BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Hirshhorn Museum -- Exhibit: Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection

DC -- Hirshhorn Museum -- Exhibit: Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection:

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Description of Pictures: Put It This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection
August 2, 2022 – Fall 2023
Put It This Way is devoted to the work of nearly 50 women and nonbinary artists in the Hirshhorn’s collection. The exhibition brings together almost a century of work in a range of media drawn exclusively from the museum’s holdings, beginning with early works by Carlotta Corpron, Barbara Hepworth, and Julia Thecla. One-quarter of the artworks have been made in the past decade by the likes of Loie Hollowell, Rachel Jones, Deana Lawson, Sondra Perry, and Kiyan Williams. Recent acquisitions include art works by Dana Awartani, Zanele Muholi, and Billie Zangewa that reflect the museum’s mission to highlight global voices. Many works from the permanent collection that have never been seen before at the Hirshhorn will also be on view, notably an untitled 1974–1975 mosaic by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Ana Mendieta’s “Blood and Feathers” (1974) and Diana Thater’s installation, “Oo Fifi, Five Days in Claude Monet’s Garden, Parts 1 and 2” (1992).

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[6] VISION_220807_022.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[7] VISION_220807_034.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[8] VISION_220807_040.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[9] VISION_220807_046.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[10] VISION_220807_050.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?) $EYE, BODY Much of Western art history is grounded in the image of the female body, long approached as an object to be posed, molded, and gazed upon by men. The first two galleries in this exhibition tackle this formula in opposition, through images of self and other made by women and gender-nonconforming artists. Some employ traditional female archetypes (Madonna and Whore, Ingenue and Crone) in order to examine and deconstruct them; others fracture these archetypes altogether in service of building newly complicated, at times humorous, and insistently challenging portrayals. Here the body is understood as a site of discovery and negotiation, constantly in formation and witnessed with frankness, empathy, and respect.$
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VISION_220807_001.JPG: PUT IT THIS WAY: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection
2. VISION_220807_005.JPG: The exhibition Put It This Way brings together almost a century of art from the Hirshhorn’s collection made exclusively by women and gender-nonconforming artists. Collectively, it serves as a demonstration of the breadth, vibrancy, and rigor of work by those who historically have been marginalized within the larger story of art. Yet it is also a prompt, to consider the complex ways that art and gender are intertwined, and the problems and possibilities of gender as a lens through which art might be appreciated and understood. If gender is impossible to understand apart from its connections with, for example, race and class, how do we understand it in relation to art, where categories of identity are frequently explored and challenged? Does an artist’s gender inevitably imprint upon their work? What does it mean for a museum to revisit its collection according to gender? How does our own gendered experience in the world condition our experience of art? These intersections and inquiries offer a point of departure in these galleries, where works by artists past and present, in varied media, both celebrated and underacknowledged, coexist in thematic groupings. The artists on view are looking everywhere; to gender, yes, but also color, history, perception, the body, technology, politics, the future, family, and inner life. Each approaches the relevance of gender in their own way, alternately embracing, contesting, or dismissing it altogether. If art can act as a viewfinder, then Put It This Way (titled from a 1963 painting by American artist Rosalyn Drexler) invites viewers to focus anew on the Hirshhorn’s collection through the frame that gender provides: evocative, imperfect, and, like art itself, forever refusing to conform. Organized by Anne Reeve, Associate Curator, with Alice Phan, Curatorial Assistant
3. VISION_220807_016.JPG: Anni Albers B. Berlin, Germany, 1899–1994 Do.I‒VI 1973 Screenprint on paper The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.26.1‒6) A member of the Bauhaus in Berlin (along with her husband, Josef) before escaping wartime Germany in 1933, Anni Albers has left an astonishingly influential legacy as a Modernist, colorist, and the first artist to bring textile into the realm of fine art—her geometrically patterned wall hangings are both beloved and revered. In 1963, she began to explore print-making, a medium that allowed for the expansion of her investigations into material; in a 1982 essay entitled “Material as Metaphor,” she writes: “What I had learned in handling threads, I now used in the printing process. Again I was led. My prints are not transfers from paintings to color on paper as is the usual way. I worked with the production process itself, mixing various media, turning the screens. . . . What I am trying to get across is that material is a means of communication. That listening to it, not dominating it makes us truly active, that is: to be active, be passive. The finer tuned we are to it, the closer we come to art.”
4. VISION_220807_020.JPG: Judy Dater B. Los Angeles, California, 1941 Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite 1974 Gelatin silver photograph Gift of Herbert Lust, 2019 (2019.088) Judy Dater became known in the 1960s for creating striking black-and-white portraits that humanize her subjects with a profound sense of intimacy. In her most famous work, Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite, Dater captures two women encountering each other against the idyllic forest backdrop of California’s Yosemite National Park. A play on the historical trope of the nymph in the forest, the choice of subjects is loaded and specific: the older figure holding a camera is Imogen Cunningham, a respected American photographer and Dater’s mentor. Turning to look at her is a young ingenue in the nude: Twinka Thiebaud, one of the era’s most successful models and a well-known cultural figure. Dater’s portrait serves as a personal and startling look at voyeurism, caricaturizing a standoff between archetypes that -- with a fair dose of humor -- reckons with traditional portrayals of femininity. Rather than exposing or obscuring female subjectivity, here the gaze is feminized, multiplied, and complicated in a reciprocal and circular exchange.
5. VISION_220807_050.JPG: EYE, BODY Much of Western art history is grounded in the image of the female body, long approached as an object to be posed, molded, and gazed upon by men. The first two galleries in this exhibition tackle this formula in opposition, through images of self and other made by women and gender-nonconforming artists. Some employ traditional female archetypes (Madonna and Whore, Ingenue and Crone) in order to examine and deconstruct them; others fracture these archetypes altogether in service of building newly complicated, at times humorous, and insistently challenging portrayals. Here the body is understood as a site of discovery and negotiation, constantly in formation and witnessed with frankness, empathy, and respect.
6. VISION_220807_053.JPG: Deborah Roberts B. Austin, Texas, 1962 Fighting the ISM 2019 Mixed-media collage on canvas Museum purchase with funds provided by The Basil Alkazzi Purchase Fund, 2021 (2021.015) Deborah Roberts creates mixed-media collages that bring together images from books, magazines, newspapers, and the Internet, transforming them into nuanced representations of Black experience and challenging the conventional standards of beauty, gender, and race that persist in both art history and popular culture. The artist often works with images of children, as she believes their representation through media is less subject to entrenched prejudice. In Fighting the ISM, the young subject’s composite face synthesizes both male and female features, as well as different skin tones, signaling the broad range of colors and identities encompassed by the term Black. Depicted against a stark white background that focuses attention immediately and exclusively upon its subject, the figure simultaneously projects vulnerability, strength, and defiance.
7. VISION_220807_067.JPG: Katharina Fritsch B. Essen, Germany, 1956 Display Stand with Madonnas 1987‒1989 Aluminum, plaster, and paint Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1999 (99.23) Artist Katharina Fritsch has often worked with mass produced objects from consumer culture, removing them from their original contexts and altering their scale, texture, and/or color to conjure both the familiar and the fantastical. The Virgin Mary has been a recurring figure in Fritsch’s art since the early 1980s, and in this case the “original” source is itself a multiple: a souvenir of Our Lady of Lourdes sold at a pilgrimage site in France. For Display Stand with Madonnas, the artist created 288 identical plaster reproductions of the statuette, stacking them as if set out for sale in a department store. Painted an almost hallucinogenic yellow, the work becomes a mesmerizing shrine to the enduring iconography of the pure and selfless Virgin figure, and to its perpetual salability as commodified image. The work’s overlapping associations call to the complex value systems that underpin our ideal versions of self and suggest how an image of femininity can be codified, packaged, and sold.
