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas
In this series by artist and University of Nebraska–Lincoln professor Dana Fritz (b. 1970), haunting black-and-white photographs present the remains of a spring-fed forest within an otherwise near-empty stretch of semiarid Nebraska prairie, a thirty-one-square-mile plot of trees hand-planted at the turn of the twentieth century. The images raise questions about historical and contemporary environmental efforts: their motivations (here, originally, the desire to create a timber industry from scratch), their failures, and, in the forest’s survival, their successes.
Goddess Tales
Through December 21
Apexart, New York
Goddess Tales reinterprets the function of ritual, techniques that can be tools for the diaspora to feel at home via shared cultural understandings. The exhibition highlights the need to reimagine these practices today. Included artists subvert patriarchal values and gender binaries to create their own future folklores centering on the goddess archetype. The exhibition also foregrounds Native practices that were historically banned because they were seen as threats to colonial power.
Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis
January 26–May 25
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
In Pictures for Charis, American photographer Kelli Connell reconsiders the relationship between writer Charis Wilson and photographer Edward Weston through a close examination of Wilson’s prose and Weston’s iconic photographs of the Western landscape and the female nude. Connell weaves together the stories of Wilson and Weston with that of her own relationship with her partner at the time, Betsy Odom, enriching our understanding of the couple from her contemporary queer and feminist perspective. Selections from Pictures for Charis appeared in Art Journal 83, no. 2.
Made of Memory
Through March 16
New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU), Los Gatos, CA
NUMU presents an exhibition of five women artists who explore concepts of memory as it pertain to generational and cultural experience, immigration and migration. Through various media, they explore their experience of inherited memories and unveil personal stories of family and heritage while inviting us all to consider the deeper themes that connect us with the past and with each other. Engaging with culturally significant materials and symbolism, these works examine the vicarious nature of memory and present implicit meanings carried in ancestral artifacts that are passed from one generation to the next. Each artist
Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection
Through April 20
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, CA
Making Their Mark brings together more than seventy artworks by women artists from the Shah Garg Collection, illuminating transgenerational affinities, influences, and methodologies among pathbreaking artists from the postwar era to the present.
Pablita’s Wardrobe: Family & Fashion
Through April 12
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, NM
Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin, and Margarete Bagshaw—mother, daughter, and granddaughter—have a defining role in our understanding of painting traditions in New Mexico. All are tied to, and descended from, the Tewa people of Kha’p’o Owingeh, Santa Clara Pueblo. Each was independently known as one of the finest painters of her generation. Each struggled to be recognized in an artistic field still predominantly defined as Anglo and male. As women artists, defining and holding their own space was important. A means of achieving this was the careful cultivation of self-image while holding onto cultural values beyond the reach of a commercial art scene.
Tamara de Lempicka
Through February 9
de Young Museum, San Francisco
With works that exuded cool elegance and transgressive sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980) helped define Art Deco. Her paintings captured the glamor and vitality of postwar Paris and the cosmopolitan sheen of Hollywood celebrity. This exhibition—the first major museum retrospective of Lempicka in the United States—explores the artist’s distinctive style and unconventional life through four major chapters. More than one hundred works are on display and range from her post-Cubist work in 1920s Paris to her famous nudes and portraits to the melancholic still lifes and interiors of her final days in the United States and Mexico.
Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art
Ongoing
Brooklyn Museum, New York
How might American art be experienced at this moment? In honor of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary, a transformative reinstallation of the American Art galleries reorients the ways that the Brooklyn Museum exhibits—and audiences rediscover—this acclaimed collection. Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives act as throughlines in this vast presentation of more than four hundred works.
MEXICO
Myra Landau: Sensitive Geometry
Through February 23
Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City
Born in Bucharest, Myra Landau (1926–2018) escaped Nazi persecution as a teenager and settled first in Río de Janiero, then in Mexico City (in the early 1970s) and Veracruz (1974–1994) before moving to Rome, Jerusalem, and finally the Netherlands. This exhibition brings much-needed attention to the geometric abstractions Landau produced during the nearly fifty years after her arrival in Mexico. Landau pastels, artists’ books, and works in other media reflect her relatively loose, free handling of abstract form, an approach of the type described by Brazilian critic Roberto Pontual as Geometria sensível.
SOUTH AMERICA
Circumambulatio: Anna Bella Geiger
Through July 27
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paolo, Brazil
The process piece Circumambulatio (in Latin, “a walk around”) by Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933) and four students has been reassembled here for the first time since its initial presentation in 1972. The group spent three months interrogating the notion of the center by making large-scale imprints in the sand of Rio de Janeiro’s Marapendi Reserve and by asking pedestrians what they thought of as the city’s center. The slides, photographs, experimental music, and handwritten records in this installation treat the theme of the center from scientific, psychoanalytic, philosophical, religious, visual, linguistic, and other perspectives.
