“Body/Magic: Liz Cohen”
This exhibition combines all aspects of artist Liz Cohen’s “Bodywork” series. She explores issues of personal and cultural identity and assumes various roles in lowrider culture, including builder and bikini model, to challenge prevailing narratives about femininity and prompt conversations about “immigration, nonconformity, and resistance.”
Date: January 16 to May 29
Website: ASU Art Museum
Location:
“Leon Polk Smith: Hidden in Plain Sight”
Leon Polk Smith is a modern artist who helped found the Hard-edge Painting movement characterized by geometric forms in bright colors. He was inspired by American Indian culture in his native Oklahoma and the Southwestern landscape, and artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Piet Mondrian.
Date: February 5 to May 31
Website: Heard Museum
Location:
“Diedrick Brackens: ark of bulrushes”
Diedrick Brackens’s work explores African American and queer histories reflects his interest in movement, nature, and mythology. The exhibit is titled after the biblical story of the infant Moses being floated to safety inside a reed vessel.
Date: February 20 to August 22
Website: ASU Art Museum
Location:
“Division of Labor: Women Shifting a Transnational Gaze”
Together the group of 10 female artists offer a unique perspective on labor in connection to feminism, identity, equity, and the gaze that reaches across the United States/Mexico border.
This exhibition includes sculpture, photography, and video addressing the experiences of Latinx women living in the Southwest.
Claire A. Warden
Date: February 20 to August 22
Website: ASU Art Museum
Location:
Dinner Where
This exhibition explores the ways communal meals can spark dialogue about critical issues from food access to national identity by using objects associated with meals, from full-size dinner table to ceramic cup.
Featured artists include Claydies, Marilyn Lysohir, the Democratic Cup Project, and more.
Morgan Morell
Date: March 27 to October 9
Website: ASU Art Museum Ceramic Research Center
Location:
“Fearless Fashion: Rudi Gernreich”
This exhibition consists of more than 80 pieces by Rudi Gernreich, a 20th-century fashion designer who played with notions of gender, identity, and aesthetic ideals to create iconic designs. Visit this exhibition and you’ll see filmed oral histories, photographs, and ephemera that illuminate his cultural significance, and his wide range of interests from performing arts to the gay rights movement.
Date: April 7 to September 26
Website: Phoenix Art Museum
Location:
“Canupa Hanska Luger”
Canupa Hanska Luger will be showing works that include Something to Hold Onto, an installation created with 7,000 beads representing people who have died along the U.S.-Mexico border. The collaborative exhibit at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum will also include a floor mural painted by local artists Thomas “Breeze” Marcus and Dwayne Manuel.
Date: May 14 to August 8
Website: Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum
Location:
Source: phoenixnewtimes.com (article by Lynn Trimble)