8. VISION_220807_083.JPG: Rosalyn Drexler B. Bronx, New York, 1926 Put It This Way 1963 Oil and collage of printed papers on canvas Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.1423) The life of American artist Rosalyn Drexler reads like fiction: completely self-taught, she has been a powerlifter and wrestler (the latter under the pseudonym “Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire”), a lauded playwright and novelist, and a singular artist embedded within New York’s postwar avant-garde. All of Drexler’s work fixates upon the action of encounter; her paintings often borrow cinematic images of sex, romance, and violence—elements regularly confused and conflated in popular culture—which she pastes on canvas and then paints over. In Put It This Way, Drexler excerpts a harrowing, if magnetic, scene of a film star hitting a young starlet, taken from a poster for the film Toys in the Attic (1963). That same year’s Where Is the Loot! captures a similarly disturbing moment of Technicolor aggression. In both, Drexler insists on playing critically with gender and genre stereotypes and wryly points to the ways in which media toys with our understanding of identity and the world. She toys with it right back, reminding us that these glossy ideals can be as sinister as they are seductive.
9. VISION_220807_086.JPG: Rosalyn Drexler B. Bronx, New York, 1926 Where Is the Loot! 1963 Oil and collage of printed papers on canvas Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.1418)
10. VISION_220807_100.JPG: Carolee Schneemann B. Fox Chase, Pennsylvania, 1939–2019 Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions 1963‒1973 Gelatin silver photographs Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest and Purchase Funds and Holenia Purchase Fund, in memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 2007 (07.23) Carolee Schneemann’s works in performance art, including such iconic pieces as Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), are heralded as some of the most significant contributions to twentieth-century contemporary art and feminist practice, yet she was first a painter, working within the stylistic tropes of Neo-Dadaism and New York Abstract Expressionism. As she became increasingly frustrated with the inherent sexism of Western art history, and of the New York art scene in which she operated, she began to transform her work into a site where these imbalances could be addressed. Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions is the revolutionary work in which she became both image-maker and subject. This performance, and its photographic record by the Icelandic artist Err�, her longtime friend, shows her in various actions (one per frame): nude, in a makeshift studio, and covering herself with paint, grease, rope, plastic tarps, and garden snakes. Here Schneemann insists upon ownership of both her body and its reproduction.
11. VISION_220807_128.JPG: Billie Zangewa B. Blantyre, Malawi, 1973 A Vivid Imagination 2021 Hand-stitched silk collage Future gift of Mitchell and Joleen Julis Born in Malawi and now based in South Africa, Billie Zangewa uses silk to create collaged portraits of scenes from her daily life, describing a kind of “everyday feminism” in the sharing of intimate moments that women usually experience at home. A Vivid Imagination was made early in the 2020 pandemic lockdown as the artist navigated feelings of isolation and containment by staging a mini-“vacation” in her sun-soaked garden, putting on a swimsuit and using “my childlike imagination to transport myself to a place of rest.” The fact that the edges are frayed and irregular is deliberate: a condition the artist relates to entropy and the passage of time, as well as to the scars we gather as individuals in our ever-unfinished process of becoming whole. Here Zangewa manages to convey, through fabric, the warm, full sun of midday and the comfortable and composed resting enjoyment of a Black female subject—its own quiet demonstration of power.
12. VISION_220807_135.JPG: Cecily Brown B. London, England, 1969 Hoodlum 2000‒2001 Oil on canvas Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2001 (01.11) Cecily Brown is renowned for lush canvases that deftly marry abstraction, figuration, and a masterful knowledge of the history of art. Hoodlum (which was exhibited at the Hirshhorn in 2002–2003 as part of the artist’s first museum solo show) was made soon after she had moved to a new studio in New York City’s Meatpacking district, and the painting’s vibrant palette of reds, oranges, and browns recalls the scenes of viscera and blood that punctuated her new surroundings. Rather than revel in gore, however, this work evokes the body as a fleshy, sensual landscape. In the center of the canvas, part of a splayed nude figure begins to emerge, both exposed and filtered through the blur of riotous swaths of paint. Brown is particularly known for subverting painting’s hierarchical “figure to ground” relationship, and the figure here remains both visible and evasive, subsumed within the painting’s larger exploration of color, tone, and texture. Hoodlum’s tensions and sensations conjure a glimpse of physicality on the verge—never fully graspable, and whether cohering or dissolving, we cannot be sure.
13. VISION_220807_145.JPG: Senga Nengudi B. Chicago, Illinois, 1943 R.S.V.P. X 1976/2014 Nylon, sand, and rose petals Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2016 (16.7) Part of an influential Black avant-garde that coalesced in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Senga Nengudi operates at a generative artistic nexus among the conceptual, formal, performative, and political. Process and participation are especially significant in her approach, and her best-known series of works, R.S.V.P. (R�pondez s’il vous pla�t, or “Respond, please”), reflects upon the sense of perpetual call-and-response between an artwork and viewer (at times these works are also activated through movement by the artist Maren Hassinger, a longtime collaborator). Nengudi developed this series at the time of her first pregnancy, as she considered the body’s ability to stretch, retract, and adapt. Everyday nylon pantyhose—associated with traditional expectations of femininity—act as a type of skin and are filled with sand and rose petals. The material creates a structure that is both pliable and taut, a sagging and stretching creature strangely anthropomorphized and abstracted. R.S.V.P. X calls to a female physicality that is both precarious and resilient, shouldering burden with tenderness and strength.
14. VISION_220807_150.JPG: Loie Hollowell B. Woodland, California, 1983 Boob Wheel 2019 Oil, acrylic, sawdust, and high-density foam on canvas mounted on panel Gift of Iris and Adam Singer, 2020 (2020.025) Loie Hollowell paints abstractions of the body designed to evoke sensory experience, using color as an emotional tool and geometry as a universal language. To echo the weighty curves of ancient fertility figures, she attaches spherical forms to her canvases, turning paintings into sculptural objects that reflect light and cast shadows onto their own surfaces. Boob Wheel is part of a series of paintings that visualize Hollowell’s experience of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum motherhood, and its scale echoes that of her body with her arms outstretched. Here she distills the female form into five elements (head, breasts, belly, vulva, and butt) arranged in relation to lines of light that run vertically and horizontally through the composition. She employs the term “plumb line,” referring to the gravitational pull felt in the body during pregnancy. Further standing in for the spine or the ground upon which the body rests, the plumb line also links the composition to sacred (often symmetrical) architecture, acting as an axis mundi (axis of the world) and connecting terrestrial and celestial realms.
15. VISION_220807_162.JPG: Kiyan Williams B. Newark, New Jersey, 1991 Meditation on the Making of America, Study 2018 Soil and acrylic on canvas; 3 wooden panels Gift of Dr. Michael I. Jacobs, 2020 (2020.005) Meditation on the Making of America is a performance, captured on video, that viscerally conveys the nation’s history of violence against Black bodies and land. Williams -- a multidisciplinary artist who often employs soil in their work -- flings and smears dirt onto a wall-mounted canvas; they occasionally pause to gather handfuls of the material from a coffinlike sculpture that contains a mask of the artist’s face modeled from the same soil. After a few minutes, a second performer joins, throwing soil at Williams as they stand and kneel against the wall. As the performance continues, a makeshift map of the United States begins to take shape upon the canvas, alluding to the nation’s history of extraction of labor from enslaved people on the one hand and of the earth’s natural resources on the other. For the artist, this also becomes a kind of self-portrait, which speaks to the interdependence of nation-building and identity formation, whereby one both creates and is created by one’s homeland. The soil in the performance was gathered from plantation ruins in St. Croix, where Williams’s ancestors were enslaved, and from the grounds of a house that one such relative owned after she was emancipated. Here the video recording is shown alongside a study for the dirt-caked painting that Williams created during the performance.
