The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) is launching its Fall/Winter exhibition season next month with four culturally diverse female artists whose works include paintings, sculptures, digital animation and a site-specific installation.
The season kicks off Friday, Sept. 3, with four featured exhibitions, including Shara Hughes’ first major solo museum show in the United States. “Shara Hughes: On Edge” showcases more than 30 paintings, prints and drawings from the past seven years.
The Brooklyn-based artist is often referred to as a landscape painter, but according to Hughes, her paintings “are not really about landscapes” at all. Rather, the floating moons, gnarled trees and blazing sunlight depicted in her work bridge the abstract and representational, giving them a psychological complexity.
“Kathy Butterly: Out of one, many/Headscapes” combines two major bodies of work by the New York-based ceramic sculptor from the past three decades. “Out of one, many” displays the artist’s imaginative powers to a single pint-glass form over the years, producing astonishing variations. In “Headscapes,” Butterly takes formal variation to a grander scale, with 10 new works created especially for CAM.
Farah Al Qasimi’s “Everywhere there is splendor” is a site-specific, photo-based Project Wall installation – the artist’s largest museum installation to date. Al Qasimi, who hails from the United Arab Emirates and is based in Brooklyn and Dubai, uses photography, video and performance to explore the notions of culture, domesticity, escapism and labor in Arab culture. For her CAM installation, she focuses on her personal history after spending time in and around her family home as a result of being quarantined following a trip to the United Arab Emirates earlier this year.
Acclaimed photographer and multimedia artist Lorna Simpson presents two recent digital animation videos projected on CAM’s façade as part of Street Views. “Lorna Simpson: Heads” highlights “Blue Love” and “Redhead,” melding black-and-white photographs of a man and woman from vintage Ebony and Jet magazines and embellishing them with shimmering, flame-like watercolor hairdos.
All Fall/Winter exhibits are on display from Sept. 3 to Feb. 13, 2022. For a complete list of exhibitions, visit the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis website.
