Upcoming Exhibitions

Gee’s Bend, Alabama, is home to generations of extraordinary Black craftswomen whose quilts represent a crucial chapter in the history of American Art. Since the mid-1800s, women of Gee’s Bend have transformed worn clothes, sacks, and other fabric remnants into patterns that surpass the boundaries of the genre. Born out of necessity, the quilts provided warmth for family and friends while bearing witness to shared knowledge passed down among quilting groups and female lineages. But, in 1966, at the height of Civil Rights activism, the quilters transformed their artistic practice into collective action by founding the Freedom Quilting Bee. This cooperative championed the vision and production of Gee’s Bend quilters in national auctions and commercial partnerships, empowering the quilters and reworking systems of American quilting.

*The Museum is currently closed to help stop the spread of COVID-19. She Knew Where She Was Going: Gee's Bend Quilts and Civil Rights will open when the Museum reopens; that date is unknown at this time. Please check back regularly for updates.

Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, co-organized with the Aspen Art Museum, brings together more than 15 lush paintings that show the artist’s expansive treatment of landscape through dexterously crafted compositions that tantalize the eye and beguile the mind. Over a career now spanning 35 years, Yuskavage has produced paintings that are ebulliently colorful, unabashedly explicit, and epic in ambition—and yet elusory in their meaning. Since roughly 2007, the vastness of nature has played a significant role in her most ambitious large-scale paintings. Rather than simply depicting landscape elements, her expansive canvases imagine entire worlds that are both highly detailed and vague in implication, inviting viewers to consider the mysterious societies she has conjured.

This exhibition features film, photography, and sculpture that bookend American artist Sharon Lockhart’s 10-year engagement with a group of children in Poland. The film Pódworka (2009) marks Lockhart’s first encounter with the Polish landscape and the children who inhabit it. A series of fleeting interludes within city life in Łódź, Pódworka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of children’s resourcefulness. Among the children Lockhart met was a young girl, Milena, who became a friend and collaborator over the next decade. It was through Milena’s desire to tell her own story that Lockhart began working with a group of young women in the Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko, where she created a series of workshops and projects empowering them to find their own voices.

Known for constructing grandly scaled Black figures in collage-like canvases made of found fabrics and fragments of her own recycled artworks, Tschabalala Self has emerged over the past five years as one of the most significant artists working to reinvent figurative painting.

For her upcoming BMA exhibition, the New Haven-based artist turns her attention to Henri Matisse’s Two Women (1907–08), the only sculpture by Matisse to combine two figures. Self was drawn to the work because of its original title, Two Negresses. In response to the sculpture, the artist has produced a suite of three monumental new paintings portraying a female couple in shifting orientations.

This retrospective will explore the full arc of Joan Mitchell’s artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings in the early 1950s to the majestic, large-scale multi-panel works made in France later in her career. Co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition features rarely shown paintings and works on paper from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe. The exhibition moves through focused suites of work, following Mitchell's cyclical way of working, in which subjects and gestures appear and resurface years later. A selection of projects created with and for writers like Frank O’Hara and Jacques Dupin will underscore the role of poetry in her life and work; others signal themes including her relationships with music and the artists of the 19th century. Additionally, the exhibition will feature transitional works that unfold her process and emphasize the role of Mitchell’s exquisite small paintings, pastels, and works on paper. An accompanying catalog will provide a sweeping scholarly account of the artist’s career.