BMA To Open Solo Exhibitions by Contemporary Artists Sharon Lockhart, Tschabalala Self, and Lisa Yuskavage in March 2021

This exhibition features film, photography, and sculpture that bookend American artist Sharon Lockhart’s 10-year engagement with a group of children in Poland. The film Pódworka (2009) marks Lockhart’s first encounter with the Polish landscape and the children who inhabit it. A series of fleeting interludes within city life in Łódź, Pódworka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of children’s resourcefulness. Among the children Lockhart met was a young girl, Milena, who became a friend and collaborator over the next decade. It was through Milena’s desire to tell her own story that Lockhart began working with a group of young women in the Center for Sociotherapy in Rudzienko, where she created a series of workshops and projects empowering them to find their own voices. As Milena moved from adolescence to adulthood, she remained close with the artist. Made a decade after the two first met in the courtyards of Łódź, the elegiac photographic still life portrait Milena (2020) and the bronze sculpture Untitled (Siblings) (2020) pay homage to Milena in the wake of her passing, denoting both the passage and the fixing of time. Perilous Life captures the enduring power of love and the fragility of life.

This exhibition is curated by Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Research & Programming Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University.

Sharon Lockhart (born 1964, Norwood, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2017, Lockhart represented Poland at the 57th Venice Biennale with her multidisciplinary project, Little Review, organized with National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania (2019), Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (2019) Fonzadione Fotografia Modena, Italy (2018); Museu Colecção Berardo,

Lisbon, Portugal (2017); Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2016); and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2015). Lockhart’s films have been presented in the New York Film Festival, Vienna International Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and Sundance Film Festival. She holds an MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Over the past five years, Tschabalala Self has emerged as one of the most significant artists reinventing figurative painting. In By My Self, the BMA presents 13 paintings, from 2016 to the present, alongside two related sculptures that capture the depth, intricacy, and singularity of Self’s formal strategy and techniques for investigating the iconographic significance of the Black female form in contemporary culture. Among the featured works are a new suite of three paintings of a female couple created in response to Henri Matisse’s sculpture Two Women (1907–08; originally titled Two Negresses) in the BMA’s collection. Self uses a variety of reproductive techniques, including stencils, tracings, prints, casts, and mechanically stitched lines of thread, to produce her singular and complex works. The exhibition explores how the compositional process generates meaning in Self’s work, and the ways in which it also reflects her theory of selfhood as a consciousness that is at once produced by external images and by an ongoing reworking and evolving of forms into a new whole.

This exhibition is curated by Cecilia Wichmann, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

Tschabalala Self (born 1990, Harlem, NY) lives and works in New York City and New Haven, CT. Recent solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2020); Art Omi, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (2017); and Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, London, UK (2017); as well as numerous group exhibitions around the world. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BA from Bard College, Anandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Co-organized with the Aspen Art Museum, this exhibition brings together more than 15 paintings that show American artist Lisa Yuskavage’s expansive treatment of landscape through lush and dexterously crafted compositions that tantalize the eye and beguile the mind. Over a career now spanning 35 years, Yuskavage has produced paintings that are ebulliently colorful, unabashedly explicit, and epic in ambition. Since roughly 2007, the vastness of nature has played a significant role in her most ambitious large-scale paintings. Rather than simply depicting with landscape elements, her expansive canvases blur the line between the fantastical and the familiar, melding abstraction with realism to imagine entire worlds that are both highly detailed and vague in implication, inviting viewers to consider the mysterious societies she has conjured.

A catalogue published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. in conjunction with the exhibition includes color reproductions of Yuskavage’s paintings and watercolors from the early 1990s to the present, an interview between Yuskavage and fellow artist Mary Weatherford, and essays by Heidi Zuckerman, former director of the Aspen Art Museum, now director of the Orange County Museum; Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director; and independent curator Helen Molesworth.

Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness is curated in Baltimore by Christopher Bedford, BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director.

Based in New York City, Yuskavage (born 1962, Philadelphia, PA) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2016); Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2015); The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2011; organized as part of Dublin Contemporary 2011). Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001); and Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2000).