Comprising nine works by three generations of female artists from the Americas, “Tha Sun Will Set: Contemporary Abstraction and the Body” draws from the MFA’s collection to trace a lineage of abstract painting spanning seven decades.

The exhibition borrows its title from Christina Quarles’s In 24 Days Tha Sun’ll Set at 7pm (2022), which takes joyful liberty with the traditions of abstraction by experimenting with various painting techniques and ways of depicting figures in a landscape. Quarles’s painting arrived at the MFA in 2023, as part of an initiative to expand the Museum’s works by women, and is on view here for the first time. Also making their public debuts are Marcia Hafif’s Pop-inspired bodily abstraction 153. (1967) and Rose B. Simpson’s early earthenware piece Red (2012).

Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Jacqueline Humphries, Amy Sillman, Elizabeth Peyton, and Cecilia Vicuña round out the display. Taken together, these works offer a compelling look at how 20th-century modernism intersects with depictions of the feminine, the body, and landscape in the art of our time.