“Behind this mask, another mask; I will never be done with removing all these faces,” wrote artist and poet Claude Cahun in 1930. Throughout the 20th century, artists have imagined the body and ideas of the self as fluid and open to ongoing transformations. Vital Signs includes over 100 works by artists who question what it means to be an individual within a larger society—and how socially sustained categories such as gender, race, and sexual identity are rooted in abstraction.
Much of the work in Vital Signs was made by women or gender-expansive artists. The exhibition suggests fresh perspectives on celebrated works from MoMA’s collection by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, and Senga Nengudi, as well as works on view at the Museum for the first time by artists including Belkis Ayón, Ted Joans, and Rosemary Mayer. Some artists explore how we project, distort, and create identities through acts of play, empathy, or control. Others focus on the body’s interior—both real and imagined—or look to the world outside, forming newly imagined combinations of the human and the non-human. Full of life, Vital Signs illuminates some of the ways that artists reflect on abstraction in its broadest social senses while expanding ideas around what it means to be alive and to connect with others.