CAA News Today

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.

Martha Diamond: Deep Time

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.

Rosana Paulino, Garça Branca from the Mangrove-Women series, 2023

The exhibitions, screenings, projects, and talks selected for CWA’s Spring Picks hint at the fleeting, ephemeral nature of memory and intimacy. The creatives highlighted here have left their mark, interpreting and imbuing their materials with meaning, often leaving behind evidence of their process. 

 UNITED STATES  

Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures 

Through April 28 

Art on Hulfish Gallery, Princeton, NJ 

Princeton University Art Museum’s Art on Hulfish presents a survey of work by Christina Fernandez, a Los Angeles–based artist who has spent more than thirty years conducting a rich exploration of migration, labor, gender, and her Mexican American identity through photography. Whether staged or candid, Fernandez’s photographs record touch and mark making, engaging the medium’s distinct ability to convey surfaces—the surfaces of bodies, architecture, and the images themselves. Multiple Exposures traces the development of the artist’s work from the late 1980s to now. 

Hana Miletić: Soft Services 

April 4–August 4  

MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA 

Since 2015, the Zagreb-born Miletić has worked almost exclusively with hand-produced textiles across several ongoing series.  

Her Materials series is comprised of works hand woven on a 1970s loom. As an extension of her formal training as a photographer, their idiosyncratic shapes and color-schemes are based on Miletić’s snapshots of temporary repairs to buildings and objects in urban public spaces. Though never exhibited, her photographs of responsive, ad-hoc constructions become templates for seemingly abstract textile pieces. Her meticulous and time-consuming use of hand work to document the ephemeral repairs reproduces this ethos of care and provides a slowness and material intimacy that Miletić found lacking in photography. Across her various series, Miletić also calls attention to the gendered associations of textile craft, subtly relating forms of historically undervalued labor, like the “women’s work” of weaving, to other narratives of social and economic struggle and the larger political forces that give shape to them.  

Jane Catlin: A Retrospective 

Through June 15  

Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan 

Jane Catlin’s career as an artist and teacher has lasted more than forty years. During that time she has produced figural paintings to semi-abstract images of biological forms and processes. Throughout her career, Catlin’s style and content have shifted due to the profound influence of her travels through Japan, Korea, Africa, and Canada. This overview reveals her fascination with biology, ecology, and the environment. The mysterious imagery that results from her visual meditations evokes our mutating world and serves as a reminder of both the beauty and fragility of nature. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see some of her most significant works presented together for the first time.  

Joan Jonas: Good Night, Good Morning 

March 17–July 6  

Museum of Modern Art, New York  

Joan Jonas creates meditations on bodies, space, time, and nature. As she has explained, “The performer sees herself as a medium: information passes through.” The most comprehensive retrospective of Jonas’s work in the United States, this exhibition provides new insights into the artist’s process, unprecedented access to archival materials, and fresh historical perspectives on Jonas’s work. Drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations, drawn from MoMA’s collection and institutions around the world, will trace the development of Jonas’s career, from works made in the 1960s and 1970s exploring the confluence of technology and ritual to more recent ones dealing with ecology and the landscape. 

Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams 

March 24–July 14  

Baltimore Museum of Art

This fifty-year career retrospective celebrates one of the most significant artists of our time. Best known for her virtuosic use of beads and glass, Scott’s work across varying media beguiles viewers with beauty and humor while confronting racism, sexism, ecological devastation, and complex family dynamics. The exhibition includes more than 120 objects ranging from woven tapestries and soft sculpture from the 1970s and audacious performances and wearable art in the 1980s to sculptures of astonishing formal ingenuity and social force from the late 1970s to the present moment.

On April 11, 6:30–8:30 p.m. Joyce J. Scott will appear with longtime collaborator Kay Lawal-Muhammad, in a conversation moderated by Tracey Beale, BMA Director of Public Programs. 

June Clark: Witness 

May 3–August 11 

The Power Plant, Toronto

June Clark: Witness is the first survey in Canada of the Toronto-based artist June Clark, who, since the late 1960s, has developed a unique and groundbreaking practice spanning photo-based work, text, collage, installation, and sculptural assemblages. In this deeply personal exhibition, she explores how history, memory, and identity—both individual and collective—have established the familial and artistic lineages that shape her work. 

Witness brings together four significant bodies of work that stretch from the 1990s to the present, many of them seen here for the first time. These include her iconic installations Family Secrets (1992) and Harlem Quilt (1997); a series of photo-based works from 2004 titled 42 Thursdays in Paris; Perseverance Suite (a new project); and Homage, a collection of sculptural assemblages that, in Clark’s words, “gave me permission to be the artist I am today.”

June Clark: Witness will be presented in tandem with another solo exhibition of the artist’s work at the Art Gallery of Ontario titled June Clark: Unrequited Love. 

LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time 

Thorugh July 21  

Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA 

LaToya M. Hobbs: It’s Time presents the series Carving Out Time (2020–21), a life-size suite of woodcuts by the Arkansas-born, Baltimore-based artist. Unfolding over five scenes, the work depicts a day in Hobbs’s life with her husband and children. Hobbs shares the labor and intimacy of her private life in these prints, centering the negotiations she brokers daily to balance her manifold responsibilities—as a wife, mother, educator, and artist. The series is also a powerful statement about her influences and self-fashioning as an artist: references to paintings, sculptures, and prints by prominent artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Valerie Maynard, and Kerry James Marshall appear throughout. Carving Out Time is a part of Hobbs’s ongoing Salt of the Earth project, which she characterizes as “the personification of Black women as salt in relation to their role as preservers of family, culture and community.” 

Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy 

Through May 25 

Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California San Diego, La Jolla  

Bodily Autonomy is Lauren Lee McCarthy’s largest US solo exhibition to date. For the past fifteen years, McCarthy has worked in performance, video, installation, software, artificial intelligence, and other media to address how an algorithmically determined world impacts human relationships and social life. The show brings together two major series of works—Surrogate and Saliva—to examine the current state of bio-surveillance in times of rapid technological development and increased corporate and government surveillance. 

Loie Hollowell: Dilation Stage 

Through April 20 

Pace Gallery, New York 

Hollowell will present ten new pastel drawings that document the dilation stage of labor. Displayed sequentially on a rounded wall, these drawings feature depictions of Hollowell’s own pregnant abdomen, rendered to scale. Below each belly is a circle the exact size of the effaced cervix as it expands. The cervical “circles” at the bottom of each drawing seem to pulse as the series progresses, culminating in a blazing cadmium red. 

In addition to these drawings, the exhibition will include a unique birthing bench that Hollowell created collaboratively with her husband, sculptor Brian Caverly. The birthing chair has been used by women in labor throughout millennia and the rendition here, which visitors are invited to sit on, is created not just for the birther, but also for the partner, midwife, doula, doctor, or any other witness to the transcendent journey of birth.

Dilation Stage will coincide with Hollowell’s first museum survey, on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through August 11. 

Modern Art for an Old Tale: Fuku Akino’s Illustrations for “The Dwarf Pine Tree” 

Through July 31   

Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

This exhibition presents more than twenty illustrations for The Dwarf Pine Tree by Fuku Akino (1908–2001), a Kyoto-based painter and teacher who was one of Japan’s most prominent woman artists during her lifetime. Published in 1963, The Dwarf Pine Tree is a modern retelling of a Japanese folk tale whose main character is a pine tree, an important symbol in Japanese culture representing love and endurance. The book is one of several collaborations between Akino, the author Betty Jean Lifton, and the editor Jean Karl, who promoted her vision to publish complex and culturally diverse stories for young American readers such as those written by Lifton, an American resident of Japan, and illustrated by Akino.   

Nona Faustine: White Shoes 

Through July 7 

Brooklyn Museum, New York

“What does a Black person look like today in those places where Africans were once sold, a century and a half ago?” asks artist Nona Faustine (b. 1977). Using her own body, she interrogates this question in her photographic series White Shoes. Forty-two self-portraits show Faustine standing in sites across New York City, from Harlem to Wall Street to Prospect Park and beyond, that are built upon legacies of enslavement in New York—one of the last Northern states to abolish slavery. On her feet are a pair of sensible white pumps, which speak to the oppressions of colonialism and assimilation imposed on Black and Indigenous peoples locally, nationally, and globally. Otherwise nude, partially covered, or holding props, Faustine is at once vulnerable and commanding, standing in solidarity with ancestors whose bodies and memory form an archive in the land beneath her shoes. White Shoes is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and the first complete installation of this consequential series.  

Rose B. Simpson: Seed 

April 11–September 22   

Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park, New York

Seed explores the personal and collective experiences that have influenced artist Rose B. Simpson’s life and work with a series of new large-scale sculptures appearing in two major public parks in Manhattan. In Madison Square Park, Simpson assembles seven monumental androgynous sentinel figures fabricated in steel with bronze adornments around a central sculpture of a young female figure emerging from the earth. In addition, two life-size bronze sentinels stand watch in Inwood Hill Park, a contested space in Native American history as the site where Dutch colonial governor Peter Minuit “purchased” Manhattan Island from the Lenape in 1626. This marks Madison Square Park Conservancy’s first collaboration with another New York City public park. 

 Sarah Maldour: Tricontinental Cinema 

Through April 28 

Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus 

Tricontinental Cinema explores Maldoror’s five-decade career as a maker of revolutionary cinema, tracing her involvement with Black liberation movements in France, Africa, and the Caribbean. Through an immersive, multisensory landscape of films, photographs, poetry, and letters, the exhibition invites you to experience the full scope of Maldoror’s radical practice. 

 A legendary filmmaker, Maldoror completed more than forty-five shorts, documentaries, and feature films before her death in 2020. Many of these works rewrite the rules of films focusing on resistance and rebellion, casting women as protagonists in movements dominated by men.   

The exhibition includes several large-scale works by contemporary artists, including a monumental fiber sculpture by renowned Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga. It also features a newly commissioned mural, painted on-site, from Paris-based artist Maya Mihindou. Framing Maldoror’s films and archives, these works form a constellation of Black and Afro-Surrealist practices while amplifying the continued resonance of her work today. 

Sarah Sze 

Through August 18   

Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

Always attuned to the built environment, Sze’s new site-specific installations across three gallery spaces integrate painting, sculpture, images, sound, and video with the surrounding architecture to create intimate systems that reference the rapidly changing world. This extraordinary new exhibition will blur the boundaries between making and showing, process and product, digital and material ultimately to question how objects acquire their meaning.   

Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art: The 6000 Circle Project  

Through April 6 

Arc Project Gallery, San Francisco

In collaboration with The Calling (artists Yasmin Lambie-Simpson, Chantelle Goldthwaite, and Sheila Metcalf-Tobin) and the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), anyone interested in participating in this international art initiative is welcome! The 6000 Circle Project focuses on the circle as a symbol of balance and unity, a never-ending container of feminine energy and light. The Calling envisions 6000 circles created by a multitude of artists from around the globe. The 6000 Circle Project opens with more than 300 circles on the walls at Arc. Through the course of the exhibition, the public will be invited to make circles to add to the walls.  

Film: Twice Colonized 

March 15, 6 –9 p.m.  

MIT Bartos Theater, Cambridge, MA 

Renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter has led a lifelong fight for the rights of her people. But while launching an effort to establish an Indigenous forum at the European Union, Aaju finds herself facing a difficult, personal journey to mend her own wounds after the unexpected passing of her son. In this “powerful exploration of cultural trauma” (The Film Stage), director Lin Alluna follows alongside Aaju Peter as she strives to reclaim her language and identity after a lifetime of whitewashing and forced assimilation. 

The screening will be followed by a Q&A discussion. Free and open to the public. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. 

Panel: Vision is a Battlefield: Histories of Race and Media 

March 26, 6:30 p.m. 

Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York

How is our basic perception of the world influenced by concepts of racial identity? Join moderator Claire Bishop, professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, for an illuminating discussion with the authors of four recent books exploring the intertwined histories of photography, media, and race. The panel features Brooke Belisle, associate professor of art at Stony Brook University, speaking on computational imagery and AI; Emilie Boone, assistant professor of art history at New York University, on Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee; Monica Huerta, assistant professor of English and American studies at Princeton University, on the aesthetics of racial capitalism; and Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, on the visual politics of whiteness.  

Talk: Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner – Natalie Dykstra in Conversation with Rachel Cohen 

April 18, 6:30 p.m. 

Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, New York 

Natalie Dykstra’s Chasing Beauty is the vivid and masterful biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner—creator of one of America’s most stunning museums and a true American original. A wealthy Boston socialite at the turn of the twentieth century, Gardner was misunderstood for her eccentric lifestyle, but found her niche as a patron and friend to artists, including John Singer Sargent, who painted her portrait. Dykstra illuminates how the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir created with objects, displayed per Gardner’s wishes, including not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture. Dykstra speaks about the new book with Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists. 

MEXICO 

War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture 

Through June 30 

Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City 

Beatriz González is one of the most renowned living Latin American painters and one of the key references of her country’s culture. War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture is a new review of Beatriz González’s work. This is the first monographic exhibition of the painter’s work to be held in Mexico: it will offer both an overview of her work and an original investigation of her approach to the figure and gestures as a vehicle for emotional communication. 

 CANADA 

un/tangling, un/covering, un/doing  

Through March 17
Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia  

From the moment of birth, hair takes on multifaceted meanings. Rooted within storytelling by families and communities, the politics of hair have been both intimately personal and profoundly social.  

Artists from across Canada—including Audie Murray, Becky Bair, Wally Dion, Clare Yow, Sharon Norwood, Sarindar Dhaliwal, Karin Jones, Baljit Singh, Kiranjot Kaur, and Natasha Kianipour—offer reflections on how hair embodies the importance of culture. In this exhibition, artists employ compelling storytelling that express connections intertwined with familial teachings and their own informed experiences. 

SOUTH AMERICA  

Rosana Paulino: Amefricana 

March 22–June 10 

Fundación Malba Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires 

This is the first comprehensive exhibition to be held outside Brazil of the work of Rosana Paulino (b. 1967). It includes works made between 1994 and 2024, and approaches her oeuvre from the concept of “Amefricana” as proposed by the Brazilian philosopher Lélia Gonzáles.  

Paulino’s poetic interventions reinscribe the archives of the African diaspora in South America. They do so through constant dialogue between personal and historical archives, reconceptualizations of Brazilian art, interrogations of the matrixes of Western science, and through an approach to the circumstances of black women in Brazilian and Latin American societies. The exhibition includes five large installations, displayed together with drawings, engravings, and video organized into four conceptual hubs that are not separate zones, but rather axes of meaning that run through almost all of Paulino’s works. 

ASIA 

Jorinde Voigt and Xiyadie: 2.0 

Through May 4 

Gallery P21, Seoul  

In 2.0 paper transcends its two-dimensional origins to become a silent narrator telling tales of delicacy, rebellion, and existence. The title of the show is tri-fold: the exhibition is the first in the gallery’s new “2.0” space; the show comprises the work of two artists; and the binary symbolism behind the numbers: 2, which represents existence and material, and 0, which represents absence or the subconscious. The overlap of these artists’ practices is predominantly material, but presenting them alongside one another brings out conceptual overlap, allowing alternate readings of each artist’s works. For both artists the fragility of each cut or fold becomes a poetic marker of time, capturing moments in the evolution of the artwork. Both artists, through their engagement with paper, participate in a form of archiving, be it of cultural narratives or conceptual explorations. 

EUROPE & UK 

Ghislaine Leung: Commitment 

May 17–August 11 

Kunsthalle Basel

For her first institutional exhibition in Switzerland, the Swedish artist Ghislaine Leung (b. 1980) presents a new, site-specific project. Leung’s artistic practice is characterized by a rigorous, conceptual approach that often traces physical and economic circuits as much as institutional and societal mechanisms. The result are artworks—which she considers “events”—that emerge from her interest in the various structures underlying commodities, sites, and human relations. 

Leung’s work is also on view in the Turner Prize 2023 Shortlist Exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, UK, and in a solo show at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, both through April 14. 

Kollwitz 

March 20–June 9 

Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) chose prints and drawings as her essential media, finding in them an independent visual language of great immediacy. This exhibition presents more than 110 works on paper, sculptures, and early paintings by the artist from the collection as well as from leading museums and Kollwitz collections. Surprising, unconventional works and selected sculptures will be presented together with loans from around Germany to highlight her independent pictorial language that was distinguished by an incisive immediacy to respond to the essential questions of humanity and address troubling topics.

A major Kollwitz retrospective exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, March 31 – July 20. 

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior 

April 20–October 20 

Venice Biennale

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s work to date, bringing together more than thirty works made over the past thirty-five years, including new site-specific drawings and glasswork created for this exhibition.  

Collective Behavior traces Sikander’s ever-evolving explorations of gender, race, and colonial histories. The exhibition includes her breakthrough work The Scroll (1989–90), which established her position at the vanguard of the neo-miniature movement. Collective Behavior also debuts new works by Sikander that respond to the architecture and history of the Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, the city of Venice, and global histories of trade and artistic exchange. 

Vanessa Bell: A Pioneer of Modern Art 

May 15–October 6 

The Courtauld Project Space, London

Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) was one of the leading artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group, the avant-garde assembly of artists, writers, and philosophers who pioneered literary and artistic modernism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. This focused display will be the first devoted to the Courtauld’s significant collection of Bell’s work. It will include paintings such as her masterpiece A Conversation, as well as the bold, abstract textile designs she produced for the Omega Workshops, led by influential artist and critic Roger Fry in London, which aimed to abolish the boundaries between the fine and decorative arts and bring the arts into everyday life. The exhibition will highlight one of the most cutting-edge artists working in Britain in the early twentieth century. 

MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA 

Ana Mzzei: How to Disappear
Through April 20 

Green Art Gallery, Dubai

How to Disappear marks the conclusion of Ana Mazzei’s ongoing project Love Scene Crime Scene, a three-part exhibition series centered around the fictional disappearance of a ballerina. In this latest installment presented by Green Art Gallery in Dubai, the Brazilian artist deepens the enigma by introducing a collection of bronze sculptures and oil paintings that leave the spectator wanting to play the role of investigator. Her sculptures, featuring half human, half animal creatures placed on raw concrete plinths, take center stage against an entire wall displaying approximately fifty paintings. The selection of paintings is divided into six themes: stage, vases, landscape, cages, beings, and the joker. Together, they form a vocabulary or alphabet of symbols put together in an attempt to illustrate how to disappear, if we ever wanted to. 

Swallow This! 

Through December 6  

Gulf Photo Plus Gallery, Dubai

Lara Chahine and Reem Falaknaz subvert a common documentary landscape in Swallow This! with works in photography and digital media. The exhibition explores the rampant pathologization of women’s bodies, where the politically absurd, visually surreal, and humorous converge. Drawing on the uncanny collective experience of womanhood, Chahine and Falaknaz veer into a kind of performance art, becoming the subjects of their own work at times.  

Swallow This! weaves narratives where the clinical or scientific, the grotesque or bodily, the divine or occult coexist as contemporary reflections on a post-internet, Arab feminism. Both photographers seek to unpack “erotic capital,” where the strange is made familiar, and the familiar, strange. 

OCEANIA 

Judy Millar: Here You Are 

Through April 20 

Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland

Material, action, trace. In myriad ways and with a diverse body of tools, Judy Millar applies and removes paint in order to explore embodied acts of making and how these enact particular forms of consciousness. With a palette made up of unexpected combinations of color, Millar often plays with the tension between background and foreground. Millar’s works are often large-scale, dwarfing those who encounter them, acting as a reminder that people belong to gestures and that painting can be a shift away from the self.

The exhibitions chosen for the Fall CWA Picks collectively highlight the power of art to engage with medium and memory in diverse and thought-provoking ways. Each exhibition showcases artists who engage with the concept of memory, whether by challenging societal norms and values, redefining perfection, or addressing historical and environmental legacies. Together, these exhibitions emphasize the power of art to shape our understanding of the past and how it shapes our present.  

Medium and Memory 

September 7–21 November, 2023 

HackelBury, London 

Medium and Memory is an exhibition featuring conversations between eight diverse artists whose work centers on memory in its various forms. The work in the show aims to challenge the act of forgetting and harness the potential of art to aesthetically transform traumatic historical legacies, including war, famine, genocide, colonialism, deindustrialization, and the memory-altering effects of the digital age. 

RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology 

October 5, 2023–January 14, 2024  

Barbican Art Gallery, London  

RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology showcases the work of nearly fifty international women and gender nonconforming artists. Through film, photography, and installations, the exhibition delves into the interconnectedness of gender and ecology, advocating for a just and equitable society where both people and the environment are valued and treated fairly. 

The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University: Three Decades, 1986–2017 

September 13–December 22, 2023 

Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ 

In 1986, Rutgers Distinguished Professor Emerita Judith K. Brodsky established the Brodsky Center to provide opportunities for women, gender nonconforming artists, and artists of color who were marginalized in the art world. This center, originally focused on print and papermaking, evolved into a hub of innovation, addressing contemporary concerns such as race, gender, climate, language, and immigration. The exhibition showcases artworks emblematic of the Brodsky Center’s mission to introduce new narratives into American culture and is organized thematically into sections reflecting its impact on art and society.  

Alison Croney Moses: The Habits of Reframing 

September 1–October 22, 2023 

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston  

The Habits of Reframing is a solo exhibition by Boston-based artist Alison Croney Moses, featuring two new series of wooden artworks. These pieces encourage viewers to consider their ability to shape their sense of self and their understanding of the world, while also challenging societal values, celebrating imperfections, and redefining perfection through sensory engagement with the materials and forms used by the artist. 

Dala Nasser: Adonis River 

September 16–November 26, 2023 

The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago 

In the fall of 2023, the Renaissance Society will host the first solo exhibition of Beirut-based artist Dala Nasser, featuring a site-specific commission designed to fill the Ren’s expansive exhibition space. Nasser’s interdisciplinary approach encompasses painting, performance, and film, with a focus on abstraction and alternative image-making. Her artwork, created by directly engaging with landscapes, offers a unique perspective by highlighting the marks of political and environmental erosion and toxicity, exploring themes of ecological decay, historical narratives, and the consequences of capitalist and colonial practices. The exhibition centers on the Adonis River, where Nasser produced her paintings inside the cave associated with the mythical figure Adonis, utilizing locally sourced materials, and incorporating three-dimensional spatial environments that evoke the Adonis temple and its surroundings. 

Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist 

July 7–October 29, 2023 

San José Museum of Art 

This is the first solo museum presentation of the work of Yolanda López, the pathbreaking Chicana artist and activist whose career in California spanned five decades. The exhibition presents a compendium of López’s work from the 1970s and 1980s, when she created an influential body of paintings, drawings, and collages that investigate and reimagine representations of women within Chicano/a/x culture and society at large. 

Yolanda M. López: Women’s Work is Never Done 

August 31–November 12, 2023 

Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco 

Curated by her archivist, Angelica Rodriguez, and son, Rio Yañez, this body of work reveals López’s inquisitive approach to artistic mediums and the feminist and political sensibilities that emerged in her practice from life experiences, research, and community activism. Artworks include drawings from her youth, protest designs, preparatory studies for her iconic 1978 Guadalupe series, photography, collage, and xerox art from 1980 and 1990s Mission, prints from her Women’s Work is Never Done series, as well as her final reflective works. This body of work reveals López’s inquisitive approach to artistic mediums and the feminist and political sensibilities that emerged in her practice from life experiences, research, and community activism. 

