Alive & Kicking: Fantastic Installations by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Gladys Nilsson
Colby College Museum of Art | June 26, 2024–November 11, 2024
This exhibition brings together three contemporary artists who have never shown together before, but are all remarkable for their punchy, surreal installations. Gladys Nilsson and Catalina Schliebener Muñoz contribute original works, made on-site in the gallery. Their spirited, strange, cartoonish scenes are complemented by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s Mysterium Tremendum (late 1980s), a quasi-autobiographical tale illustrated across 125 aluminum lasagna pans. Each installation incorporates eccentric figuration, whimsical storytelling, and lived experience, illuminating the fantastic in the everyday.
Garden Magic
OVERLAP | August 7 - September 15, 2024
Co-curated with Maya Rubio
Joining theatrical artifice with earth realities, gardens are places where we tend not only to growing plants, but to ornamentation, to surroundings, to sensory experience, to desire. Frequently an exercise in fantasy-construction, or building other worlds, we cultivate an affect-laden environment in collaboration with atmospheric conditions, attuned to the rhythm of everyday enchantment. The cherubic lawn ornament, the plastic pink flamingo, the concrete saint, the incandescent blow mold, the terra cotta bird bath—all intermingle with vines, weeds, blossoms, soil, insects, rainwater, rodents, fungus, detritus, and petals, stretching and blurring the boundaries of where nature ends and artifice begins.
Digital Iridescence: Jell-O in New Media
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | October 28, 2023–March 24, 2024
Jell-O’s presence in contemporary art is an extension of its visual and cultural history. In this exhibition, five contemporary artists use gelatin in video works to explore themes like embodiment and perception—fitting ideas to investigate through Jell-O, which is bodily and flesh like, made from animal matter, and distorts and plays with observation and vision. Each artist mobilizes Jell-O’s emotional and sensory potential to consider the sanctified social constructs of health, beauty, consumption, metamorphosis, performance, and ritual.
Tender Loving Care: Contemporary Art from the Collection
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | July 22, 2023–July 28, 2025
Co-curated with Michelle Millar Fisher
Creating and looking at works of art are acts of care, from the artist’s labor to the viewer’s contemplation and appreciation. Storage, conservation, and display are also ways of tending to art. This exhibition invites visitors to explore how contemporary artists trace and address concepts of care through their materials, subjects, ideas, and processes.
The Banner Project: Sheida Soleimani
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | August 20, 2023–June 23, 2024
Based in Providence, Rhode Island, artist Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) constructs elaborate and surreal tableaux in her studio. She then photographs these meticulously prepared sets, which incorporate mixed-media backdrops, props, and symbols. Models are central to each scene, but their faces are always hidden, providing an air of anonymity, if not universality, and shifting focus to their gestures.
Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | March 26–July 16, 2023
Assisting Sarah Thompson
Thanks to the popularity of works like the instantly recognizable Great Wave—cited everywhere from book covers and Lego sets to anime and emoji—Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) has become one of the most famous and influential artists of all time. Taking a new approach to this endlessly inventive and versatile Japanese artist, “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence” explores his impact both during his lifetime and beyond. More than 100 woodblock prints, paintings, and illustrated books by Hokusai are on view alongside about 200 works by his teachers, students, rivals, and admirers, creating juxtapositions that demonstrate his influence through time and space.
SMFA at Tufts: Archive and Autobiography
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | November 19, 2022–April 16, 2023
Archives shape our feelings about memory, history, geography, storytelling, and ourselves. Traditional archives might look like a storage facility, a repository of public records, or a special library with files of ephemera. This exhibition presents unconventional forms of documentation, as five graduate and undergraduate artists at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University use their chosen mediums to construct, preserve, and share information.
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
National Gallery of Art | March 17 – July 28, 2024
Assisting Lynne Cooke
Want to appreciate more art and design in your daily life? Just look down. The apparel we wear reflects not only our personal tastes and values but also a profound relationship to modern art. Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction reveals the myriad ways textiles intersect with and influence world-renowned modern artists and movements.
Woven Histories delves into dynamic moments when social and political issues have activated textile production and artmaking with heightened focus and urgency. Traced chronologically with 160 works made in a range of techniques—from oil painting to weaving, basketry, netting, knotting, and knitting—the exhibition explores the overlap between abstract art, fashion, design, and craft.
Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston | July 25–September 19, 2021
Assisting Anna Walker
Olga de Amaral has pioneered her own visual language within the fiber arts movement. Her radical experimentation with color, form, material, composition, and space transforms weaving from a flat design element into an architectural component that defies the confines of any genre or medium.
Mending: Craft and Community—Selections from the Museum’s Collection
Museum of Fine Arts, Houton | December 8, 2018–October 20, 2019
Co-curated with Anna Walker
Mending: Craft and Community showcases mending as an act of transformation by artists working in a wide range of craft-based materials. Objects drawn from the MFAH collection offer both formal and metaphorical examples of mending created in the past four decades, revealing techniques and personal stories in works that weave together narratives of race, gender, and sexual orientation.