The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Announces 2023 Exhibitions

**News Release Submitted by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum**

Sept. 21, 2022

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to announce its exhibitions and programming for the upcoming year. In keeping with the Museum’s rich history as a groundbreaking contemporary arts institution, 2023 at The Aldrich will include a roster of exhibitions and projects by daring artists who push the boundaries of artistic expression.

Executive Director Cybele Maylone states, "2023 will, as always, be a year of firsts at The Aldrich, with first museum exhibitions and first publications for a number of artists as well as first presentations of new bodies of work. But the year will also include a last: thirty years after his debut curatorial project for the Museum, Richard Klein will conclude his incredible tenure at The Aldrich with the sweeping group exhibition 'Prima Materia.'"

"52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone"
On view through January 8, 2023

"52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone" revisits and celebrates the landmark exhibition "Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists," curated by Lucy R. Lippard and presented at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 1971. "52 Artists" showcases work by the artists included in the original 1971 exhibition alongside a new roster of twenty-six female identifying or nonbinary emerging artists, tracking the evolution of feminist art practices over the past five decades. "52 Artists" encompasses the entirety of the Museum—the first exhibition to do so in The Aldrich’s new building which was inaugurated in 2004. "52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone" is organized by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart, who selected the emerging twenty-six artists, and independent curator Alexandra Schwartz, with Caitlin Monachino, Curatorial and Publications Manager.

Related events and programming:
Performance Choreographed by Phoebe Berglund | Music by Celia Hollander
Saturday, October 22 from 5 pm to Dusk
Rain date: Sunday, October 23

"October" is an abstract dance built on repetitive formal structures inspired by the work 4 Into 3 by Cecile Abish, included in "52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone" exhibition. Choreographed and performed by Phoebe Berglund, who has work included in "52 Artists," in collaboration with dancers Elanor Bock, Emily Kessler, and Jade Manns to music by Celia Hollander. "October" will be performed live in the Museum’s Sculpture Garden. The performance is organized by Director of Education Namulen Bayarsaihan and Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

Virtual Panel Conversation: Global Feminism
Wednesday, November 2 from 4 to 5:30 pm

A panel discussion with artists Aya Rodriguez-Izumi, Kiyan Williams, and Lizania Cruz, moderated by curator and writer Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism and Executive Director of The Kitchen in New York City.

Book Release: "52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone"
Saturday, November 19 from 3:30 to 5 pm

Celebrate the launch of the book 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, a 192-page hardcover publication, co-published with Gregory R. Miller & Co. This significant catalogue includes essays by curators Amy Smith-Stewart and Alexandra Schwartz, an introductory text by Lucy R. Lippard, individual artist spreads, a complete exhibition checklist, and installation photography from both the original 1971 exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists and the current exhibition, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone. An intergenerational group of artists from both the 1971 and 2022 exhibitions will join us for a series of short talks in the galleries, including Cynthia Carlson, Dona Nelson, Loie Hollowell, LJ Roberts, Mary Miss, and Rachel Eulena Williams.

"David Shaw: Last Steps"
On view through April 23, 2023

David Shaw’s "Last Steps" is on view as part of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s Main Street Sculpture Program. Shaw’s recent work explores the indistinct boundaries that separate nature, technology, and consciousness. "Last Steps," which takes the form of a step ladder, is in a process of decomposition as well as rebirth, with gleams of spectral light appearing in gaps in the moss-like growth that has enveloped it, suggesting an alternate reality or a regenerative possibility lurking beneath the surface. Shaw states about the piece: “As we begin to embrace our responsibilities to the natural world, Last Steps is both an image of our frustrated, unattainable, and perhaps misguided desire for progress, and a symbol of hope that the world wants to rebuild, that life wants to continue.” The artist’s use of the ladder form—but with missing rungs—speaks of the challenges we face as a civilization as we try to heal what has been lost. "David Shaw: Last Steps" is organized by former Aldrich Exhibitions Director Richard Klein.

Related events and programming:
Outdoor Artist Talk: David Shaw with Curator Richard Klein
Saturday, September 24 from 4 to 5 pm

Join artist David Shaw with curator, artist, and writer Richard Klein for a conversation on Shaw’s work including "Last Steps," currently on view as part of the Museum’s Main Street Sculpture series. This talk will be held in the Museum’s front courtyard.

