Photobooks USA 2000–25 explores how the photobook has emerged as a powerful tool for artists to respond to the forces shaping contemporary life in the United States. Over the past 25 years, this evolution is reflected in the growing number of publications, a wider range of publishers, bold experimentation in design, and greater inclusivity.
Featuring over 50 photobooks—from out-of-print titles to more recent landmark publications—the exhibition presents a cross section of creators, themes, forms, and subjects, examining how artists have used the photobook to present and circulate their work in powerful and innovative ways.
With Gender Bending Fashion, we explore the role of gender and fashion, by connecting the past and the present, highlighting the work of trailblazing designers and wearers of fashion, and creating an immersive experience worthy of these compelling garments.
We were intent on creating a celebratory setting, engaging retrofuturism as a visual theme to connect the current moment to historical precedents and the imaginative exuberance of what the future could be.
Photos by Michael Blanchard
Video by Jared Medeiros
Overflow, Afterglow brought together seven young artists who use color to distort the figure and expand cultural norms—whether nodding to pop culture and digital immersion, the vibrancies of their heritages, or spaces of youthful and queer liberation. Responding to the social and political turmoil of the past decade and absorbing input from different backgrounds and histories, these artists articulate new visual vocabularies.
#techstyle explores how the synergy between fashion and technology is not only changing the way designers design, but also the way people interact with their clothing. The exhibition draws on the MFA’s collection of contemporary fashion and accessories, and features key pieces from innovators in the field including a digitally-printed dress from Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection (Spring/Summer 2010/2011) and Iris van Herpen’s 3-D printed dress (2013) produced in collaboration with MIT designer and assistant professor Neri Oxman. Special commissions include work by CuteCircuit, Hussein Chalayan, Kate Goldsworthy, and Somerville-based Nervous System.
We wanted to create a singular setting for fashion and technology, adding in the elements of fantasy and extravagance from the fashion sphere, which, in their own form, are native to technological explorations.
Video by Jared Medeiros
“Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity” celebrates the identities of South Africans historically denied their rights: Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu communities; women of color; members of the LGBTQI community; and rural citizens, among others. Many of the artists featured in the exhibition explore the way that clothing communicates identity, documenting the fashion choices of brave individuals challenging the social norms of their times. Others examine how clothing has been used to create or erase cultural identity, or to enforce class divisions.
The design references the graphically striking painted houses of the Ndebele people of South Africa. This same graphic treatment features in the beadwork on display. The platforms take their cue from the traditional neck and leg ornaments of the Ndebele.
To tell the story of multi-disciplinary artists who were fluent in multiple languages and art forms, the exhibition design takes up the challenge of code-switching. Basquiat was a master code-switcher, moving freely and appreciated commensurably between the realms of graffiti art and the downtown gallery scene.
Throughout the different galleries in the show, the same formal moves, colors, and materials show up remixed and reinterpreted, switching their codes in various contexts. The visitor descends into the entry space where we allude to a NYC subway platform, and, through the main doors, visitors are transported to a Chelsea art gallery, a portrait gallery, a dance club, and even an Afrofuturistic spaceship. The same fluorescent lighting, flooring, and paint colors appear in different spots throughout, shapeshifting in relationship to these different contexts.
The casework is designed to underscore the multi-disciplinary work of these artists. The work is displayed tiered in a dynamic fashion to emphasize this energetic output in all different forms from these artists.
With the barrier line in front of the paintings and the strong linear lighting elements throughout the galleries, the design underscores the vitality of the Line and writing in the artwork.
Henri Matisse—who revolutionized 20th-century art—believed that a treasured group of objects was instrumental to his studio practice. “Matisse in the Studio” was the first major international exhibition to examine the importance of Matisse’s personal collection of objects, offering unprecedented insight into the great artist's creativity.
The window figured prominently in Matisse’s paintings. This architectural apparatus functioned as a way of collapsing foreground, middle ground, and background, connecting disparate objects in his domestic settings. In this show, the window allows visitors the opportunity to see the objects collaged with one another as they move throughout the exhibit. The window also affords the visitor the ability to encounter the same object from different vantage points, at different moments of the show. The viewer gets to enact the same kind of re-discovery that Matisse did with these objects throughout his life.
Eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture, and bapo refers to the damaged cultural ephemera hyper-realistically depicted in the paintings—worm-eaten calligraphies, partial book pages, burned paintings, remnants of rubbings and torn-open letters. They are usually arranged in a haphazard, collage-like composition, created with Chinese ink and colors on paper or silk. When bapo emerged, this unexpected imagery was radically distinct from classical Chinese landscape and figure painting, and became popular among an aspiring urban middle class delighted by its visual trickery and sophistication.
Partically-enclosing walls, broken and overlapping, allow the visitor to make connections across the gallery to different objects in the show. The show manifests the same shard-like imagery on the scrolls. One wall features an exploded diagram of the objects featured on a bapo scroll.
This exhibition of magnificent jewelry, pottery, sculpture, metalwork, and more from the MFA’s collection of ancient Nubian art examines power, representation, and cultural bias—in the ancient world, in the early 20th century, and today. Through a majestic display of art and objects, “Ancient Nubia Now” confronts past misinterpretations and offers new ways of understanding Nubia’s history and contemporary relevance.
VR walkthrough made by our friends at Archimedes Digital, special thanks to Luke Hollis: https://archimedes.digital/
The MFA’s Arts of Islamic Cultures Gallery is designed to expand how visitors see and understand the diverse arts of Islamic cultures. Its thematic installation—developed through an intensive eight-year process of engagement with Islamic, artistic, and scholarly communities—is divided into distinct spaces that reflect the richness of these artistic traditions. Some sections explore art forms that are integral to all Islamic cultures, like Arabic calligraphy, while others focus on unique visual traditions such as that of Ottoman Turkey or Mughal India. Still other sections delve deeply into the history of singular objects in the collection, for example a remarkable door assembled from fragments of medieval Egyptian woodwork for the first American World’s Fair.
“Disappeared Quipu” pairs five ancient quipus on loan from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University with a newly commissioned, site-specific installation by Vicuña that combines monumental strands of knotted wool with a four-channel video projection. Together, these quipus of the past and present explore the nature of language and memory, the resilience of native people in the face of colonial repression, and Vicuña’s own experiences living in exile from her native Chile.
“Masterpieces of Egyptian Sculpture from the Pyramid Age” tells the story of this artistic moment and the culture that shaped it through some of the singular landmarks of the Old Kingdom (2575–2150 BCE). The bust of Prince Ankhhaf, the man who oversaw the completion of the Great Pyramid, is the most convincing example of realistic portraiture to survive from the Old Kingdom. The pair statue of King Menkaura and queen is one of the most famous Egyptian sculptures in the world. These and every other work on display—all of them undisputed masterpieces—have been in the MFA’s collection since the first part of the 20th century, when they were excavated in Egypt by the Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition.
The adjacent gallery, “Faces of Ancient Egypt,” illustrates the breadth of approaches sculptors took in creating distinctive likeness over 2,000 years of Egyptian artistic development. From the Twelfth Dynasty and the Late Period, respectively, the Josephson and Boston Green Heads are sensitive portrayals of a nobleman and a priest with startlingly realistic features. Meanwhile, a portrait of Pharaoh Amenhotep III from the Eighteenth Dynasty smiles broadly without a single crease in its cheeks, making it more of an elegant mask than a lifelike depiction.
For decades, MFA visitors who read the small print have been familiar with the names of Jean and Fred Sharf. “Gift of Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf” has appeared at the bottom of hundreds upon hundreds of the labels next to artworks in our galleries. One theme does run through the Sharfs’ collection: transportation. Fred, whose energy was legendary and who was always on the move, had forever been fascinated by the great speeding up of life that occurred in the middle decades of the 20th century. Planes, trains, and, most of all, automobiles, appear over and over again in the collection, as Fred had sought to capture the excitement that accompanied the simple act of getting from one place to another at mid-century.
The exhibit tries to capture both the speed lines and stylized curves of the early to mid-century, but also the wonder and boyish fascination of such a collection.
Luminous and often haunting, Kay Nielsen’s interpretations of classic fairy tales are among the most celebrated book illustrations of the 20th century. “Kay Nielsen’s Enchanted Vision” celebrates the Danish artist’s significant achievements in illustration while highlighting some of his work in theater design and animation.
Featured here are speculative renderings of an earlier version of this exhibition.
In 2018, Weng made the largest gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy to the MFA in the institution’s history, comprising 183 objects that were acquired and passed down through six generations of his family. This exhibition features approximately 20 works from the gift that relate to concepts of family and friends.
“Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Family and Friends” includes paintings and calligraphy by some of the greatest masters from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. The intimate Suzhou Sceneries (1484–1504) album describes Shen Zhou’s travels with friends around his home regions. The calligraphy in Nine Letters to Home (1523), written by Wen Zhengming to his wife and sons, displays a spontaneity of style rarely found in the artist’s more formal works. The most recent piece in the exhibition is a handscroll painted by Wan-go H. C. Weng himself, Elegant Gathering at the Laixiju Studio (1990). The contemporary work commemorates a momentous gathering of friends—including six esteemed historians of Chinese paintings—held at the collector’s home in 1985.
“Casanova’s Europe” reveals a refined and visually seductive culture on the cusp of modernity—one characterized by pleasure seeking, movement across boundaries, and self-invention. By using his life as the basis for the exhibition, the MFA invites visitors to consider aspects of power—political, social, economic, sexual—both in Casanova’s time and today.
Three tableaux - Venice, Paris, and London - and a variety of vignettes transport the visitor to the rich interiors of Casanova’s time. They provide the fully fleshed-out setting of the art work on display while underscoring the theatricality of a life lived unconditionally.
William Merritt Chase was a brilliant observer, an innovative painter, and a leader in international art circles at the turn of the last century. The first complete examination of the artist in more than three decades, “William Merritt Chase” brought together 80 of the painter’s finest works in both oil and pastel, drawn from public and private collections across the US.
