Abstraction & Ourselves is the first abstract painting and glass sculpture exhibition in the United States. Featuring monumental-scale paintings and sculpture by renowned international artists, the exhibition draws upon the significant holdings of abstract glass sculpture in the CAT’s collection, recently acquired paintings, and significant works on loan from national and regional collections.

The exhibition showcases a broad range of artists working in abstract painting and sculpture, including legendary female abstract painters Helen Frankenthaler, Howardena Pindell, and Dyani White Hawk, alongside large-scale sculptures by Claire Falkenstein, Stanislav Libenský, and Jaroslava Brychtová, and others. Abstraction & Ourselves presents an unexpected curatorial lens to abstraction. As you encounter large-scale works in the gallery, we encourage taking notice of your own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in relation to abstraction and to yourself.

Abstraction & Ourselves is organized by the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum and curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

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Abstract Expressionists: The Women presents a fresh look at important contributions U.S. women painters working in New York, California, and Paris made to Abstract Expressionism from the early 1940s through the 1970s. The show features approximately fifty works from The Levett Collection by over thirty women artists, offering audiences a more in-depth understanding of a singular aspect of twentieth-century American art, one whose significance has only just begun to receive proper recognition.

Until recently, the historical and critical reception of Abstract Expressionism—an American postwar artistic phenomenon—has almost uniformly marginalized its women practitioners. The development of expansive, gestural paintings with a radical approach to scale, surface, and process has historically been associated with male creativity, invoking a New World “heroic” masculinity that defined the American post-war era. Abstract Expressionists: The Women upends this gendered narrative, demonstrating that women artists working in the Abstract Expressionist style were not merely acolytes or interpreters, but ambitious innovators all their own. Concurrent with their more celebrated male peers, many of these women experimented with spontaneity and immediacy in their large-scale compositions, also exhibiting the automatic techniques and extemporaneous characteristics associated with “action painting.” Focusing on the talent, commitment, and ingenuity of more than two dozen women artists, this exhibition reveals the vital impact made by women painters on the first truly avant-garde artistic movement to originate in the United States.

Abstract Expressionists: The Women is organized by the American Federation of Arts from the Christian Levett Collection and FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum), France, and curated by Ellen G. Landau.

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Constellations: Contemporary Jewelry at the Dallas Museum of Art showcases more than 350 wearable works of art, many of which have never been on view before. The exhibition surveys nearly a century of creativity and celebrates the ingenuity of jewelry artists from across the globe. It provides a fresh perspective on contemporary jewelry, illuminating the delightful connections that unite established masters and burgeoning talents and transcend chronological boundaries and geographical borders. Featuring golden crowns formed to look like cardboard, enchanting necklaces made from plastic bags, and whimsical brooches resembling toast, Constellations does not simply highlight the treasures of a world-class collection, but captures the depth, breadth, and diversity of contemporary jewelry design.

Constellations: Contemporary Jewelry at the Dallas Museum of Art is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Sarah Schleuning, the Margot B. Perot Senior Curator of Design and Decorative Art.

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Ortuzar is pleased to present Through Dusk, a group exhibition featuring works by Lee Bontecou, Claire Falkenstein, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, and Mira Schendel. Created between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the works reflect a shared pursuit among these artists: to give form to the invisible, at a moment defined by the atomic age, the Space Race, and a popular imaginary enamored with the early exploration of outer space. Rather than depict the cosmos, each artist turned to abstraction, spatial configuration, language, and light as means of modeling unseen systems, from the subatomic to the spiritual. They capture both the anxieties of a world reckoning with nuclear possibility and the optimism of a generation newly attuned to the infinite.

Claire Falkenstein’s open structures of copper, brass, and wire—including Sun XIV (1958)—translate theories of space-time and energy into sculptural form. Suspended networks of interlacing metal arcs trace pathways through air, suggesting constellations, atoms, or biological networks. Her work encourages perceptual shifts: viewed from different angles, these lattices alternately appear weightless and dense, microcosmic and cosmic. Her interest in the imperceptibility of scale—the idea that structures of matter mirror one another from the molecular to the celestial—links her practice to contemporary scientific models of the period. Related paintings and works on paper extend these investigations in two dimensions, exploring the interplay of line, color, and organic systems.

Together, these six artists trace separate but related inquiries into the immaterial—bridging scientific discovery and spiritual reflection, anxiety and wonder. In an era once defined by nuclear uncertainty and the promise of space exploration—and again today, amid renewed anxieties and fascination with the cosmos—Through Dusk reflects on the fragile and often porous thresholds between inner vision and infinite space.

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Abstract Expressionists: The Women presents a fresh look at important contributions U.S. women painters working in New York, California, and Paris made to Abstract Expressionism from the early 1940s through the 1970s. The show features approximately fifty works from The Levett Collection by over thirty women artists, offering audiences a more in-depth understanding of a singular aspect of twentieth-century American art, one whose significance has only just begun to receive proper recognition.

Until recently, the historical and critical reception of Abstract Expressionism—an American postwar artistic phenomenon—has almost uniformly marginalized its women practitioners. The development of expansive, gestural paintings with a radical approach to scale, surface, and process has historically been associated with male creativity, invoking a New World “heroic” masculinity that defined the American post-war era. Abstract Expressionists: The Women upends this gendered narrative, demonstrating that women artists working in the Abstract Expressionist style were not merely acolytes or interpreters, but ambitious innovators all their own. Concurrent with their more celebrated male peers, many of these women experimented with spontaneity and immediacy in their large-scale compositions, also exhibiting the automatic techniques and extemporaneous characteristics associated with “action painting.” Focusing on the talent, commitment, and ingenuity of more than two dozen women artists, this exhibition reveals the vital impact made by women painters on the first truly avant-garde artistic movement to originate in the United States.

Abstract Expressionists: The Women is organized by the American Federation of Arts from the Christian Levett Collection and FAMM (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum), France, and curated by Ellen G. Landau.

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Particles and Waves examines how concepts and technologies from the realms of advanced scientific research impacted the development of abstract (or non-figurative) styles of artwork in postwar Southern California.

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, scientists at institutions near Los Angeles including Mount Wilson Observatory, the California Institute for Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, generated groundbreaking experimental research in astronomy and particle physics. During and after World War II, the region remained at the forefront of scientific inquiry in theoretical physics and its applications within aerospace engineering, industrial manufacturing, and communications technologies. Between 1945 and 1990, many artists in Los Angeles produced visually abstract artworks while closely engaging with scientific ideas, mathematical theories, and materials or processes derived from physics and engineering.

The exhibition unites several generations of artists working in diverse materials and styles to examine how subfields of scientific investigation inspired a range of non-figurative artworks by practitioners concerned with light, energy, motion, and time. By drawing interdisciplinary connections between the work of early abstractionists and contemporary practitioners, the exhibition considers abstract artwork from Southern California in a new way.

Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945–1990 is organized by the Palm Springs Art Museum and co-curated by Sharrissa Iqbal, Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art, and Michael Duncan, guest curator.

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Following World War II, hundreds of artists from the United States flocked to the City of Light, which for centuries had been heralded as an artistic mecca and international cultural capital. Americans in Paris explores a vibrant community of expatriates who lived in France for a year or more during the period from 1946 to 1962. Many were ex-soldiers who took advantage of a newly enacted GI Bill, which covered tuition and living expenses; others, including women, financed their own sojourns.

Showcased here are some 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper by nearly 70 artists, providing a fresh perspective on a creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendency of the New York art scene. The show focuses on a diverse core of twenty-five artists—some who are established, even canonical, figures, and others who have yet to receive the recognition their work deserves. A complementary section dubbed the “Salon” combines works by French and foreign artists that the Americans would have seen in Parisian galleries or annual salons, alongside examples by compatriots who likewise spent at least a year residing in France during this time.

While the U.S. art scene was dominated by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Americans working in Paris experimented with a range of formal strategies and various approaches to both abstraction and figuration. And, as the esteemed writer James Baldwin—a longtime French resident—saliently observed, living in Paris afforded expats the opportunity to question what it meant to be an American artist at midcentury. For some, Paris promised a society less constrained by racism and the exclusionary power structures of the New York art world.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University and curated by Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert.

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San Francisco was the center of bohemian culture in California in the late 1930s and 1940s. It was a golden era for art making and the blossoming of Bay Area art due to a confluence of factors, one being the activities of the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA), a group of art enthusiasts and artists who nurtured the growth of a museum and art school (the California School of Fine Arts) and organized yearly annual exhibitions that stimulated and propelled progressive art of the time.

Artists like Adaline Kent were central to the development of modernist art on the west coast during the early to mid-twentieth century, and yet, until recently their influence remains largely untold in American art history. Kent was among the active members of the SFAA and her work exemplified the period’s penchant for individualism and experimentation, as did the work of artists associated with the SFAA. Other artists associated with the SFAA are Dorr Bothwell, Benjamin Bufano, Harry Crotty, Jay DeFeo, Sonia Gechtoff, Robert Boardman Howard, Sargent Johnson, Madge Knight, Knud Merrild, Henrietta Shore, Ralph Stackpole, and Clay Spohn.

The exhibition, San Francisco the Golden Years 1930-1960: Making a Scene, is drawn exclusively from the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art collection. NEHMA’s collection, with its focus on the art of the western United States, is ideally suited to provide in-depth examples of art from this little-known period in art history. This is the first major exhibition and publication to look at the pivotal and colorful history of the SFAA.

San Francisco the Golden Years, 1930–1960: Making a Scene is organized by the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art and co-curated by Michael Duncan, guest curator, and Bolton Colburn, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions.

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Following World War II, hundreds of artists from the United States flocked to the City of Light, which for centuries had been heralded as an artistic mecca and international cultural capital. Americans in Paris explores a vibrant community of expatriates who lived in France for a year or more during the period from 1946 to 1962. Many were ex-soldiers who took advantage of a newly enacted GI Bill, which covered tuition and living expenses; others, including women, financed their own sojourns.

Showcased here are some 130 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, textiles, and works on paper by nearly 70 artists, providing a fresh perspective on a creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendency of the New York art scene. The show focuses on a diverse core of twenty-five artists—some who are established, even canonical, figures, and others who have yet to receive the recognition their work deserves. A complementary section dubbed the “Salon” combines works by French and foreign artists that the Americans would have seen in Parisian galleries or annual salons, alongside examples by compatriots who likewise spent at least a year residing in France during this time.

While the U.S. art scene was dominated by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Americans working in Paris experimented with a range of formal strategies and various approaches to both abstraction and figuration. And, as the esteemed writer James Baldwin—a longtime French resident—saliently observed, living in Paris afforded expats the opportunity to question what it meant to be an American artist at midcentury. For some, Paris promised a society less constrained by racism and the exclusionary power structures of the New York art world.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University and curated by Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert.

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The Palm Springs Desert Museum is extremely gratified to present the works of Claire Falkenstein not only because she is one of California's leading artists with an international following, but also because she embodies the highest degree of creativity. She has worked in multiple media over the years, experimenting as she goes, always on the lookout for new, innovative techniques. While her work spans a period of forty years, with a variety of media represented in this comprehensive retrospective, there remains a sense of unity that relates the individual pieces to one another. Claire Falkenstein has produced the most innovative and exciting art to have come out of the West in this century. This exhibition presents the development and scope of Claire Falkenstein's work in four primary periods: her work in San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, and now.

Claire Falkenstein in San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, and Now is organized by the Palm Springs Desert Museum (today the Palm Springs Art Museum) and curated by Katherine Plake.