16. VISION_220807_178.JPG: Carlotta Corpron B. Blue Earth, Minnesota, 1901–1988 Light Follows Form 1945–1946 Gelatin silver photograph Gift of Herbert Lust, 2019 (2019.023) Carlotta Corpron B. Blue Earth, Minnesota, 1901–1988 White Paper Shapes against White Background—Light from a Venetian Blind n.d. Gelatin silver photograph Gift of Herbert Lust, 2019 (2019.024) Photographer Carlotta Corpron worked in Denton, Texas, but nonetheless aligned her practice with the tenets of the New York School, describing her camera in the way contemporaneous painters characterized gestural brushwork: as an unmediated channel for expression. In her words, “The camera became an extension of myself, and allowed me to express what I wanted to say with and about light.” Corpron produced a number of experimental black-and-white images that study light—the essential element of photography—and in so doing, defied conventional wisdom that the mechanical apparatus of the camera lends itself inherently to representation rather than abstraction or emotion. In Light Follows Form and White Paper Shapes against White Background—Light from a Venetian Blind, Corpron explores how light and shadow both interact with and are able to transform three-dimensional objects, rendering a new kind of poetry from the everyday
17. VISION_220807_182.JPG: Jay DeFeo B. Hanover, New Hampshire, 1929‒1989 Reflections of Africa No. 7 1987 Charcoal, acrylic, graphite, and oil pastel on paper Gift of The Jay DeFeo Foundation in honor of James Demetrion, 2021 (2021.022) A central member of the Bay Area Beat circle in the 1950s and ’60s, Jay DeFeo has long been known for her seminal painting The Rose (1958–1966), considered to be one of the great artworks of the twentieth century. Recent scholarship has sought to expand an understanding of the artist’s practice, which included fluid engagement across disciplines such as drawing, collage, and photography, all deployed in an ongoing examination of both the outside world and her own inner life. Reflections of Africa No. 7 is part of a series of works on paper completed just after the artist climbed Mount Kenya, the second-highest peak on the African continent. Though the drawing takes inspiration from a humble tissue box, its simple geometries are abstracted into flat planes and volumetric forms to create a sensation of deep space, amplifying strong contrasts between light and dark and conjuring something akin to a vast mountain landscape. She later stated that this series was prophetic, revealing an unconscious awareness of her coming diagnosis of lung cancer. In 1989, the year of her death, she said, “As I look back on this series of drawings, they almost seem to be kind of an internal view of that knowledge which I hadn’t really known about, objectively speaking, at the time.
18. VISION_220807_184.JPG: Barbara Hepworth B. Wakefield, England, 1903–1975 Reclining Figure 1933 Alabaster on marble base Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.2442)
19. VISION_220807_192.JPG: Helen Lundeberg B. Chicago, Illinois, 1908–1999 Arcanum #2 1968 Acrylic on canvas The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.3080) A cofounder of the Southern California–based movement known as Post-Surrealism, Helen Lundeberg viewed abstraction as a way to touch upon deeper meaning and sensation within everyday life, and Arcanum #2 (arcana meaning secrets or mysteries) merges a lyrical poetics with a complex investigation of geometric form. The painting is set against a light background and uses layers of color to create an illusion of depth reminiscent of a stained- glass window. Lundeberg’s later work is often explicitly tied to landscape, presaged here by the work’s commingling of architectural and natural sensations. Its precise contours and interplay of line manage to create a feeling of expansive physical space, straddling reality and imagination. In her words, “My work has been concerned, in varying modes of pictorial structure and various degrees of representation and abstraction, with the effort to embody, and to evoke, states of mind, moods, and emotions.”
20. VISION_220807_197.JPG: Barbara Hepworth B. Wakefield, England, 1903–1975 Pendour 1947‒1948 Wood and paint on wood base Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.2444)
21. VISION_220807_205.JPG: Lee Bontecou B. Providence, Rhode Island, 1931 Untitled (Cocoon) 1967 Silk, balsawood, and metal Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972 (72.37) Within the annals of postwar American art, Lee Bontecou is renowned for her decisive early success -- in the words of historian Calvin Tomkins, “only a handful of male artists broke from the starting gate as strongly as she did in the nineteen-sixties, and no woman came close” -- and her equally declarative “disappearance” from the art world in the 1970s, when she moved to rural Pennsylvania and stopped exhibiting regularly (though she never stopped working, and taught at Brooklyn College for many years). Untitled (Cocoon) dates from a period prior to this departure, when Bontecou was experimenting with balsawood and transitioning from the wall reliefs for which she was best known into forms more tied to the natural world. Her practice has often explored the connections between technology and environment, in particular the phenomenon of flight; here the suspended form evokes both a cocoon and an aerial machine, calling forth the myriad intricacies, mysteries, and powers at play within our natural and industrial worlds.
22. VISION_220807_212.JPG: Barbara Hepworth B. Wakefield, England, 1903–1975 Head (Elegy) 1952 Mahogany and string on wood base Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.2438) A driving force of Modern sculpture and a pillar of twentieth-century British art, Barbara Hepworth approached the medium of sculpture as both a physical and metaphysical practice, and her works—often made by direct carving in wood or stone—are explorations of the symbiotic interrelationships between surface and core and objects and surrounding space. The Hirshhorn holds many significant works by Hepworth, including the early Reclining Figure (opposite wall), which shows the artist transitioning fully into abstraction and demonstrates her evocation of the sensuousness of material. A particularly pioneering gesture was piercing the form, as with the sinuous Pendour, which was named for a cove near the artist’s home in St. Ives, Cornwall. Hepworth had moved with her family in 1939 to escape wartime destruction in London, and the dramatic Cornish landscape would become a significant presence within her subsequent work. Pendour’s contours create their own almost cosmic geology, conjuring windswept cliffs and the ebb and flow of cresting waves. This evocation of continuum and reciprocity is furthered throughout Hepworth’s oeuvre, as in the stringed Head (Elegy), which synthesizes surreal, Constructivist, and geometric elements into a single elegant abstraction.
23. VISION_220807_231.JPG: Joan Mitchell B. Chicago, Illinois, 1925–1992 Field for Skyes 1973 Oil on canvas Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David T. Workman, 1975 (75.20) Joan Mitchell had already garnered critical acclaim as a seminal gestural painter when she began to split her time between New York and Paris in the mid-1950s, and she would live primarily in France for the rest of her life while producing one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated bodies of work. The almost overwhelming Field for Skyes was one of several triptychs Mitchell painted in 1973, and it was shown at the artist’s landmark one-woman retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. An immense and magnetic convergence of color, movement, and feeling, the work seems to suggest not only the enormity of landscape, but also the smallness one feels when subsumed by an expanse of sky or a field disappearing into the distance. The sublime, as traditionally understood through the historical genre of landscape painting, aimed to tap sensations too vast to fully quantify or articulate, and Mitchell describes a similar attempt to grasp at something ephemeral: “I paint from remembered landscapes I carry with me -- and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would more like to paint what it leaves with me.”