"Kathleen Ryan"
January 12 to May 14, 2023

"Kathleen Ryan" is the fourth installment of Aldrich Projects, a single artist series that features a singular work or a focused body of work by an artist every four months on the Museum’s campus. This project brings together two monumental works, "Daisy Chain," 2021, and "Pearls," 2017, conceived over a five-year span and sited in the Museum’s Leir Atrium. Ryan’s output ranges from body-size to larger-than-life scale sculptures that cite seventeenth-century vanitas paintings, Americana, kitsch, and Pop art. She uses humor and instantly recognizable imagery to interrogate the busts and breakdowns of the American dream, an artifice fueled by desire and deception. Coiled on the Atrium floor is "Pearls," 2017, a behemoth strand of pearls laced together with thirty-five glittering pink and rose-hued bowling balls and sturdy rope. Dangling from wall to floor, "Daisy Chain," 2021, is a giant string of plastic daisies threaded together by their stems to form a mega-ornamental wreath assembled from found and composed elements–garden hoses for stems, plastic funnels for pistils, and cut vinyl for petals–alluding to its horticulture origins. "Kathleen Ryan" is curated by the Museum’s Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

Aldrich Projects both reinforces The Aldrich’s mission of presenting timely exhibitions of new art as well as allowing for more spontaneity in the Museum’s exhibition program. Two additional Aldrich Projects will be presented in 2023 the first from May 18 to August 27, 2023, and the second from September 10, 2023 to January 7, 2024. The Aldrich Projects’ artists will be announced closer to the exhibition dates.

"Aldrich Box"
February 2023 to February 2024

The "Aldrich Box" is a yearlong traveling exhibition series unbound to a physical space. This edition is the second in an annual series inaugurated in 2021 during the pandemic. The first edition included commissions by five visual artists, whose contributions spanned objects scaled to be held with a focus on care, grief, intimacy, and healing through a diverse range of materials and methods. Next year’s series will run from February 2023 through February 2024 with a focus on performance—underscoring the collaborative and interdisciplinary aspects of making art. The three participating artists work at the intersection of dance, music, and the visual arts and will be commissioned to stage a live performance at the museum and to contribute work to their own "Aldrich Box." Visitors will be able to borrow the three "Boxes" prior to their performances. The "Boxes" will be available for loan over the duration of the project’s cycle. This series is organized by Namulen Bayarsaihan, Director of Education, and Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

"Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art"
February 5 to August 27, 2023

Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art is a group exhibition presenting significant and diverse works of art, which incorporate or reference thirty-five of the 118 elements on the periodic table by artists Matthew Barney, Edward Burtynsky, Rachel Berwick, Dove Bradshaw, Julian Charrière, Compound Interest, The Dufala Brothers, Ashley Epps*, Philip Grausman, Tom Lehrer, Bryan McGovern Wilson, Jeffrey Meris, Myra Mimlitsch-Gray, Cornelia Parker, Katie Paterson, Simon Patterson, Beverly Pepper, Winston Roeth*, Allison Smith*, Edward Steed, Carlos Vega, Eleanor White*, and Robert Williams. While the basis of the exhibition is science, through expansive curatorial choices, the project will reveal the material basis for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter. Artists use specific materials for a reason, quite often for their metaphorical potential, and "Prima Materia" will explore hard facts as well as alchemical conjecture. As a society we are woefully unaware of the trail followed by common materials as they go from the earth into our hands, and the exhibition will give the viewer a greater appreciation of the material world, reveling in both the beauty and convoluted history of our understanding and manipulation of physical matter.

"Prima Materia: The Periodic Table" in Contemporary Art is curated by former Aldrich Exhibitions Director Richard Klein and will be accompanied by a museum publication featuring an essay by Klein.

*Artists commissioned by The Aldrich to make new works for the exhibition.

Hangama Amiri
February 5 to June 11, 2023

Afghan Canadian artist Hangama Amiri combines painting and printmaking techniques with textiles, weaving together stories based on memories of her homeland and her diasporic experience. Amiri fled Kabul with her family in 1996 when she was seven years old. Moving through numerous countries over several years, they immigrated to Canada in 2005 when Amiri was a teenager. Amiri’s choice of materials stems from autobiographical origins—her mother taught her to sew and her uncle was a tailor. Her textiles also reference the colors and fabrics she remembers in the bazaars and on the streets in Kabul. She sources her materials from an Afghan-owned shop in New York City’s fashion district, collaging with fabric and painting on the surfaces. Large-scaled with frayed edges, Amiri’s textile works are made from layering fabrics, piecing and sewing them together, so the fragments collectively characterize her home from a distance. Centered on the lives of women, she builds interiors that capture her protagonists within domestic and entrepreneurial spaces and amplify a collective struggle for women’s rights in Afghanistan and around the world. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo museum presentation and will unveil a new body of work specially made for The Aldrich. It will span the entirety of the Museum’s first floor galleries and will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum publication, with an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

Raven Halfmoon
June 25, 2023 to January 2, 2024

Sculptor Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) interrogates the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and personal experience. Her practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized stoneware, some soaring up to nine feet and weighing over eight hundred pounds, with inspirations that orbit centuries of ancient Indigenous pottery, Moai statues, and Land Art. Working mainly in portraiture, Halfmoon hand builds each work using a coil method. Her surfaces are expressive and show deep finger impressions and dramatic dripping glazes—a physicality that presences her as both maker and matter. Fusing Caddo pottery traditions (a history of making mostly done by women) with populist gestures—often tagging her work (a reference to Caddo tattooing), her works reference stories of the Caddo Nation, her feminist lineage, and the power of its complexities. Her palette is specific and matches both the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with—reds (after the Oklahoma soil and the blood of murdered Indigenous women), blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and creams. Sometimes she stacks and repeats imagery, creating totemic forms that represent herself and her maternal ancestry while also reinforcing the multiplicities that exist inside all of us. The exhibition will feature a combination of new and borrowed works from the last five years as well as some of the artist’s largest works to date, commissioned by The Aldrich and Bemis Center on the occasion of the exhibition. The exhibition is organized by The Aldrich’s Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and the Bemis Center’s Chief Curator & Director of Programs Rachel Adams and will be accompanied by the artist’s first museum publication. The exhibition will be on view at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE from May 18 to September 14, 2024.

Yvette Mayorga
September 10, 2023 to March 3, 2024

Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and video, Yvette Mayorga’s work flaunts a maximalist aesthetic rooted in personal narrative and familial histories to examine the Mexican American or Latinx experience in the United States. Mimicking the confectionary labors performed by her mother, who worked as a baker in a department store in the 1970s after immigrating to the US, Mayorga uses bakery-grade piping bags to thickly apply her signature bubblegum pink acrylics to varying sized canvases. The color pink is central to her practice, dominating the works with an in-your-face monochromatic presence that celebrates and commands femme power. Mayorga’s elaborate, candied reliefs lure viewers into a world of excess where Rococo-inspired elements abound: lavish trimmings, gilded scrollwork, and architectural ornament. Yet under the veil of its saccharine guises, Mayorga’s storytelling offers a glimpse into the grim realities of pursuing the American Dream. Her compositions chronicle the Mexican American and Latinx diaspora experience, ranging from issues of border control, surveillance, and labor, to growing up in the Midwest as a first-generation Mexican American woman—all while recontextualizing a Western-centric art historical point of view. The multifaceted works explore the intersection of immigration, feminism, identity, and colonialism. This exhibition marks Mayorga’s first solo museum exhibition on the East coast and will include a combination of new and borrowed works from varying series over the last seven years. The artist’s first museum catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring an essay by the curator, Caitlin Monachino, Curatorial and Publications Manager.

Chiffon Thomas
September 10, 2023 to March 3, 2024

Spanning embroidery, collage, sculpture, drawing, and installation, Chiffon Thomas examines the ruptures that exist where race, gender expression, and biography interconnect. Taking inspiration from artists David Hammons, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Louise Nevelson, and Lee Bontecou, as well as a childhood steeped in religion, Thomas joins reclaimed materials recovered from abandoned colonial architecture—columns, windows, doorways, wooden spindles, and ceiling tin—with cast fragments of his body, split and fractured, in urethane and foam, as well as plaster and leather, sometimes combined with sections of the bible. Interrogating a legacy of colonization and the Black diaspora in the US, Thomas interweaves materials resonant with personal and collective histories of trauma and repair as well as resilience and transformation. Thomas’ work oscillates between figuration and abstraction, underscoring society’s binary opposition as well their own transgender identity, finding agency and care within the fissures that exist in life. This exhibition will be the artist’s solo museum debut and will include a new series of sculptures that will feature the human body fused with the geodesic dome to explore the connections in the efficiency of their structural design. The exhibition will also debut the artist’s first public sculpture, sited on the Museum’s grounds along Main Street, and be accompanied by the artist’s first museum catalogue, featuring an essay by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

For additional information, please visit www.thealdrich.org

**News Release Submitted by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum**