Women Around Town by Karen Schifman
With summer just around the corner, we can look forward to an array of exhibitions to enjoy and inspire. I will be checking out the current exhibitions at the Laguna Museum of Art, an Alex Katz exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jeffrey Gibson exhibit at the Broad, and Paris After 1900 at the San Diego Museum of Art.
Suzanne Valadon
IN THE GALLERIES
Night Gallery presents Autofiction, a presentation of new oil paintings by Anna Rosen. In Anna Rosen’s six new canvases for Autofiction, automobiles appear to commute across alternate planes of existence, while library shelves and fluttering pages hover in the background or on high. The cars suggest stand-ins for the self, while the books propose a manner of metabolizing information and experience. An alternately bold and gritty palette unites the works with a downtown sensibility. Their layered, atmospheric marks evoke superimposed time frames. The paintings become containers for color, pattern, and memory as they explore all that a two-dimensional medium can hold. Rosen paints on unstretched linen, which she adheres to stretched canvas. She often rips the fragments away, leaving marks that resemble sponging or monoprinting. Sometimes, Rosen keeps the fragments on her surfaces, allowing their borders to create new textures and frayed seams. Patches of raw canvas and disrupted marks privilege experimentation and open-ended dialogue over resolution. Thru June 28, 2025.
Agua de vida is an exhibition by Mexican artist Ileana García Magoda currently on view at Anat Egbi gallery. This is Magoda’s first presentation in the United States and features new paintings and works on paper. Magoda explores la mar (the sea) as the creative mother and primordial womb of existence. Her paintings on canvas and works on paper delve into ancient mythologies, where the ocean represents divine feminine power and the mysterious depths of consciousness. Magoda’s dynamic compositions, filled with undulating forms, mirror the perpetual motion of the sea, while red waters transform emotional turbulence by creative force. Dense and vibrant, the works in Agua de vida (Water of life) consider the ebb and flow of inner transformations, hinting at alternate pain-free realities. Thru June 28, 2025.
Mary Weatherford: The Surrealist continues at David Kordansky Gallery. Over the course of her career, Weatherford has created feminist revisions of large-scale Color Field painting, posited new directions for the landscape genre, and explored the social histories of California. She has a fearless and physically embodied approach to painterly gesture. Thru June 28, 2025.
Enchantment is an exhibition of works by Hillary Gruenberg continuing at Lois Lambert Gallery. Many of Gruenberg’s pieces in this exhibition have been created by altering and reworking projects that she had previously discarded.Her focus is primarily on the process, not the final outcome.Her work is characterized by a unique assemblage of tactile materials, including paper, leather, fabric, paint, metal leaf, and
sewing. Thru July 5, 2025.
IN THE MUSEUMS
Performance on Paper is one of the outstanding current exhibits at the Hammer Museum. The exhibition features
prints and drawings created at the intersection of music and dance by some twenty artists active from the 1960s to the present, primarily from the Grunwald Center and Hammer Contemporary Collections. It explores how works of art on paper can store sound and movement, becoming lasting visual records of ephemeral sonic and dance experiences.The exhibition includes works activated by performance, such as graphic notations and choreographers’ scores; drawings and prints that are physical representations or evocations of music and movement; collaborations between visual artists, musicians, and dancers; as well as drawings that are the physical trace or embodiment of performance. Among the artists who are represented here are Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Ann Carlson, Jennie C. Jones, Ann Hamilton, Channa Horwitz, Meredith Monk, Julia Phillips, Kandis Williams and more. (Hammer)Thru August 10. 2025.
Ann Carlson
Don’t miss seeing a selection paintings by noted Baroque artist, Artemesia Gentileschi at the Getty Museum. Artemisia’s Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece will consist of 5 paintings highlighting Gentileschi’s skill in portraying donne forti or “strong women.” The exhibit will include the recently restored Hercules and Omphale.
June 10- September 14, 2025.
m\other is the current exhibit at MOAH. The exhibit explores motherhood beyond the traditional nuclear family, engaging themes of queer, Indigenous, and spiritual mothering in the work of 5 artists, Tanya Aguiñiga, Marthe Aponte, Zackary Drucker, Gina Herrera, Nike Schroeder. “Through diverse media and conceptual approaches, m\other challenges dominant narratives of motherhood, offering multifaceted interpretations of care, creation, and resilience. The exhibition amplifies voices that redefine what it means to mother, embracing alternative networks of kinship, sustainability, and the reclamation of maternal power in a contemporary context.” (MOAH) Thru August 31, 2025. Please visit their website to explore this powerful body of work in detail.
Continuing at the California African American Museum is Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe. “During the last fifteen years of her life, artist Nellie Mae Rowe (1900–1982) lived on Paces Ferry Road, a major thoroughfare in Vinings, Georgia, and welcomed visitors to her “Playhouse,” which she decorated with found-object installations, handmade dolls, chewing-gum sculptures, and hundreds of drawings.” (CAAM).
Thru August 17, 2025.
Leave a Reply