Hung Liu: Capp Street Project, 1988 

September 16–November 18, 2023  

Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco  

This collection of paintings and artifacts re-imagines the 1988 exhibition Hung Liu: Resident Alien, the culmination of Liu’s two-month artist residency at the Capp Street Project in San Francisco, presented at the downtown Monadnock Building, a sprawling, under-construction office space that offered Hung Liu a liberating and engaging opportunity. The original exhibition, which took place just five years after Liu immigrated to the US from her native China, was instrumental in bringing her work to the attention of the larger art world. The multimedia installation—composed of paintings, wall drawings, Chinese calligraphy, ceremonial objects from Chinatown, a pile of abacuses, and small mounds of fortune cookies—addressed the history and complexities of the immigrant experience, looking specifically at the history of Chinese immigration to San Francisco from the Gold Rush of 1849 to her own immigration to the US in 1984 and her subsequent status as a “resident alien.” This exploration was both a central theme of the 1988 show, and a focus Liu would pursue for the rest of her career.  

Hung Liu: Witness 

June 30–December 10, 2023 

SFMOMA, San Francisco 

Chinese-born artist Hung Liu (1948–2021) created richly layered portraits and installations that interweave memory and history. This exhibition features works from SFMOMA’s collection, from her most significant paintings made in China during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution between 1966–76 to those created in the US during the 1990s and 2000s. Intimate and large-scale works blend landscapes and images from historical and family photographs with dripping brushwork. Together, they reveal Liu’s enduring commitment to “be a witness of my time” as she elevated her subjects to “mythic figures on the grander scale of history painting.” 

Arleene Correa Valencia: Naces Así, Naces Prieto. No Naces Blanco. / You Are Born Like This, You Are Born Brown. You Are Not Born White. 

August 26–November 4, 2023 

Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco 

Born in Mexico and based in California’s Napa Valley, Arleene Correa Valencia creates paintings, textiles, and drawings that reflect on patterns of migration and family separation. Her recent work is inspired by the letters that she wrote to her father as a child, during a period when her father had migrated to the United States while Correa Valencia remained in Mexico. Correa Valencia draws on her family’s archives and correspondence to craft a visual language that considers the politics of visibility and the complexities of undocumented immigration.  

Mika Rottenberg: Spaghetti Blockchain 

May 18–October 22, 2023 

Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco 

New York–based Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires) employs a disarmingly absurd sense of humor to confront the paradoxes of global capitalism and uncover the surprising ways in which we are all connected. This exhibition presents Rottenberg’s most prominent videos, installations, and sculptures of the past decade in the first museum survey of her work ever to be presented on the West Coast. Explore a collection of vividly colorful video installations and kinetic sculptures that uncover the surreal qualities of mass production and consumption. 

Women In Revolt! Art And Activism In The UK 1970-1990 

November 8, 2023– April 7, 2024

Tate Britain, London 

This exhibition is a major survey of feminist art by over 100 women artists working in the UK. 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. 

Women in Revolt! brings together a wide variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, and photography. It explores and reflects on issues and events such as: the British Women’s Liberation movement, the fight for legal changes impacting women, maternal and domestic experiences, punk, and independent music, Greenham Common and the peace movement, the visibility of Black and South Asian Women Artists, Section 28 and the AIDS pandemic. 

The show celebrates the work and lived experiences of a hugely diverse group of women. Many who, frequently working outside mainstream art institutions, have largely been left out of artistic narratives. Women in Revolt! presents many of these works for the first time since the 1970s. 

The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity

September 13, 2023–January 21, 2024

REDCAT, Los Angeles

In 1970, artist Judy Chicago pioneered a feminist model for art and education with her students at Fresno State College. Chicago was invited by Miriam Schapiro to collaboratively expand this program at CalArts in 1971, where they would go on to develop radical and now influential forms of art, pedagogy, and performance. The program began a cycle of collective activity with the contribution of numerous students, faculty, artists, and designers, many of whom are now considered pivotal artists in feminist art history. 

This exhibition acknowledges the many generations of women, trans, queer, and non-binary faculty, students, and artists at CalArts who have stewarded these histories through teaching, archiving, and experimenting. Engaging with these initial moments, while also drawing connections with subsequent contributions, The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity brings together these histories through its diverse feminisms, gender theories, and transfeminismos. The exhibition gathers materials from institutional and personal archives, joining them with new responsive artworks by CalArts alumni ak jenkins, Andrea Bowers, Gala Porras-Kim, and Suzanne Lacy. The show includes a special presentation of The Performing Archive by Leslie Labowitz Starus and Lacy. The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity presents an ever-growing feminist contribution to art and pedagogy with a multiplicity of voices, contexts, and identities, with an intergenerational collective of scholars, artists, activists, and curators contributing to the research, memory, syllabi, and artworks on display.

Joanne Leonard, Artemesia’s Suzanna and the Elders and Men Conspiring, 2006 
(From Medium & Memory)

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) curates a seasonal list of must-see exhibitions. The CWA Summer 2023 picks highlight the rich contributions of women-identifying African, Latinx, and Indigenous artists, bringing their voices to the forefront. These artists explore the legacies of their respective mediums and their enduring significance in contemporary art. Unafraid to tackle pressing social issues, their works offer a powerful lens through which to examine themes of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. By amplifying marginalized perspectives, these exhibitions provoke meaningful conversations and challenge existing narratives in the art world.

Tender Loving Care
July 22, 2023–July 28, 2025
Museum of Fine Art, Boston

This exhibition explores the theme of care through contemporary art. The act of creating and appreciating art is a form of care, and the exhibition highlights how artists address this concept through their materials, ideas, and processes. The exhibition showcases around 100 works from the museum’s collection, organized into five thematic groupings: threads, thresholds, rest, vibrant matter, and adoration. Examples of care in art can be seen in Gisela Charfauros McDaniel’s portrait of her mother, Nick Cave’s Sound Suit, and textiles and fiber art by Sheila Hicks, Howardena Pindell, and Jane Sauer. Through these works and others, visitors are invited to consider how care can inspire new models for living and feeling in the present and the future.

Creativity in the Time of COVID-19: Art as a Tool for Combatting Inequity and Injustice
August 25–September 30, 2023
Buffalo NY: Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo Arts Studio + Buffalo Game Space

In collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Michigan State University, and SUNY Buffalo’s Amatryx Lab & Studio, this exhibition features a range of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Buffalo-based artists and creatives to center marginalized experiences of the pandemic and social justice concerns.

Black Venus
Through August 20, 2023
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco

BLACK VENUS, curated by Aindrea Emelife is an exhibition that surveys the legacy of Black Women in visual culture – from fetishized, colonial-era caricatures to the present-day reclamation of the rich complexity of Black womanhood by 18 artists (of numerous nationalities and with birth years spanning 1942 to 1997). This exhibition is a celebration of Black beauty, an investigation into the many faces of Black femininity and the shaping of Black women in the public consciousness – then and now.
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In BLACK VENUS, archival depictions of Baartman and other historical Black women pair with the vibrant, narrative portraiture by some of today’s most influential Black image-makers whose work deals with layered narratives of Black femininity.

This exhibition reckons with difficult visual histories. It features some themes and images that are derogatory and many that are empowering. Sensitive visitors should be aware that several artists in the exhibition employ nudity and sexual imagery to explore their ideas.

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archeology of Memory 
Through August 13, 2023
UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory is the first retrospective exhibition of the work of longtime Bay Area artist Mesa-Bains. Presenting work from the entirety of her career for the first time, this exhibition, which features nearly 60 works in a range of media, including fourteen major installations, celebrates Mesa-Bains’s important contributions to the field of contemporary art locally and globally.

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest
Through July 9, 2023
Bard Graduate Center, NYC

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest invites you to explore the world of Navajo weaving. This dynamic gallery and online experience presents never-before-seen textiles created by Diné artists. These historic blankets, garments, and rugs from the American Museum of Natural History are situated alongside contemporary works by Diné weavers and visual artists, such as Barbara Teller Ornelas and Lynda Teller Pete. Shaped by the Loom highlights seasonal cycles that guide the harvesting of dye plants, the cosmologies that inform a weaver’s work, and the songs, stories, and prayers that are woven into every piece. The items in the exhibition will be accompanied by artist interviews, interactive storytelling, and stunning panoramic views of the Navajo Nation. Shaped by the Loom elevates the voices of Indigenous artists and makers to express the cultural legacy and continued vibrancy of weaving traditions in the American Southwest.

The Figure, Reclaimed
A Renaissance of the female body in visual culture
July 5–August 4, 2023
Carolla Arts Exhibition Center, Missouri State University

Throughout the history of visual culture, figurative painting has been regarded as one of the highest forms of Western art. Dazzling displays of hyper-realistic anatomical mastery and expansive narrative scenes depicting multiple figures through complex perspectives dominated as the pinnacle of art-making for centuries. While the artists of these historic images were all white male painters, it was the female body that was often leveraged for these narratives. Further, female artists were also excluded from painting these historic scenes and denied access to nude models to even attempt to study the art of figural painting.

The Figure, Reclaimed, seeks to celebrate and explore the Renaissance of the female body and the female figurative painter in visual culture. Through the work of Aneka Ingold and Livia Xandersmith, this exhibition explores how female figurative painters have combined the traditional art of figurative painting with contemporary, stylized approaches to redefine and expand upon what it means to be a figurative painter, ruminate on the female experience, and how representations of the female body are consumed.
 
As women face losing bodily autonomy in today’s contemporary society, what does it mean to be a female figurative painter in today’s context? What stories must be told on the scale of figurative painting about what it means to identify as a woman today? Why is the female body a contested landscape, and why does this form hold a sense of home base for visual culture? Is it the embodied connection to humanity and life?

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich: Too Bright to See
Perez Art Museum, Miami
Through January 7, 2024

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (b. 1987) is a filmmaker and artist whose work blends narrative and documentary traditions to explore stories and experiences of Black women in the Americas.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s experimental narrative artwork Too Bright to See (Part I) draws on her extensive research on the legacy of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire, a writer and anticolonial and feminist activist from Martinique who, along with her husband, Aimé Césaire, was at the forefront of the Négritude movement during the first half of the 20th century. Roussi-Césaire would also become an important Surrealist thinker, influencing the likes of painter Wifredo Lam and writer André Breton. However, despite her critical contributions to Caribbean thought and Surrealist discourse, until recently much of her work was overlooked.

Too Bright to See (Part I) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts.

Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now
Barbican Art Gallery, London
June 21–September 3, 2023

Opening 22 June 2023, Barbican Art Gallery is proud to present the first major solo exhibition of Carrie Mae Weems in a UK institution. Widely considered to be one of the most influential American artists working today, Weems (b.1953) is celebrated for her exploration of cultural identity, power structures, desire, and social justice through a body of work that develops questioning narratives around race, gender, history, class and their systems of representation.

Highlighting her remarkably diverse and radical practice, this survey brings together an outstanding selection of photographic series, films, and installations spanning over three decades, many of which have never been seen before in the UK. Presenting the development of her unique poetic gaze and formal language from the early 1990s to the present day, this exhibition reflects on Weems’s pioneering career. On display are works from her early iconic Kitchen Table Series (1990) which explores how power dynamics are articulated in the domestic sphere and the potential of the home as a space for resistance, to her acclaimed series Roaming (2006) and Museums (2016) where Weems’s muse confronts architecture as the materialisation of political and cultural power. Her oeuvre challenges dominant ideologies and historical narratives created by and disseminated within science, architecture, photography, and mass media.

The exhibition is accompanied by Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now, the first publication devoted to the artist’s writings. It will highlight Weems’s influence as an intellectual, reflecting the dual nature of her career as an artist and activist. A public programme of events, including a programme of films in Barbican cinema, will also run throughout the course of the exhibition.

Gio Swaby: Fresh Up
Through July 3, 2023
Art Institute of Chicago

Gio Swaby is a multidisciplinary artist whose textile-based practice explores the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. Her embroidered portraits are anchored in the connections she forges with her subjects: each portrait begins with a photo shoot in which her sitters are captured in a moment of self-awareness and empowerment. In her textile interpretations, Swaby foregrounds their hair, clothing, and jewelry—highlighting and celebrating the subjects’ use of fashion as unapologetic self-definition and self-expression.