24. VISION_220807_238.JPG: NATURE AND ABSTRACTION Alternately lyrical, muscular, and provocative, the artworks on view in this and the following gallery testify to the near limitless artistic potential where nature and abstract form converge. While abstraction has never been neutral or existed apart from individual and historical realities, for some female artists -- especially those in the early and mid-twentieth century -- it offered a way to deemphasize a gendered view and instead emphasize a human one, all while rejecting older artistic conventions that artificially separated human beings from their surroundings. Artists today continue to expand upon our relationships to the environment and investigate how abstraction might attempt to grasp the energy and complexity of the natural world—its magnitude and mysteries beyond language, but not recognition.
25. VISION_220807_243.JPG: Arlene Shechet B. New York, New York, 1951 Ripple and Ruffle 2020 Glazed ceramic, hardwood, sand-cast brass, and steel Gift of Mickalene Thomas, 2022 Incorporating both natural and industrial materials, Ripple and Ruffle energetically manifests what artist Arlene Shechet describes as an ongoing tension between “the wild and the tame.” The work’s central trunk was salvaged from a friend’s walnut tree and reveals a swath of insect “drawings” on its surface. The trunk is topped and seemingly tipped by a ceramic rectangular block, alternately painted black and with a camouflage-like glaze, and a gash in its side is filled with a small sheet of plywood (a slight nod to the pretense of wood, as plywood is not fully wood), which is finished with a rippled edge -- as though the plywood is fancifying itself for show. A brass “limb” (another element posing as wood) branches out from the base of the trunk, serving as a literal counterweight for the larger composition. As a sculptural object, the work is endlessly evocative, shifting dramatically from viewpoint to viewpoint. Yet it also calls to a history of classical sculpture and the torqued or contrapposto stance characteristic of ancient statuary. Shechet has always found humor in the posturing of these leaning (mainly male) hero figures, often propped at the base by the form of a wooden branch made to appear “natural” within the overall composition. With its many guises, Ripple and Ruffle thus becomes a winking antihero for the twenty-first century: no pushover, with power, poetry, and a lively sense of play.
26. VISION_220807_249.JPG: Lesley Vance B. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1977 Untitled 2021 Oil on linen Future Gift of Iris and Adam Singer Lesley Vance creates sweeping abstract paintings with a palpable sense of continuity and flow. Her surfaces deftly weave light and shadow, color and form, background and foreground into a heady mix that can appear to vibrate in front of the eyes like an optical illusion. She achieves this effect by working intuitively and improvisationally, following both material and movement, until—as she describes it -- the painting develops its own independent logic. Untitled demonstrates this negotiation between control and a relinquishing of it, seeming to generate its own feeling of ceaseless energy and reminiscent of natural phenomena such as breath, gravitational pull, wind, or water. Vance refrains from titling any of her works, as she wishes viewers to come to them openly and follow their own interpretations and sensations. This choice also, perhaps, reflects a respect for the painting’s independence, its unique life force. In her words, “You want the painting to feel like it just fell out of the sky, and . . . was meant to exist that way.”
27. VISION_220807_258.JPG: Alma Thomas B. Columbus, Georgia, 1891–1978 Earth Sermon—Beauty, Love and Peace 1971 Acrylic on canvas The Martha Jackson Memorial Collection: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson, 1980 (80.107) Alma Thomas was an instigator of firsts: the first fine arts graduate of Howard University (in 1924) and, at the age of eighty, the first Black woman to hold a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In between, Thomas was a significant fixture of an energetic art scene in Washington, DC, where she also worked as a public-school teacher for close to thirty years. Sky Light and Earth Sermon—Beauty, Love and Peace both date from the era of Thomas’s Whitney exhibition and demonstrate the liveliness and syncopation of her best-known, beloved, and exuberant abstraction (a style she came to later in life, only after her retirement from teaching). Thomas approached color as the foundational element of her work, and often it was nature that served as muse: “Man’s highest aspirations come from nature. A world without color would seem dead. Color is life. Light is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.” Ultimately, Thomas insisted upon art—and abstraction—as a manifestation of beauty and joy, a place to find solace and rejoice.
28. VISION_220807_265.JPG: Alma Thomas B. Columbus, Georgia, 1891–1978 Sky Light 1973 Acrylic on canvas Gift of Vincent Melzac, 1975 (75.26)
29. VISION_220807_276.JPG: Dorothea Rockburne B. Montreal, Canada, 1934 Locus Series #6 1972 Soft-ground etching and aquatint on folded paper Gift of Harry Kahn, 1988 (88.32) In a remarkable career spanning more than seventy years, Dorothea Rockburne has consistently demonstrated an exceptional sensitivity to material and an ability to create expansive possibilities through extremely simplified forms. Mathematical principles -- in particular their relationships to nature -- have been an important touchstone (Rockburne studied with celebrated mathematician Max Dehn at Black Mountain College in the 1950s), and Locus Series #6 manifests this interest in part through its careful attention to geometric structure. Here Rockburne carefully folded paper according to a specific creasing pattern and ran it through a printing press, creating a sequence of embossed lines alongside planes both indented and in subtle relief. She then applied aquatint only on the paper’s raised surfaces to create a distinct tone and texture. To look closely is to understand how a single sheet of paper might become its own universe, with peaks and valleys, ridges, and textural patterns centralized by a single axis point. Though the work appears austere, Rockburne’s relationship to it is more than purely cerebral. She says, “Even though it has an intellectual basis and mathematical structure, my work comes from a deep emotional source within me.”
30. VISION_220807_285.JPG: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian B. Qazvin, Iran, 1924–2019 Untitled 1975‒1976 Mirror, reverse-glass painting, and plaster on wood Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2016 (16.2) Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s work exhibits her unique vantage point as an Iranian artist who lived in both Tehran and New York and cultivated an awareness of the affinities between traditional Persian art and the contemporary Western avant-garde. After a 1966 visit to the mosaic-encrusted Shah Cheragh Shrine in Shiraz with fellow artists Robert Morris and Marcia Hafif, Farmanfarmaian began experimenting with cut-mirror mosaic, enlisting the help of master craftsman Hajji Ostad Mohammad Navid to realize her ambitious designs. She worked in this mode throughout the 1970s, gradually shifting away from representation toward complex tessellated works based on spiritual geometry. She described Untitled, created in the midst of this shift, as “a background filled of sky and stars and, in the middle, a box of heaven.” It is a rare extant example of Farmanfarmaian’s artwork from before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, when the government confiscated most of her work and forced her into exile.
31. VISION_220807_291.JPG: Mary Bauermeister B. Frankfurt, Germany, 1934 In Memory of the Stone-Arrow-Error (Stone Series) 1962‒1967 Stones, ink, and gesso on canvas mounted on wood The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.262) Mary Bauermeister moved to New York from Cologne in the early 1960s, inspired by the example of American artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work -- among other things -- synthesized painting and sculpture. Her own work encompasses multiple media and a range of concerns including nature, science, politics, music, and mathematics, all mobilized in an ongoing exploration of the phenomenon of perception. She is especially well known for her “lens boxes,” lively compositions that combine glass lenses with minutely detailed drawings rendered on both flat and round surfaces, creating a surreal space where vision is magnified and distorted. Each of her works is a heady mix of the physical and the illusory: in her words, “The wonderful thing is that when you move by as a viewer the background changes, or if you go back and forth you get a different focus and you see different things. Whatever I write or paint on the background becomes more ambiguous. I don’t like fixed statements, I don’t like dogmas, that is why my artistic slogan is 1+1=3. Things are not only the way we think they are, they have a big variety of answers.”
32. VISION_220807_297.JPG: Mary Bauermeister B. Frankfurt, Germany, 1934 308,975 Times No . . . Since . . . 1966 Glass lenses, wood, ink, and paint The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.267)
33. VISION_220807_314.JPG: Mary Bauermeister B. Frankfurt, Germany, 1934 In Memory of Your Feelings, or Hommage � Jasper Johns 1964‒1965 Glass lenses, wood, ink, and paint Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.399)
34. VISION_220807_325.JPG: Mary Bauermeister B. Frankfurt, Germany, 1934 4 Pages Yes and 1 No? 1965 Ink and pencil on transparent paper The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.265)
35. VISION_220807_358.JPG: Liz Deschenes B. Boston, Massachusetts, 1966 Untitled (LeWitt) #1 2016 UV print on plexiglass Gift of Benjamin Reed Hunter, 2020 (2020.026) Liz Deschenes is fascinated by the metaphors and materials of photography, not only such elements as photosensitive papers, chemistry, and light reactions and exposure, but also the evolving life of a photograph over time and the almost instinctual desire -- especially in an age of iPhones -- to stop or “fix” time in an image. Untitled (LeWitt) #1 is part of a series that responds directly to the work of Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, in particular to a group of 666 photographs titled On the Walls of the Lower East Side, wherein he captured images around his downtown Manhattan neighborhood. Like the walls that he documented, LeWitt’s photographs have now faded, and Deschenes’s work, which like all photography is also vulnerable to fading, calls us to face (at literal standing height) the impossibility of arresting these life cycles. The freestanding acrylic monochrome is made without a camera, using digital pigment printing, and is a photo-sculpture hybrid meant to be viewed in the round. The magenta shade recalls a hue from LeWitt’s faded photographs, emitting an elegiac rosy glow that clouds our view, and which we can never fully grasp.
36. VISION_220807_364.JPG: THE POETRY OF PERCEPTION It can seem a paradox that much art traditionally thought of as cool and cerebral is concerned with exactly the opposite: extreme sensation and the complex mental/physical duality that unlocks our experience of art. By emphasizing form and materiality, the artists in this gallery ask viewers to look closely, listen, and pay attention to the ways in which individual bodies move through space, absorb, and process information. Is an object something one experiences only with the eyes? How does shifting perspective shift understanding? How do light and color condition feeling? Can an abstract form convey emotion? Memory? Place? In the words of painter Agnes Martin, whose work is on view in this gallery, “Art work that is completely abstract—free from any expression of the environment is like music and can be responded to in the same way. Our response to line and tone and color is the same as our response to sounds. And like music abstract art is thematic. It holds meaning for us that is beyond expression in words.”
37. VISION_220807_366.JPG: Anne Truitt B. Baltimore, Maryland, 1921‒2004 Night Naiad 1977 Acrylic on wood Museum Purchase, 1978 (78.1) Part of a thriving artistic community in Washington, DC, following World War II, Maryland native Anne Truitt is known for spare, totemic sculptures that bring evocative abstractions off the wall and into three dimensions. Building up the surface of her works with layer upon layer of gesso and titanium white paint, Truitt would then add subtle color to create lyrical and almost vibrational fields. Though her works are often referred to as Minimalist, Truitt -- much like Agnes Martin, whose work is also on view in this gallery -- was invested in art not as a material or geometric exercise but as an expressive one, where a human feeling or sense of presence might be distilled into an object through color, material, and process. With Night Naiad (a naiad being a mythological water nymph), Truitt calls to a specific experience in the natural world. In her own words, “Night Naiad is about the mysteries of water and night -- a combination of water and night. Not the sea. Still water and the night.”
38. VISION_220807_373.JPG: Agnes Martin B. Macklin, Canada, 1912‒2004 Untitled No. 3 1998 Acrylic and graphite on linen Gift of the American Art Foundation, 2001 (01.15) Painter Agnes Martin lived and worked for much of her life in the American Southwest, producing a body of almost ethereal work. Incorporating both graphite, which she used to draw horizontal and vertical lines on canvas by hand, and paint -- either oil or acrylic -- her paintings are spare yet magnetic, both intimate and seemingly infinite. While these works often have been understood in relation to the Minimalist art so prevalent in the late twentieth century, Martin sought an art that countered Minimalism’s detached and industrial formalism, an art that she described as existing beyond “intellectual living” altogether. Instead she wished to touch upon beauty as a “mystery of life,” and her abstraction attempts to connect us to the indescribable feelings that mark us as human in our ongoing search for happiness. In this work, painted within the last ten years of the artist’s life, a single white line intersects a soft blue field, a shimmering horizon within a vast expanse. Though such work can appear simple almost to the point of dissolving, for those who give themselves over to it, Martin’s art can become a kind of meditative experience, a place to get lost within a peaceful and powerful landscape.
39. VISION_220807_384.JPG: Eva Hesse B. Hamburg, Germany, 1936–1970 Vertiginous Detour 1966 Acrylic, polyurethane, papier-m�ch�, rope, and net Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1988 (88.24) In the four short years before her untimely death in 1970, Eva Hesse produced one of the most impactful bodies of late-twentieth-century sculpture, at once original, sophisticated, mysterious, seductive, hilarious, compelling, and confounding. Powered by an intuitive and experimental approach to material, Hesse was invested in art as “a total thing” that could not be intellectualized apart from the ineffable and essential qualities of interior life, the absurdities (a favorite term) of human existence. The matte-black Vertiginous Detour consists of a papier-m�ch� ball covered in spikes made of hardened rope, suspended in a net from the ceiling. Its title summons a feeling of dizziness and an inability to ground oneself, a condition evoked through the work’s array of contradictory tensions. It is stuck yet precarious, vulnerable to gravity yet resistant, contained yet -- as bits of rope reach through holes in the net -- attempting to escape its container. The resulting work turns its generally unremarkable elements into an unearthly hybrid: a surreal and psychosexual wrecking ball.
40. VISION_220807_394.JPG: Jennie C. Jones B. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1968 Light Gray with Middle C (variation #2) 2013 Acoustic absorber panel and acrylic on canvas Museum Purchase, 2014 (14.7) In a practice that spans painting, sculpture, works on paper, sound, and installation, Jennie C. Jones draws on commonplace materials to give visual expression to sound and to consider the unexplored confluences between abstract visual artists and African American jazz composers. Light Gray with Middle C (variation #2) is an example of what she calls acoustic paintings, which employ commercial acoustic panels generally used to minimize echoes and reverberations. Here Jones subtly accentuates the surfaces, including the space between component panels, with bright yellow paint, complicating the otherwise spare and unmodulated fabric. Inspired by the graphic forms of musical notations, the restrained palette and clean aesthetic also evoke the principles of Minimalism.
41. VISION_220807_405.JPG: Women in America Earn Only 2/3 of What Men Do (from Portfolio Compleat: 1985‒2012) 1986/exhibition copy 2022 Vinyl Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2014 (14.9.6)
42. VISION_220807_412.JPG: Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? (from Portfolio Compleat: 1985‒2012) 1989/exhibition copy 2022 Vinyl Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2014 (14.9.24)
43. VISION_220807_415.JPG: Guerrilla Girls Founded New York City, 1985 Since 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of activist feminist artists, have donned identity-obscuring gorilla masks while staging public interventions and acts of resistance. They are best known for their poster campaigns, which use bold graphics, thoroughly researched data, and humor to expose corruption, gender and ethnic inequalities, and class biases in art, pop culture, and politics. The works on view in this room all come from the artists’ Portfolio Compleat: 1985–2012, a multidecade collection of diverse materials and the culmination of years of investigation and social commentary. The initial 1989 iteration of Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum? is perhaps the Girls’ best-known work and was first designed as a billboard for the Public Art Fund, though it was ultimately reformulated as an advertisement on New York City buses. This adaptation of different media is typical of their approach, which has included renegade wheat-pasted posters, strategically placed billboards, and public projections. The Guerrilla Girls’ ongoing collective projects continue to call the art world to attention via accessible forms of thoughtful resistance and a reasoned insistence upon self-reflection and critique.
44. VISION_220807_424.JPG: From Foundation to Future
45. VISION_220807_439.JPG: The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist (from Portfolio Compleat: 1985‒2012) 1988/exhibition copy 2022 Vinyl Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2014 (14.9.18)
46. VISION_220807_447.JPG: Dearest Art Collector (from Portfolio Compleat: 1985‒2012) 1986 Offset lithograph Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2014 (14.9.8)
47. VISION_220807_450.JPG: Horror on the National Mall! (from Portfolio Compleat: 1985‒2012) 2007 Electrophotographic print Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2014 (14.9.75)
48. VISION_220807_459.JPG: Guerrilla Girls’ Code of Ethics for Art Museums (from Portfolio Compleat: 1985‒2012) 1990/exhibition copy 2022 Vinyl Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2014 (14.9.28)
49. VISION_220807_468.JPG: Isa Genzken B. Bad Oldesloe, Germany, 1948 Untitled 2006 Wood, plastic, metal, fabric, glass, taxidermied bird, porcelain, lights, candy, stickers, duct tape, and paint Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2006 (06.14) Isa Genzken has worked for more than a half-century in diverse media, including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and collage. Her practice is untethered to any specific subject but knowingly engages many (in particular the histories of Modernism, architecture, and art), and she turns a keen eye toward political and societal life. In the 1990s, she began experimenting with rough-and-ready assemblage, approaching a superabundance of contemporary objects -- expensive or cheap, bespoke or mass-produced -- as readymade sculptures in their own right. In Untitled, varied elements such as a silver bird, child’s doll, upside-down chair, stickers from the television show The Simpsons, electric light, and purple plastic sheeting commingle around and on a simple pedestal, which serves as a grounding and emphatically sculptural device. Scrutinizing sculpture alongside the loose ends of our commercialist culture, Untitled is a tender and anarchic altar for the twenty-first century: a portrait of life in its most convoluted and precarious abundance.
50. VISION_220807_478.JPG: Amy Sillman B. Detroit, Michigan, 1955 P & H 2 (behemoth) 2007 Oil on canvas Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest and Purchase Funds, 2008 (08.19) Amy Sillman engages painting as an arena where resistance is a form of potential, and the medium, its history, the body, and an understanding of space are all negotiated as part of a larger process of build-up and take-down, entanglement and disentanglement. For Sillman, this often involves a tension between figuration and abstraction, which P & H 2 (behemoth) tackles in large scale. Part of a series related to partnership, this painting has its genesis in a sketch of a couple (two of the artist’s friends) in bed in their own home. Sillman then began abstracting the imagery to seek something “between figure and no-figure, or beyond figure; between space and no-space.” The resulting work feels like psychologically charged abstraction, as though its elements are tussling, expanding, and compressing in tandem, with a gravitational pull threatening to topple the composition altogether. Sillman insists upon the inextricability of the body and abstraction, and the high stakes of their intricate connections. In her words, “Isn’t the recording of experience engraved on the senses, the nervous system, the organs of our body? It seems to me as long as there is such a thing as one’s own body, gestural painting will be a fantastic territory for politics.”
51. VISION_220807_493.JPG: Nancy Spero B. Cleveland, Ohio, 1926–2009 Torture of Women III 1981 Typewriting and handprinted collage on paper Holenia Trust Fund, in memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 2009 (09.4) For more than sixty years, Nancy Spero’s visceral and haunting work was powered by her unwavering commitment to justice and her insistence upon art’s inseparability from the world’s larger social and political realities. Spero began her Torture of Women series in the late 1970s, juxtaposing journalistic excerpts from sources including the New York Times and Amnesty International’s Reports on Torture with printed and hand-wrought imagery on paper. The texts—which one can read only in fragments—describe horrific examples of institutional violence perpetrated against women, here overlaid with a wrenching image of a female figure straining to crawl upon (or rise from?) the earth with an open-mouthed cry. Spero further incorporates thick, erratic white lines that slash across the page, cohering into loose figurative profiles reminiscent of early cave paintings. Overall the work operates as a modern-day scroll pieced together from salvaged parts, its raw mixing of media seeming to suggest that certain horrors exist beyond words. While its archival quality historicizes the specific stories, it serves too as an unflinching reminder of the sustained violence that continues to disproportionally target female and female-identifying people throughout the world. In a text written for the artist’s first exhibition of the series, historian Lucy Lippard said that in these works, “Spero is secretary to the apocalypse.”
52. VISION_220807_502.JPG: Eva Hesse B. Hamburg, Germany, 1936–1970 Vertiginous Detour 1966 Acrylic, polyurethane, papier-m�ch�, rope, and net Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 1988 (88.24) In the four short years before her untimely death in 1970, Eva Hesse produced one of the most impactful bodies of late-twentieth-century sculpture, at once original, sophisticated, mysterious, seductive, hilarious, compelling, and confounding. Powered by an intuitive and experimental approach to material, Hesse was invested in art as “a total thing” that could not be intellectualized apart from the ineffable and essential qualities of interior life, the absurdities (a favorite term) of human existence. The matte-black Vertiginous Detour consists of a papier-m�ch� ball covered in spikes made of hardened rope, suspended in a net from the ceiling. Its title summons a feeling of dizziness and an inability to ground oneself, a condition evoked through the work’s array of contradictory tensions. It is stuck yet precarious, vulnerable to gravity yet resistant, contained yet—as bits of rope reach through holes in the net—attempting to escape its container. The resulting work turns its generally unremarkable elements into an unearthly hybrid: a surreal and psychosexual wrecking ball.
53. VISION_220807_512.JPG: STRESS POSITIONS The artworks in this gallery explore positions of stress, both through formal abstraction and experimentation and, more pointedly, in testimonies of or challenges to the physical body. What capacity might art have for registering conditions of precarity, compression, vulnerability, or constraint? How does stress condition our physical spaces, bodies, and possibilities for freedom? What is art’s capacity to register pain, and what is our position as viewers who are witness to it? “What’s still familiar is our incredible exhaustion; looping, running, daily,” says the avatar in Sondra Perry’s video installation Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation, on view in this gallery, and evident here are the ways in which marginalized bodies must continually persist in the face of resistance, pressure, and even violence. Also present are the forces of refusal and resilience that are creatively mobilized in return.
54. VISION_220807_515.JPG: Deana Lawson B. Rochester, New York, 1979 Young Grandmother 2019/printed 2021 Inkjet print with collage in mirrored frame Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2022 For the past two decades, Deana Lawson has been assembling what she refers to as an extended family album, photographing strangers, often in their homes, across the fragmented African diaspora. She strives to draw out the inherent magnificence of her subjects, despite their sometimes humble surroundings, and welcomes the surprises they actively bring to the encounter. Cascade is linked to Lawson’s fascination with the idea of stretching a body to its limits: the young Black model gazes coolly from the center of an almost impossibly balanced contortion, exuding a calm that belies her incredible flexibility and strength. In Young Grandmother, we see an attractive woman with a trio of squirming children on her lap, crowned by a rose-petal heart like a haloed modern-day Madonna and children. While bolstered by their church community, who are represented in the photo on the right, an empty chair speaks to an absence where another (a mother? a partner?) may have been. Cultural theorist Tina Campt has identified Lawson as part of a contemporary group of artists who are cultivating a distinctively Black gaze that rejects spectatorship and forces the viewer to engage with Blackness on its own terms (rather than in relation to whiteness). These subjects’ powerful stares open a two-way connection between viewer and subject, wherein both carry responsibility and vulnerability simultaneously as the seer and seen.
