RIDGEFIELD, CT — The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will present the first solo museum exhibition devoted to New York-based artist Bonnie Lucas, featuring more than five decades of work exploring femininity and the cultural expectations associated with it.
"Bonnie Lucas: Material Girls, A Survey" will be on view from June 27, 2027, through Jan. 30, 2028, at The Aldrich, 258 Main St.
The exhibition will bring together works dating from the early 1970s to the present, along with new pieces making their debut at the museum. Lucas' work includes collage, assemblage, cast-plaster relief, watercolor and painting.
Her art frequently incorporates objects associated with girlhood and domestic life, including dolls, ribbons, beads, buttons, trinkets and inexpensive consumer products marketed to women and girls.
"Bonnie has spent more than fifty years turning the visual language of femininity against itself," said Amy Smith-Stewart, The Aldrich's Diana Bowes chief curator, in the release. "She embraces pink, prettiness, dolls, ribbons, and sentimentality, then cuts them apart and reconstructs them into something stranger and more powerful."
Lucas began creating small fabric collages while studying at Rutgers University in the 1970s. The works combined buttons, beads, ribbons, yarn and other materials in predominantly cream-colored compositions backed with felt.
The museum said those early pieces connected Lucas' work to other artists who incorporated craft materials, domestic objects and autobiography, including Miriam Schapiro, Louise Bourgeois and Lucas Samaras.
Lucas moved to Lower Manhattan in 1979, where she has lived and worked at the same address for nearly five decades.
During the 1980s, she began producing larger, more three-dimensional compositions and collecting inexpensive merchandise from discount stores, dollar stores and craft outlets.
Many of the objects recall her childhood in the 1950s and reflect cultural associations with innocence, femininity and domestic life.
Lucas cuts, disassembles, sews and glues these materials into layered compositions. Dolls frequently appear dismembered or altered, sometimes representing the artist herself.
The exhibition will also include examples from a series of cast-plaster plaques Lucas began in 2001. These works embed fragments of consumer objects in plaster, preserving their physical forms while obscuring their original purposes.
The museum described the finished pieces as resembling archaeological fragments or fossilized remains of consumer culture.
"Her work reveals how the things we dismiss as frivolous can carry complicated ideas about desire, identity, and power," Smith-Stewart said.
Born in Syracuse, New York, in 1950, Lucas earned a bachelor's degree in art history from Wellesley College and a master's degree in fine arts from Rutgers University.
Her work has been exhibited at galleries and museums in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Massachusetts, Washington state and the Netherlands, among other locations.
The exhibition is organized by Smith-Stewart and will be accompanied by Lucas' first museum catalogue, featuring an essay by the curator.
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