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.”
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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.
Vital Signs: Artists and the Body
Nov 3, 2024 – Feb 22, 2025
MoMA
New York, USA
Rosemary Mayer. Galla Placidia, 1973