55. VISION_220807_518.JPG: Deana Lawson B. Rochester, New York, 1979 Cascade 2019/printed 2021 Pigment print Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2022
56. VISION_220807_527.JPG: EARTH KNOWLEDGE Though working at different times and in distant locales, the two artists in this gallery each look to physical earth as a recorder of passages: the life cycles of materials, travels through space and time, memory, and the transformative power of art to evoke the unique presence of a place. Dana Awartani is a young artist based in Saudi Arabia whose work engages the complexity of Arabic cultural heritage, often through practices associated with traditional craft. I went away . . . is an installation in two parts: the first is a floor mosaic rendered in colored sand whose pattern recalls Islamic tiles; the second is a silent video of the artist sweeping away this colored sand and exposing a simple floor. The Jeddah house where Awartani first performed and filmed this action is key: its European style, common among wealthy homes built in the 1950s and ’60s, reflects a moment when Middle Eastern modernization was often equated with Westernization. Now abandoned, the property is decaying through quiet neglect. Awartani’s gesture marks this slow layering of history and its erasure, whereby cultural identity becomes increasingly unstable. She calls instead for a contemporary identity built alongside careful attention to the past. Associated with the Land art movement of the 1960s and ’70s, American Michelle Stuart’s work stands apart from others of her generation in its anti-monumentality. Rather than carving into the earth or building upon it, Stuart adopts a philosophy of treading lightly and leaving few traces. To capture nuances in the earth’s surface that typically go unnoticed, she incorporated frottage into her practice in the early 1970s, laying large muslin- backed paper scrolls directly on the ground and rubbing them with graphite and/or earth. Passages: Mesa Verde is a rare installation that combines one of Stuart’s scrolls with sculpture and photography. Just as the scrolls record the topography of the Pueblo cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde, Colorado, the books are filled with layers of its earth and the photographs capture its light.
57. VISION_220807_530.JPG: Michelle Stuart B. Los Angeles, California, 1933 Passages: Mesa Verde 1977‒1979 Photographs, muslin-mounted rag paper, handmade paper, and soil Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2021 (2021.011)
58. VISION_220807_544.JPG: Dana Awartani B. Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 1987 I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming 2017 Single-channel video; color; sound; hand-dyed sand; 24:47 min. Museum purchase with funds provided by Joleen and Mitchell R. Julis, 2021 (2021.009)
59. VISION_220807_584.JPG: Louise Nevelson B. Kiev, Ukraine, 1899–1988 Dream House XXXII 1972 Wood, paint, and metal The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.3340) In the 1940s and 1950s, as many of her male counterparts espoused a muscular abstraction in welded metal, Louise Nevelson turned to a different though no less potent sculptural material: found and scavenged wood. Nevelson was invested in the way that physical things can carry meaning, both personal and political, and assembled constructions of wooden scraps and objects became the foundation and crux of her art. The surreal, suggestive Dream House XXXII exemplifies some of its best-known characteristics, such as the Cubist-inspired box motif, yet Nevelson’s approach was as much poeticized abstraction as it was an exploration of form. The wash of matte black paint—the artist’s primary color, which nods to her preoccupation with celestial bodies and the night sky— serves to underscore a quiet sense of mystery, muting objects’ recognizable functions and enveloping them in a uniform web of allusion. Dream House can be read against feminist concerns of the era: disillusionment with the promise of domestic idyll; the home’s inscription (often pejorative) as a feminized place; and disregard of female labor. Yet it also stands as a surrogate for the body, an Alice in Wonderland funhouse with doors that swing open and perforations that jumble interior and exterior space, altogether conjuring a sense of longing, entrapment, and escape.
60. VISION_220807_598.JPG: Betye Saar B. Los Angeles, California, 1926 The Birds and the Beasts Were There 1976 Coral, lacquered wood, metal, plastic, ceramic, leather, fabric, feather, silk, and cameo in wood box Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.4103) For Betye Saar, objects contain power: historical, political, familial, autobiographical, even mystic. She uses found objects to create small assemblages, a practice inspired in part by seeing Joseph Cornell’s work at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1968. Upon the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that same year, Saar began working deliberately with images and artifacts used by white culture to stereotype Black Americans. It’s Only a Matter of Time is both an unsettling reflection on a painful reality and a poignant and poetic dreamscape. Saar employs reproductions of a young Black boy and watermelon, arranged around a game board punctuated by a central clock --ticking down to what, we don’t know -- and anchored by small plastic grenades nestled into each bottom corner. Dark Erotic Dream and The Birds and the Beasts Were There are equally evocative, though perhaps more grounded in the personal. Titles and imagery call to a sense of mystery, revelation, and even ritual, here distilled and intensified within the frame into visions of poetry and potential. For Saar, the process is its own discovery and catharsis; in her words, “Beauty is a form of spirituality. Once you start making something with your hands, the healing starts.”
61. VISION_220807_602.JPG: Betye Saar B. Los Angeles, California, 1926 Dark Erotic Dream 1976 Metal, paint, ceramic, wood, and plastic sequins in wood box Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.4104)
62. VISION_220807_604.JPG: Betye Saar B. Los Angeles, California, 1926 It’s Only a Matter of Time 1974 Plastic, paper, wood, tin buttons, lead, decal, photomechanical reproduction, watermelon seeds, and paint on plywood Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.4105)
63. VISION_220807_617.JPG: Rachel Jones B. London, England, 1991 SMIIILLLLEEEE 2021 Oil pastel and oil stick on canvas Gift of Iris and Adam Singer, 2022 Rachel Jones’s kaleidoscopic SMIIILLLLEEEE adopts a suggestive approach to its title subject: the mouth and teeth. For Jones, the mouth is of specific, charged interest, both as the barrier between interior feeling and exterior performance, such as in the forced smile one adopts when being photographed, and a site through which we join or communicate with others—and also where we might be silenced. Here, the work “speaks” to Jones’s knowing experiences as a Black artist working in a predominately and historically white (art world) space, and directly engages the complexities around Black bodies and the politics of gender and representation. She offers a compelling visual language -- riotous abstraction -- to propose new possibilities for exploring and understanding identity. In her words, “You can use color and shape and form to speak to people in a way that isn’t about a spoken language. It’s about emotion and inciting feelings that don’t have to be explained or expressed. It’s responsive, it’s instinctive, and a core part of all of us.”
64. VISION_220807_636.JPG: Christina Quarles B. Chicago, Illinois, 1985 Held Fast and Let Go Likewise 2020 Acrylic on canvas Museum purchase with funds provided by The Basil Alkazzi Purchase Fund, 2020 (2020.034) Christina Quarles is a gestural figurative painter who is interested in depicting the dynamic experience of living within a body rather than the relatively static fa�ade that is perceived from the outside. Quarles paints at a scale determined by her own arm span and stretches, twists, compresses, and contorts her subjects to fit inside the frame of her large canvases. Bodies are irrevocably entangled, blurring and blending together into a swirl of movement that often contains too many or too few appendages. For Quarles, this indecipherability is an incitement to push beyond our quick assessment of a scene and instead spend time acclimating to its complexity. Raw canvas features prominently in her work, as do perspectival planes that bisect, fragment, or otherwise infringe upon the figures. Here the exposed canvas can be seen as both void and plane, a fitting metaphor for the paradox that lies at the center of Quarles’s work—that we are all simultaneously bounded and boundless.
