The work of Nigerian woman artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1928–2003) offers a window into cultural representations of African men and women in postcolonial Nigeria. In what was a male-dominated art scene in the 1960s, Ugbodaga-Ngu stood out not only because of her visual production, but also because of her intellectual involvement as a faculty member…
In this text, curator and writer Nina Mdivani revisits the lives and work of Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918–2007). She emphasizes how these two Georgian women artists navigated between undertaking state commissions and finding windows of opportunity to oppose the regime and, in the process, creates a genealogy of Georgian artistic…
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (1927-2023) was a pioneer of architectural modernism in India, and the first architect from the region to be awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2018. His work was prominently featured in the 2022 MoMA exhibition, The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, during which he participated in an online conversation with Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Following Doshi’s passing at the age of 95, in January 2023, we are publishing this wide-ranging conversation accompanied by Stierli’s reflection on the architect’s life and legacy.
Malika Agueznay was among the first woman modernist abstract artists in Morocco. She was a student at the Casablanca École des Beaux-Arts from 1966 to 1970, during the experimental tenure of the faculty known as the Casablanca School. Shaped by the formative experience within the school, she has also distinguished herself by the ways her research emphasizes her female identity. Throughout her career, she has elaborated on seaweed as a central motif in her abstract practice. This motif is both deliberately evocative of femininity and rooted in her own female perspective.
In this text, Dorota Jagoda Michalska writes about Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a Jewish Polish postwar artist. Michalska opens up a transnational perspective, inviting us to look at the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of global surrealisms, connecting her articulations of Holocaust trauma with the work of artists who have dealt with slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.
Theresa Musoke (born 1944) is one of Uganda’s premier artists. Part of the earlier generation of artists trained at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts at Makerere University, author Serubiri Moses focuses on her concept of the wild and details her intellectual rebuttal of the school’s pedagogy.
This text considers the work of Vera Pagava, a Georgian artist who lived in exile in Paris, as an amalgamation of modernist and Georgian art historic references. Following Pagava’s life story from Tbilisi, where she was born, to Germany and later Paris, where she settled with her family in 1923 and lived until her death in 1988, this essay introduces her work in relation to that of various other Georgian artists, simultaneously tracing her path from figuration to abstraction.
Collaborating artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho take a speculative approach to Alfonso Ossorio’s sculpture, currently on view in Gallery 415, attempting to locate an insurgent potential bubbling underneath the picture’s baroque aesthetic.
Grace Salome Kwami (1923-2006), undoubtedly a forerunner of modern art in Ghana, was one of the first women to undertake academic training in fine art. Elsbeth Court takes a closer look at her artistic formation, key work and restitution.
In this essay, Giulia Paoletti deftly explores the photographic portraits of Senegalese photographer, Mama Casset, where female sitters are not mere objects of a male gaze, but rather present themselves as viewing subjects who dare to look.
Zenta Logina (1908–1983) was a Latvian artist at work during the Soviet occupation. Her paintings, reliefs, and sculptural objects developed in a singular manner, as she broke away from the accepted framework of visual arts codified by the regime and crossed into the realm of contemporary art as we define it today.
As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Safia Farhat (Tunisian, 1924–2004), contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic space during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. Jessica Gerschultz introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition for Tunisian modernists.
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