“Subvert, Repair, Reclaim” brings together multimedia works by twelve contemporary artists who critically engage with representations of the nude in Western art history. Responding to objectification, exploitation, and erasure embedded within these images, they confront entrenched gender structures and power dynamics in work that resonates with present-day issues of bodily autonomy, agency, and accountability.

Featuring works made since 2012, the exhibition symbolically reaches into the frames—and framing—of the nude as it has appeared within encyclopedic museum contexts. Through performative gestures, archival interventions, and acts of redaction and repair, these artists challenge inherited narratives and expose the structures that have long governed visibility, authorship, and desire. From Xandra Ibarra positioning her critical Turn Around Sidepiece (2018) on a spinning marble pedestal; to Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano undermining the diaries of Paul Gauguin through photography, video, and collage; to Betty Tompkins overlaying familiar art-historical images with the often-disingenuous apologies and defenses from those accused of abuses during in the #MeToo era, nudity becomes not a site of passive display, but a critical tool for refusal, self-fashioning, and redefinition.

The exhibition presents an intergenerational group of artists working across performance, video, painting, sculpture, photography, sound, and collage. Artworks by Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Nona Faustine, Derek Fordjour, Xandra Ibarra, Maya Jeffereis, Gisela Charfauros McDaniel, Joiri Minaya, Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, Cato Ouyang, Katherine Sherwood, Betty Tompkins, and Salman Toor not only challenge the narrative, but actively infiltrate the established canon from a place of knowledge and resistance.

This exhibition contains references to child sexual abuse. We encourage visitors to engage with care.