EUROPE & UK
Chiharu Shiota: Between Worlds
Through April 20
Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey
Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) evokes Istanbul’s position as a port city at the crossroads of Asia and Europe—and her own position as an Osaka-born artist working in Berlin—in “Between Worlds,” her full-gallery installation of an enveloping net punctuated by suitcases. Humanizing the net are its red threads, which suggest blood vessels; the suitcases, too, stand in for people, signifying the memories and feelings we carry through space and time. The exhibition celebrates the hundredth year of diplomatic relations between Turkey and Japan.
Kamilla Szíj: The Path of the Sun
Through January 17
Vintage Galéria, Budapest, Hungary
In these new drawings, Hungarian artist Kamilla Szíj (b. 1957) uses gently applied yet arresting patterns of overlapping, interlocking, cascading ovals to capture the play of light through circular openings in the blinds of her home studio. The works are musings on the passage of time and on the often unaddressed centrality of the sun in human existence.
Nicola L.: I Am the Last Woman Object
Through December 29
Camden Art Centre, London
This is the first in-depth exploration of Nicola L.’s multilayered practice, which encompassed cosmology, environmental concerns, spirituality, mortality, sexuality, and political resistance, and is typically contextualized within Pop art, nouveau realism, feminism, and design. The show includes textile sculptures intended to be participatory as a political gesture—all people united in one skin, regardless of ethnicity or gender. Oversized and caricatured sculptures are imbued with political commentary on equality, collectivity, and place, particularly for women, within society. A series of works on bed sheets memorialize women whose lives ended in tragedy or violence, among them Eva Hesse, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, and Ulrike Meinhof.
ASIA
The Elemental You: Simryn Gill, Neha Choksi and Hajra Waheed
Through January 9
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India
In The Elemental You, works in a wide range of media by South Asian diaspora artists Simryn Gill (b. 1959), Neha Choksi (b. 1973), and Hajra Waheed (b. 1980) explore the geological and cultural relationship of human activity to the Earth’s landscapes. Addressing themes of deep time and of reconciling oneself to loss, the exhibition exposes humanity’s destructive interventions but also reveals the importance of explorations and chronicling by artists, the latter engagements constituting, in curator Akansha Rastogi’s view, acts of care.
Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful.
Through January 19
Mori Art Museum, Roppongi, Tokyo
This first solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois in Japan in the twenty-first century takes place at the Mori Art Museum in the Roppongi Hills development in Tokyo, home to one of the artist’s enormous bronze mother spider sculptures, Maman (1999/2002). The show features paintings from Bourgeois’s first decade in New York, 1938–48, and puts Maman in conversation with other Bourgeois spiders as well as with other large and small-scale sculptures. Passages from the artist’s psychoanalytic writings appear in a new set of projections by Jenny Holzer, here with Japanese translations.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
Zeinab Al Hashemi: Metempsychosis
Through January 15
Al Serkal Avenue, Dubai, UA
Metempsychosis is a reflection on transformation, where the raw materials of industry and history meet personal healing. This body of work represents Zeinab Alhashemi’s ongoing exploration of the elements that shape her artistic practice while also responding to the trauma of a life-altering car accident. Metal, now a permanent part of her body in the form of screws and hardware, is exposed in her sculptures as a metaphor for the structures that define contemporary existence. These elements highlight the impact of human intervention in reshaping the environment. At the heart of the exhibition are sculptures made from PVC Roman pillar molds, enveloped in camel hides, a material that symbolizes the tension between heritage and industrialism, death, and rebirth. The visible screw bolts serve as both functional elements and symbols of mechanization, echoing the hardware in her own body. These bolts, a recurring motif in Alhashemi’s work, ground her in the industrial era while transforming personal trauma into art.
AFRICA
Annamieke Engelbrecht: Between Worlds: Fragments of a Cosmic Reality
Through January 16
Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
Between Worlds: Fragments of a Cosmic Reality by Engelbrecht invites you to set aside preconceived notions of reality and enter a space where familiar ideas dissolve into something vast and unknowable. Through abstract forms and shifting compositions, each work draws us into a liminal space where the finite and infinite converge, offering a sense of cosmic unity that transcends human constructs. Each artwork is a fragment of a larger whole, narrating the landscapes within and the distant strata beyond. These pieces present not a linear story but a layered experience—a vision of boundaries that define and connect us to an ever-expanding cosmos.
OCEANIA
Julia Trybala: Wide Eyed
Through January 25
Station Gallery, Sydney, Australia
In Wide Eyed, Julia Trybala continues to explore relationship dynamics through figurative painting. Her work, inspired by personal conversations with friends and family, captures an emotive response to the social dynamics of contemporary life while also referencing traditional Western painting practices. In this new body of work, the figures step into the spotlight becoming main characters in their own narrative rather than obscured amongst the setting. Hints of objects and landscapes emerge to ground the figures to time and place, suggesting an unfolding story.