Museum of Modern Art
November 3, 2024, through February 22, 2025.
The Museum of Modern Art presents Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, on view from November 3, 2024, through February 22, 2025. The international, cross-generational group of artists in this exhibition use depictions of the body to address the question of what it means to be an individual within society—and how socially sustained categories of gender, race, and identity are rooted in abstraction. Vital Signs presents over 100 works by approximately 65 artists, primarily drawn from the Museum’s collection. A majority of works in the exhibition were made by artists who are women or gender-expansive, highlighting ways in which human forms and gender intersect in these artists’ practices. While the exhibition includes celebrated works from the Museum’s collection, new acquisitions will provide fresh perspectives—as will lesser-known collection works that will be on view for the first time. Vital Signs is organized by Lanka Tattersall, Laurenz Foundation Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, with Margarita Lizcano Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.
“Vital Signs suggests an expanded account of abstraction in the 20th century by exploring the work of artists for whom the bodily and the abstract are deeply intertwined,” said Tattersall. “Full of life, the exhibition aims to illuminate some of the ways that artists have reflected on abstraction in its broadest social senses while expanding ideas around what it means to be alive and connect with others.”
For some artists in the exhibition, the body can be used to project, distort, and create identities for ourselves and others through acts of play, empathy, or control. Claude Cahun’s photomontage of self-portraits, M.R.M (Sex) (c. 1929–30) takes the face as a point of departure in a work that suggests the refusal of a single, categorizable identity. Later artworks similarly explore notions of the self though multiple lenses, including Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit (1971) and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Roberta’s Construction Chart #2 (1976). Margo Humphrey’s print The History of Her Life Written Across Her Face (1991) details a spectrum of the artist’s life experiences rendered as texts and symbols inscribed across the face of a central figure.
Other artists focus on the interior materiality of the body through its physical and imagined constitution of muscles, genes, hormones, scars, and bones. They also examine flows of desire and vulnerability, pointing to abstract states of experience, genealogies, and desires
that have tangible manifestations in the everyday. Frida Kahlo’s My Grandparents, My Parents, and I, for example, utilizes a diagrammatic abstraction of a family-tree diagram. Works that explore the materiality of the body and its gendered implications include a selection of intimate drawings by Christina Ramberg, Rosemary Mayer’s diaphanous yet commanding sculpture Galla Placidia (1973)—a new acquisition to the collection—and Lorna Simpson’s poignant series of photographs, Untitled (1992), among others. A film and notebooks by Greer Lankton from the late 1970s reveal an artist whose sense of self was in ongoing transformation.
A number of artists have brought together abstraction and the human form as a means to imagine how boundaries between the human and non-human might be transcended, often through a fantastical merging with other animals or entities. From Thelma Johnson Streat’s jewel-like Rabbit Man (1941), through a constellation of works by Birgit Jürgenssen, to the imposing and intricate figure of Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Yakshi (1984), artists harness vibrant intersections of abstraction and figuration as a means to explore various forms of transcendence, whether as an escape from the limitations of the body or as a means to delight in and play with those same limitations, as a kind of freedom. Rarely seen works such as Bhupen P. Khakhar’s Kali (1965), which will be on view for the first time at MoMA, suggest the proximities between the human and the sacred, while important new acquisitions like Belkis Ayón’s Resurrection (Resurrección) (1998) and Ted Joans’s Long Distance (1976– 2005)—a more than 30-foot-long exquisite corpse drawing with over 130 contributors from around the globe—imagine new relationships between the individual and the collective.
PUBLICATION
The accompanying publication takes MoMA’s collection as a starting point for a consideration of abstract art in the twentieth century, exploring its intimate ties to the complex, ecstatic, and contradictory experience of having a body. An introductory essay by Lanka Tattersall explores the intertwining of abstraction and figuration in modern art as it converges with feminist, queer, and Black studies; contributions by the poet and artist Precious Okoyomon and Lambda Literary Award-winning writer Cyrus Dunham bring new language to bear on the relationship between our outer forms and inner lives. 148 pages, 180 color illustrations. Hardcover, $55. ISBN: 978-1-63345-165-0. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and available at MoMA stores and online at store.moma.org. Distributed to the trade through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada, and through Thames & Hudson in the rest of the world.
IMAGES
Belkis Ayón. Resurrección (Resurrection). 1998. Collagraph on nine sheets of paper, overall 9′ 13/16″ × 7′ 1″ (276.5 × 215.9 cm). Unpublished. Printer: the artist, Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Havana, Cuba. Edition: 4. Riva Castleman Endowment Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 Belkis Ayón. Courtesy of the Artist’s Estate. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Robert Gerhardt
Claude Cahun. M.R.M (Sex), c. 1929-30. Gelatin silver print. 6 × 4″ (15.2 × 10.2 cm). Gift of Helen Kornblum in honor of Roxana Marcoci. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 Estate of Claude Cahun. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Jonathan Muzikar
Mrinalini Mukherjee. Yakshi, 1984. Dyed hemp. 8′ 1″ × 48″ × 29″ (246.4 × 121.9 × 73.7 cm). Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds, and acquired through the generosity of Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin and the Modern Women’s Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 Mrinalini Mukherjee. Courtesy of the MM Foundation. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by John Wronn
Rosemary Mayer. Galla Placidia, 1973. Satin, rayon, nylon, cheesecloth, nylon netting, ribbon, dyes, wood, and acrylic paint. 8′ 2″ × 6′ 6″ × 7′ (248.9 × 198.1 × 213.4 cm). Gift of Alice and Tom Tisch and Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 Courtesy of the Estate of Rosemary Mayer. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Jonathan Muzikar
Maria Lassnig. Still from Encounter, 1970. 16 mm film (color, sound), 1 min. Gift of the Maria Lassnig Foundation. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 Estate of Maria Lassnig.
Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Margo Humphrey. The History of Her Life Written Across Her Face. 1991. Lithograph with copper leaf and collage additions, composition (irreg.): 29 15/16 × 29 5/8 in. (76 × 75.3 cm); sheet: 32 5/16 × 29 5/8 in. (82 × 75.3 cm). Publisher and printer: Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Edition: 30. Purchase. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 The Margo Humphrey Trust. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Robert Gerhardt
Forrest Bess. Untitled. 1957. Oil on canvas with wood frame. 9 7/8 × 14 1/4″ (25.1 × 36.2 cm). Gift of Adam Kimmel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Thomas Griesel
Lorna Simpson. Untitled. 1992. Color instant prints (Polaroids) and engraved plastic plaques. Overall 7′ 6″ × 13′ 6″ (228.6 × 411.5 cm). Gift of UBS. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 Lorna Simpson, courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Jonathan Muzikar
Greer Lankton and Joyce Randall Senechal. Still from The Contortionist. 1978. Super 8mm film transferred to video (black and white, silent), 1 min. Gift of Joyce Randall Senechal. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2024 Estate of Greer Lankton, courtesy Joyce Randall Senechal. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Suzanne Jackson. Wind and Water. 1975. Acrylic and pencil on canvas, two panels. Each: 97 × 60″ (246.4 × 152.4 cm). Acquired through the generosity of The Modern Women’s Fund, Alice and Tom Tisch, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Michael S. Ovitz, Ronnie F. Heyman, and Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Suzanne Jackson, courtesy the artist and Ortuzar Projects, New York. Digital image © 2024 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, photo by Jonathan Muzikar
Barbara Hammer. Still from Sync Touch. 1981. 16mm film transferred to video (color, sound), 10:07 min. Purchase. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Courtesy The Estate of Barbara Hammer and Company Gallery, New York. Digital image © Courtesy the Barbara Hammer Collection at the Academy Film Archive
Installation view of Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 3, 2024, through February 22, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
Installation view of Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 3, 2024, through February 22, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
Installation view of Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 3, 2024, through February 22, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
Installation view of Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 3, 2024, through February 22, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar