Senga Nengudi’s (*1943) media-spanning oeuvre situates itself at the threshold of sculpture and object-related performance, making a crucial contribution to postminimalism. Known for abstract-poetic work that uses such ordinary materials as nylon stockings, the Colorado Springs-based artist casts new light on the relationship between work and viewer while critically exploring socio-political realities.
Kaari Upson, Day Coffin - Watermelon, 2020
© Esmé Trust / Kaari Upson Trust
© Esmé Trust / Kaari Upson Trust
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability
Group Exhibition
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Through February 2, 2025
This is the first historical survey of artistic responses to sickness, health, and medicine broadly. In the past decade, the art world has witnessed an explosion of artistic activity surrounding issues of illness, disability, caregiving, and the vulnerability of the human body. Set in motion by the emergence of movements for disability justice, this activity accelerated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet since the 1960s, artists have negotiated and deflected the medical gaze, creating works that assert agency in the face of medicalizing labels and that highlight the role of care in producing new forms of community and healing. Increasingly, artists have come to locate illness and disability not in individual bodies, but as part of a web of interconnected societal, environmental, and historical conditions.
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