This exhibition—Swaby’s first solo museum show—brings together seven of Swaby’s series from 2017 through 2021, such as My Hands Are Clean, Love Letters, and Pretty Pretty, along with approximately 15 new works, including her largest work to date, a commission for the US Embassy in Nassau, Bahamas. The title of the show, Fresh Up, developed with the artist, is a Bahamian phrase often used as a way to compliment someone’s style or confident way of being. Swaby has remarked, “It holds a lot of positivity and joy. It also speaks to the tone of confidence and power that I want to create with these works. I love that it is a way to form connections through a simple phrase.”

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Phantom Limb
Through July 8, 2023
Altman Seigel, San Francisco

Altman Siegel proudly presents a historical exhibition of works from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Phantom Limb series, which was created in the 1980s. At the time that it was created, the Phantom Limb collages illustrated the more insidious impacts of mass media and technology on women’s bodies. Created prior to the advent of Photoshop, this body of work borrows from the visual language of advertising, fusing female forms with technology. Seductively posed women merge with cameras, TV screens, and electrical plugs, pointing to ways in which gendered mass media representations shape and distort women’s self-image. At once alluring and disarming, these black-and-white photo collages grapple with the absorption of female identity into modern media at a time when the depths of this issue were just beginning to be explored.

In this series Hershman Leeson was already musing on the implications of surveillance when she describes cameras as a “capture system”:

“This photographic series…suggests that we are not only being watched by surveillance systems, but that ‘capture’ systems are endemic to our society. The series questions individual complicity in a system that simultaneously steals images and warps personal identity. The seductive alliance of surveillance and capture inspired the sexually provocative positions in the anthropomorphic images.” – Lynn Hershman Leeson

My Hands Are Clean 4, 2017  Gio Swaby. Courtesy of Claire Oliver and Ian Rubinstein. © Gio Swaby

The CAA Committee on Women in the Arts (CWA) Winter Picks include exhibitions and events that explore language through form, abstraction, the archive, and narrative. The artists included in this season’s picks investigate language and how it shapes our vision and experience of the world. They also reveal the systems of power embedded within language and how it often acts as a mediator. 

Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

Until August 31, 2023   

Put It This Way includes almost a century of work from fifty women and nonbinary artists in the Hirshhorn’s collection. The exhibit presents a range of media from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular emphasis on the Hirshhorn’s mission to highlight global voices.  

An Improvisation of Form 

Caroline Kent 

Until January 28, 2023 

Figge Art Museum 

Language and invented vocabulary made up of geometric shapes, marks, and colors are central to Caroline Kent’s practice. Her work challenges the viewer to consider how the indecipherable might play a role in their understanding of the world.  

The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America 

Until March 4, 2023  

Conference: “The Age of Roe: The Past, Present, and Future of Abortion in America” 

Friday January 27, 2023 

This two-day conference at Harvard Radcliffe Institute will explore how Roe v. Wade and its aftermath shaped the United States and the world beyond it for nearly half a century. The conference will include lectures and panel discussions from experts in constitutional law, historians, health policy advocates, and other scholars. An accompanying exhibition curated by Mary Ziegler, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law, will also be on view through March 4, 2023.  

re:collection 

Until April 23, 2023  

re:collection includes the work of five artists—Ali Cherri, Nicole Cherubini, Lily Cox-Richard, NIC Kay, and SANGREE—whose work reconsiders the Tufts University collection. Specifically, the artists explored about 200 objects from the fifth century BCE to the seventh century CE, including early Greco-Roman ceramics, stone carvings, pre-Columbian vessels, jewelry, and textiles. The exhibition has a range of approaches, from performance and installation to sculpture and painting.  

Valiant postures/A ruse! A ruse!
2021
Acrylic on Belgian linen, acrylic on walnut
63 × 74 × 2 1/2 in

Toni Pepe, Mothercraft, Archival Inkjet, 28″ x 35″, 2020

This fall, there are wonderful exhibitions devoted to the work of women artists. We have linked a few of them here through the theme of care and care’s connection to the urgent crisis in which legal protections for women’s bodily autonomy have been taken away right before our eyes. The artwork featured in the exhibitions below does not explicitly take up abortion bans and restrictions. Still, they provoke viewers to see women with complexity, and not as natural resources of care. With their inventive imagery, forms, materials, and ideas, each artist implicitly asserts that women’s bodies are not transparent containers for other people’s purposes. Rather, the artists create images that are layered sites, dense with women’s singular desires to imagine and place themselves in worlds of their own making.

Toni Pepe: An Ordinary Devotion
Danforth Art Museum, Framingham State University, Massachusetts
October 8, 2022—January 29, 2022

Artifacts of caregiving and its complications, these archival inkjet prints by Toni Pepe explore the tension between the analytic mind and the tenderness of touch that maternal care encompasses. Each image depicts an ordinary scene in which care is needed or expressed, but Pepe’s textual markings and imprints index care’s contradictions instead of suffusing them in the aura of idealization and satisfaction. Pepe suggests motherhood is equally about violence and abuse as it is about devotion and nurturing. All are ordinary, but when framed together in such intimate proximity, these dimensions of maternal care trouble societal expectations about what a woman should sacrifice in the name of motherhood and challenge the accepted visual tropes of a woman as a caregiver.

52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
June 6, 2022—January 8, 2023

Proving that we can both revisit feminist art’s dynamic past and witness its ongoing pertinence in an equally dynamic and transformative future, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone celebrates the fifty-first anniversary of the historic exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, curated by Lucy R. Lippard and presented at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 1971. 52 Artists showcases work by the artists included in the original 1971 exhibition alongside a new roster of twenty-six female-identifying or nonbinary emerging artists, tracking the evolution of feminist art practices over the past five decades. 52 Artists encompasses the entirety of the museum (approx. 8,000 sq. ft)—the first exhibition to do so in The Aldrich’s new building, which was inaugurated in 2004. The result is an exhilarating array of styles, forms, mediums, and subjects, which creates an archive of feminist expression that is, according to curator Amy Smith-Stewart, “inclusive, expansive, elastic, and free.”