65. VISION_220807_644.JPG: Emily Mae Smith b. Austin, Texas, 1979 Unruly Thread 2019 Oil on linen Gift of Iris and Adam Singer, 2022 Employing whimsical themes, humor, and an interplay of styles including Surrealism, Pop art, and Symbolism, Emily Mae Smith thoughtfully mines art history to question canonical approaches to gender. Unruly Thread is a direct response to William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott (c. 1888–1905), itself inspired by Alfred Tennyson’s eponymous nineteenthcentury poem, which narrates the tale of a woman held captive and able to look upon the outside world only through its mirrored reflection. Day by day, she uses a needle and thread to recreate her image of the exterior landscape, until one day she gives into temptation as the knight Lancelot passes below. Her decision to gaze directly upon him is punished by her banishment and, ultimately, death. While Hunt’s painting depicts its subject at work in her jail tower, Smith’s rendering centralizes the needle itself, a traditional object of feminized labor. Smith sets this subject against an abstract background of gradient blues and reds, with fibers weaving in and around the needle, creating a complex matrix that represents the tool as both an element of confinement and a weapon of release. As Smith explains of the needle and thread: “It’s an art form, but it’s entangling her and destroying her,” adding that her own paintings “are unraveling myths that are bad,” but also acknowledge the ways in which these stories inevitably bind us together.
66. VISION_220807_651.JPG: SHAPE SHIFTERS In 1941, a critic wrote of Louise Nevelson’s one-woman exhibition at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York: “We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns.” Such a statement now reads as grotesquely and almost comically misogynist, yet artists today operate within a world that continues to privilege traditional, “comfortable” ideas of gender and assumes a connection between an artist’s gender and the art they make. The artists in this gallery, including Nevelson, have persisted in the face of such stasis by proposing their own imaginative worlds, working to generate possibilities for identity that complicate, expand, and bust at the seams any neat or tidy constraint. They ask that we envision (or [re]vision) more daring, creative, fluid, and even magical ideas of self, not by avoiding difficult truths, but by unraveling them in service of new and deeper understandings of one another and the world—both as it has been known, and as it is yet to be created.
67. VISION_220807_657.JPG: Zanele Muholi B. Umlazi, South Africa, 1972 Misiwe, Bijlmer, Amsterdam, 2017 2017/printed 2019 Gelatin silver photograph Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2020 (2020.015)
68. VISION_220807_664.JPG: Zanele Muholi B. Umlazi, South Africa, 1972 Thandiwe, Roanoke, Virginia, 2018 2018/printed 2019 Gelatin silver photograph Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2020 (2020.014) Zanele Muholi operates as a visual activist, a term that acknowledges their work to empower queer and youth communities in their native South Africa. Muholi is cofounder of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, which advocates for the rights of Black lesbians in South Africa, and is the founder of Inkanyiso, a collective that focuses on queer rights and visual media. Beginning in 2012, Muholi embarked upon the multiyear photography project Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness). Created in response to high-profile personal and public incidents tied to race, identity, violence, and history, the series features the artist in dozens of stylized self-portraits. The elaborate dollar-bill headdress of Thandiwe, Roanoke, Virginia, 2018 shrouds the artist in overflowing capitalist abundance or, rather, the bills of low-wage commerce. The wooden hangers of Misiwe, Bijlmer, Amsterdam, 2017 could reference the artist’s mother, who was a domestic worker, or the tradition of domestic work among Africans and across the diaspora (this image also carries a response to a specific violent incident in Amsterdam, where the proprietor of a rental apartment refused Muholi entry and pushed one of their collaborators head-first down a flight of stairs). Muholi imbues these commonplace materials with symbolism and power, employing lighting and high-contrast photo editing to emphasize the darkness of their skin, bring attention to the luminosity of their eyes, and heighten their outward gaze. While their practice is born of the present day, when read through the lenses of historic and ethnographic photography, which for centuries has measured, exoticized, and fetishized Black figures, Muholi’s work reckons with these complexities and works to exorcise a collective trauma around gaze and discrimination toward the Black body.
69. VISION_220807_674.JPG: Niki de Saint Phalle b. Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, 1930–2002 Annette 1964 Paper, fabric, pencil, colored pencil, ink, ink stamp, photomechanical reproduction, gouache, watercolor, pastel, and enamel on canvas Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.4436) A self-taught and sophisticated iconoclast, Niki de Saint Phalle was connected with both the American and European avant-gardes throughout the late twentieth century, and was the only woman to have been part of the influential Nouveau R�alisme movement in the 1960s. Despite these associations, Saint Phalle spent a lifetime producing work decidedly at odds with the most celebrated art of her era, in that it is bright, accessible, figurative, and relentlessly feminist. She is best known for her sinuous and colorful “Nana” sculptures, fecund female forms that feel (and often are) larger than life. Lesser known are the artist’s drawings and collages, which convey a more diaristic and intimate tone. Annette was made at the moment when Saint Phalle was first developing the Nanas, and feels like a loving and almost devotional portrait. In it one can see the impulses that would feed Saint Phalle’s sculptural creations: woman as epic and uncontainable fortress, exuberantly playful, curious, complex, and charismatic.
70. VISION_220807_692.JPG: Julia Thecla b. Delavan, Illinois, 1896–1973 Island of Birds and Beings 1964 Ink, pencil, crayon, paint, watercolor, and gouache on paper mounted on fiberboard Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.4906) Though she showed in New York and was part of an active arts community in her native Chicago through the early and mid-twentieth century, Julia Thecla died in relative obscurity—victim of an art world that often failed to recognize both regionalist and female artists. For Thecla, art was a means to both explore life and escape these frustrations. Her works depict fantastical worlds of her own creation, often incorporating animals, references to ballet and dance, self-portraiture, and outer space (arenas where imagination, surrealism, and performance converge). In the 1950s, she began experimenting with a technique that involved smudging her surfaces with candle soot, then using these marks to improvise wispy dreamscapes of intermingled figures, animals, color, and form. On the back of one work from this time, she inscribed: “Made from imagination without previous plans. THE MEANING can be found better than someone other than the artist; I believe.” These works thus become a kind of offering to those seeking realms unbound by convention, where limitless possibilities unfurl.
71. VISION_220807_695.JPG: Julia Thecla b. Delavan, Illinois, 1896–1973 Amorphous Ones 1952 Charcoal and pastel on paperboard The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.4610)
72. VISION_220807_699.JPG: Julia Thecla b. Delavan, Illinois, 1896–1973 Involved Forms 1952 Pencil, charcoal, and pastel on fiberboard The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981 (86.4611)
73. VISION_220807_708.JPG: Zarouhie Abdalian B. New Orleans, Louisiana, 1982 threnody for the unwilling martyrs 2021 Signaling bells, modular pipe, and electronics Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2021 (2022.007) Made in early 2021, threnody for the unwilling martyrs (threnody refers to a song of wailing or lament) is an expression of what the artist describes as the “protracted grieving” of the losses and injustices of its time. A work of both sculpture and sound, it incorporates five brass bells suspended from modular, prefabricated armatures ranging from child to adult heights. As an artist, Abdalian is especially concerned with the histories of labor, and here the type of bell is significant: signaling bells are functional, producing sound not for musical effect but with communicative intent. Each is set imperceptibly in motion by the percussive action of a small interior motor, which turns rapidly to produce the effect of a sustained sonic roll. Rather than a “strike” and the subsequent reverberating overtone, one hears a perpetual ringing-out of the harmonics that make up the various bells’ distinctive timbres. Together these collective vibrations fill the room, sounding a chord that defies tonal resolution. A piece for our moment as well as past and future, threnody . . . creates space for, and gives shape to, a song of collective mourning.
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