Art & Object Events

Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory features approximately 140 artworks, including paintings, drawings, and 3-D works. A global debut, this is the first Celmins retrospective in North America in more than twenty-five years.

The first major survey of Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) in the United States in more than forty years, this exhibition will reexamine the career of one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning,” a major survey of works by the pioneering feminist artist. This exhibition highlights Chicago’s iconographic transition from abstraction to figuration, and explores the ways in which the artist’s strong feminist voice transforms our understanding of modernism and its traditions.

The photographs of Graciela Iturbide not only bear witness to Mexican society but express an intense personal and poetic lyricism about her native country. One of the most influential photographers active in Latin America today, Iturbide captures everyday life and its cultures, rituals, and religions, while also raising questions about paradoxes and social injustice in Mexican society. Her photographs tell a visual story of Mexico since the late 1970s—a country in constant transition, defined by the coexistence of the historical and modern as a result of the culture’s rich amalgamation of cultures. For Iturbide, photography is a way of life and a way of seeing and understanding Mexico and its beauty, challenges, and contradictions.

Southern Rites, on view at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from Jan. 25-May 12, 2019, is a powerful and moving visual portrait of individuals struggling to confront longstanding issues of race and equality.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” With these words the Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien ignited a fervid spark in generations of readers. From the children’s classic The Hobbit to the epic The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s adventurous tales of hobbits and elves, dwarves and wizards have introduced millions to the rich history of Middle-earth. Going beyond literature, Tolkien’s Middle-earth is a world complete with its own languages and histories. Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth celebrates the man and his creation.

Solidary & Solitary tells the history of art by African-American artists, with a particular emphasis on abstraction, from the 1940s to the present moment. That story is a complicated one, woven from the threads of debates about how to represent blackness, social struggle and change, and global migrations and diasporas.

This exhibition marks first comprehensive museum survey for Keith Sonnier, a pioneering figure in conceptual, post-minimal, video and performance art of the late 1960s. Born in Grand Mamou, Louisiana, in 1941, Sonnier was one of the first artists to incorporate light into sculpture: an innovation that forms the foundation of his subsequent work.

Groundings explores movement—both seen and unseen—through a series of residencies with artists who work in dance, music, and performance art. Using durational processes, the artists inhabit and shape the gallery space alongside works from the MCA's collection.