Upcoming 2017 exhibitions

Nari Ward: Sun Splashed
April 26–September 4, 2017
Nari Ward (b. 1963, St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica) actively engages with local sites—their histories, communities, and economies—to create spectacular, ambitiously-scaled artworks out of unlikely materials. This mid-career survey exhibition includes artworks made from soda pop bottles, shoelaces, shopping carts, and a fire escape—materials that speak to the artist’s distinctive experimentation and resonate with social, political, and cultural meaning. Working in a great diversity of media, Ward captures the makeshift qualities of everyday life and imbues his production with a visceral relationship to history and the real world. The exhibition focuses on vital points of reference for Ward, including his native Jamaica, citizenship and migration, and African-American history and culture, to explore the dynamics of power and politics in society. Nari Ward: Sun Splashed is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Associate Curator Diana Nawi. The Boston presentation is coordinated by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate.

Dana Schutz: People at Odds
July 26–November 26, 2017
New York-based artist Dana Schutz (b. 1976, Livonia, Michigan) has emerged as one of the most prominent painters of her generation. Known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork, her paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats. Equal parts darkly humorous and surreal, Schutz’s paintings combine abstraction and figuration with expressive imagination, compressed bodies, banal objects, and quotidian scenes into oddly compelling and intriguing pictures. Dana Schutz: People at Odds is a concise survey of the artist’s recent work and will include several new works. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate.

Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist
October 4, 2017–January 1, 2018
Since the early 1990s, Mark Dion (b. 1961, New Bedford, MA) has forged a unique, interdisciplinary practice by shadowing and appropriating scientific methodologies. Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist is the American artist’s first U.S. survey and examines 30 years of his pioneering inquiries into how we collect, interpret, and display nature. His celebrated digs, brimming curiosity cabinets, charismatic sculptures, and participatory public projects offer novel approaches to questioning institutional power and its connections to the control and representation of the natural world. Organized by method (fieldwork, excavation, and cultivation), the exhibition traces Dion’s research-intensive work across media, time, and place, bringing together more than 20 of the artist’s most significant artworks and offering a rare look across his influential practice and distinctive material vocabulary. A scholarly publication will accompany the survey. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate.

Nicholas Nixon: Persistence of Vision
December 13, 2017– April 22, 2018
Based in Boston since the 1970s, Nicholas Nixon (b. 1947, Detroit) has captured the intimate details of family, relationships, and life as it unfolds in front of his camera. Nicholas Nixon: Persistence of Vision surveys the artist’s prolific career and is organized around his remarkable ongoing project The Brown Sisters, a series of group portraits of his wife Bebe and her three sisters, Heather, Mimi, and Laurie, taken annually since 1975. The Brown Sisters will be presented in its entirety, and each portrait will be paired with other photographs made by Nixon in the same year, drawn from various bodies of work, including schools in and around Boston, people with AIDS, couples, and landscapes. Together these pictures underscore photography’s singular ability to capture the passage of time in incremental moments and are a testament to Nixon’s extraordinary persistence of vision. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Associate.