Drawn exclusively from the Museum collection, Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction endeavors to look beyond typical art historical boundaries and to begin to lay claim to a more holistic and complex view of art history—one that includes parties left out because of aesthetic biases based on a system of privileged white male patrimony.
This focused exhibition, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, will look at the creative and irreverent ways that seven artists—Ruth Asawa, Sari Dienes, Pati Hill, Kahlil Robert Irving, Virginia Overton, Julia Phillips, and Zarina—have employed the everyday objects around them to make prints.
While best known for her innovative wire sculptures, Asawa had a deep connection to drawing and painting and often depicted plants, flowers, and other organic forms across her work that spanned fifty years. Here, we present a selection of the artist’s smaller sculptures along with prints and works on paper, many of which have not been widely shown.
Displayed in this gallery are archival objects shown alongside works from the Museum’s Black Mountain College Collection, which is comprised of over 1000 artworks and ephemera. These objects create connections, each one a thread contributing to a nuanced tapestry of the people, materials, geographies, and ideas of Black Mountain College and its ongoing legacy.
Featuring over 100 works in ceramics, fiber, wood, metal, glass, and more unexpected materials, Crafting America presents a diverse and inclusive story of American craft from the 1940s to today, highlighting the work of artists such as Ruth Asawa, Beatrice Wood, Shan Goshorn, Nick Cave, and more.
Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop explores the prints produced by a group of artists at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, and Louise Nevelson each completed two-month fellowships at Tamarind during the 1960s.
The exhibition sets out to write the history of the contributions of women artists to abstraction, with one hundred and six artists and more than five hundred works dating from the 1860s to the 1980s.
This presentation highlights the affinity between Klee’s compositional approach and Asawa’s explorations of line and shape in works she created at Black Mountain College and in her first years in San Francisco, where she moved in 1949.
In A Raft, Yto Barrada—an artist known for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives—explores how artworks can provide models for reimagining relationships and alternative ways of being in our world.
Women in Abstraction aims to trace a lesser-told history of art primarily from the 20th and 21st centuries by focusing on the contribution of women artists to abstraction. The exhibition includes over 100 artists working across disciplines, such as dance, applied arts, photography, film, and performance art from Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, Europe, and the United States in order to tell an expansive and complex story with many voices.