Lippard’s original 1971 exhibition at The Aldrich was one of the first institutional responses to the issue of women artists’ invisibility in museums and galleries. More specifically, Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists offered a rejoinder to the protests by the Ad Hoc Women Artists Committee (founded by Poppy Johnson, Brenda Miller, Faith Ringgold, and Lucy Lippard) over the absence of women in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1970 Sculpture Annual. Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists opened the floodgates to a host of other feminist exhibitions throughout the 1970s, signaling Lippard’s emergence as a visionary feminist curator and critic and marking the debut of many groundbreaking artists. Lippard viewed curating this landmark exhibition as an activist gesture. As she explains in the catalog, “I took on this show because I knew there were many women artists whose work was as good or better than that currently being shown, but who, because of the prevailingly discriminatory policies of most galleries and museums, can rarely get anyone to visit their studios or take them as seriously as their male counterparts.” With this radical exhibition, Lippard arguably founded the feminist curatorial practice in this country, and 52 Artists underscores its ongoing influence.

Amy Sherald. The World We Make
Hauser & Wirth, London
October 12—December 23, 2022

Amy Sherald is acclaimed for her paintings of Black Americans that have become landmarks in the grand tradition of social portraiture—a tradition that for too long excluded the Black men, women, families, and artists whose lives have often placed to the side of public narratives even as they have been inextricable from them. Quiet and still but also bright with vibrant, dynamic colors, Sherald’s portraits place her subjects in everyday settings that ultimately elude viewers’ full grasp but also immortalize their depth and significance. In this new body of work on display at Hauser & Wirth, she continues confronting the Western canon of portrait painting by drawing from iconic images and deploying them to carefully reveal the worlds Black people have made for themselves.

Carolee Schneeman, Body Politics
Barbican Centre, London
September 8, 2022—January 8, 2023

Carolee Schneemann, Body Politics is the first survey in the UK of the work of American artist Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) and the first major exhibition since her death in 2019. Tracing Schneemann’s diverse, transgressive, and interdisciplinary work over six decades, the show celebrates a radical and pioneering artist who remains a feminist icon and point of reference for many contemporary artists and thinkers. Body Politics reveals that Schneeman addressed urgent topics from sexual expression and the objectification of women to human and animal suffering and the violence of war. It shows that she explored the precarity of existence and art as a model of care. Spanning the range of Schneeman’s output and exhibiting rarely seen archival material that includes scores, sketches, scrapbooks, programs, and costumes, Carolee Schneeman, Body Politics positions her as one of the most relevant, provocative, and inspiring artists of the last century.

Mickalene Thomas: Avec Monet
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
October 13, 2022—February 6th, 2023

Mickalene Thomas has created a distinct visual vocabulary of Black erotica, Black sexuality, and Black queer aesthetics centered around joy and pleasure. This exhibition highlights the sensuous depths of her art historical imagination and the intimacy of her collaborations with the past. On display in Mickalene Thomas: Avec Monet are three new large-scale collages, one monumental painting, and an immersive site-specific installation featuring her 2016 video/sculpture Me As Muse. These works deepen our view of Thomas’ vivid, celebratory style and attest to her time as an artist-in-residence at Claude Monet’s home in Giverny, France, in 2011.

Martine Syms: She Mad Season One
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
July 2, 2022—February 12, 2023

This solo exhibition features Martine Syms’s She Mad series. This ongoing conceptual project takes the form of a semi-autobiographical sitcom about a young woman trying to make it as an artist in Los Angeles. Drawing from a range of sources, including early cinema, television shows, advertisements, and internet memes, Syms, known for her humor and biting social commentary, dissects the ways Black experiences are mediated on television, in film, and online. The show marks the US premiere of the fifth and newest episode of She Mad—and the first time that the series is shown in its entirety.

Martine Syms: She Mad Season One situates the five video artworks within an immersive sculptural installation constructed from exposed aluminum studs painted in the artist’s signature shade of purple—a reference to both the chroma key backdrops frequently used in post-production of films and television shows and Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple. Like the exposed walls of the installation, Syms’s videos lay bare the structures that shape the images and videos we consume.

Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers at Magnum
International Center of Photography, New York
September 29, 2022—January 9, 2023

Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum presents pivotal projects in the careers of 12 contemporary women photographers of Magnum Photos, the pioneering photography collective. With a title inspired by Magnum co-founder Robert Capa’s quote “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” Close Enough presents more than 150 works, including Sabiha Çimen’s explorations of the experiences of young Islamic women in Turkey; Alessandra Sanguinetti’s long-term collaboration with the rural Argentinean cousins Guille and Belinda as they evolve from childhood into adulthood; Bieke Depoorter’s multiyear, multiform project Agata, about a young club performer in Paris; and Susan Meiselas’ work with women who sought refuge from domestic violence in the Midlands, UK. The exhibition also creates space for the photographers to narrate their creative journeys, providing vantage points into the extraordinary relationships they create within global situations, communities, and individual subjects.

Silvia Kolbowski: Who will save us?
Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland
September 4, 2022–November 27, 2022

In the two exhibition spaces at Kunsthaus Glarus, Silvia Kolbowski presents the video work Who will save us? (2022) and Missing Asher (2019) The work Who will save us? was created especially for this exhibition. The video is a “mashup” of two films: Metropolis (1927, directed by Fritz Lang) and THX 1138 (1971, directed by George Lucas), both futuristic science-fiction films about life in hierarchical two-class societies. Distilling over three hours of film into a 14-minute film loop, Kolbowski’s experimental compilation of footage creates a new narrative that resonates with the prescience of the original films but relates to the present political moment, in which the psychological aspects of group dynamics interact with neoliberal capitalism’s embrace of technology and polarized wealth. Another video, Missing Asher (2019), also makes time into a medium. This artwork, which includes Kolbowski’s correspondence with the influential conceptual artist Michael Asher – raises the question of whether the de facto stipulations of the art market are permanently aligned against conceptual, research-based works.