National Museum of Women in the Arts Washington, DC Through August 11, 2024 “New Worlds: Women to Watch 2024,” featuring works from 28 artists, is the seventh and largest exhibition in the NMWA’s “Women to Watch” series, for which the museum collaborates with regional outreach committees of curators to find exhibiting artists. Irina
IWD
Beyond Conventional Practice: A Conversation with Megha Joshi
Passionate and opinionated, a self-described feminist and atheist, Megha Joshi is unapologetic in her work and life, questioning misogynistic beliefs and practices. Her sculptures and installations, made with sacred items such as oil lamp wicks, beads, and incense sticks, often take an ironic turn as ritual function and subject matter collide.
Radical Honesty: A Conversation with Shary Boyle
Shary Boyle has had a dynamic international career, yet, somehow, the United States is just catching on to her captivating interdisciplinary work. Boyle, who represented Canada in the 2013 Venice Biennale, works fluidly across many modalities.
Cynthia Lahti
NEW YORK James Fuentes Lahti uses a range of clays, from dark red to porcelain, and she also varies her sculpting, glazing, and firing methods (which include raku and salt firing). Her approach to building heads and figures seem to reference a wide swath of art history.
Lateral Thinking: A Conversation with Shiho Kagabu
Japanese artist Shiho Kagabu employs industrial and organic materials, often installing her work in rough, run-down environments. In many ways, she shares the contemporary predisposition for the fragment rather than the whole, but her positioning of these parts in space is unique.
Simone Leigh
BOSTON Institute of Contemporary Art Simone Leigh’s first-ever museum retrospective demonstrates her abiding use of clay (and nascent use of bronze) as a material and conceptual means to amplify Black female experiences and the spaces created by Black feminists.
Donna Dennis
HUDSON, NEW YORK Private Public Gallery “What is that?” asked one disoriented visitor, as she beheld the enormous architectural structure before her—a replicated ore dock facing a vast ocean.
Mary Ann Unger
WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS Williams College Museum of Art Unger’s intertwined roles as mother, activist, and curator, as well as artist, foreshadowed those of today’s cultural workers, who often juggle organizing, administration, and educational work in addition to art-making.
Deborah Butterfield: It All Adds Up
Recipient of the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award In 1973, Deborah Butterfield received her MFA from the University of California, Davis, where the faculty included Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, William T. Wiley, and Wayne Thiebaud, artists committed to a hands-on approach, who combined the traditional and experimental in their work.
Sheila Pepe: Claiming Space
Sheila Pepe takes a gender-bending approach to process and material while also blurring the distinction between art and craft.
