Limitless! Five Women Reshape Contemporary Art features the artwork of individuals who create without boundaries. The exhibition offers trailblazing installations in different mediums by artists Martine Gutierrez, Letitia Huckaby, Yayoi Kusama, Sandy Skoglund, and Jennifer Steinkamp. The exhibition is a visual delight for all ages, inviting you to think outside the box…where the possibilities are truly limitless. From floor-to-ceiling art and video installations to whimsical and unexpected surprises, this multigenerational and multicultural group of artists demonstrates boundless creativity and serves as inspiration to their contemporaries and future generations.
Yayoi Kusama’s All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is one of the Japanese artist’s signature Infinity Mirror Rooms, on loan to the McNay from the Dallas Museum of Art.This installation is the first Infinity Mirror Room featuring pumpkins created by Kusama since 1991, and the only Infinity Mirror Room of its kind in a North American collection. All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins focuses the reflective chamber on a series of acrylic yellow gourds covered in black polka dots, one of Kusama’s frequently used motifs. Visitors will step inside the mirrored space and fully immerse themselves in the fantastical pumpkin patch, becoming part of the art.
Advanced reservations for entry into Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room are available here, or you can join the virtual waitlist when you arrive. Please review our guidelines before your visit.
Top Image: Yayoi Kusama, All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016. Wood, mirror, plastic, acrylic, LED. Collection of Dallas Museum of Art, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund. ©YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro
This exhibition is FREE for McNay Members. If you are a Member and you’d like to make an advanced reservation, you can do so here, or you can join the waitlist when you arrive.
Limitless! Five Women Reshape Contemporary Art is organized for the McNay Art Museum by René Paul Barilleaux, Head of Curatorial Affairs, with Lauren Thompson, Assistant Curator.
Presenting sponsorship most generously provided by Bank of America. Lead funding provided by the John L. Santikos Charitable Foundation Fund of the San Antonio Area Foundation. Major funding provided by the McCombs Foundation. Additional support provided by Guillermo Nicolas and Jim Foster.
While Kusama’s artwork has gained widespread success, her inspiration is highly personal. She has stated that her repetitious painting, which she continues for several hours daily, is therapy for her mental illness. The artist’s obsession with polka dots connects to her concept of “Self-Obliteration,” where one returns to the infinite universe—not as a longing for death, but as a joyous embrace of life.
Through textiles and photographs, Letitia Huckaby addresses years of inequity for African Americans in the United States. In the midst of recent calls for socioeconomic justice, her art is particularly poignant and timely. “I am not an in-your-face political artist,” Huckaby says, “but I see politics in everything I do.”
Martine Gutierrez creates enticing worlds with confident and charismatic characters by seizing visual trappings of media, like glossy music videos, nostalgic dance scenes, and slick fashion photography—all realms not traditionally inclusive of transgender women of color. Playing the lead role in her artworks, Gutierrez investigates race, identity, and gender.
As a sculptor, installation artist, and photographer, Skoglund creates artwork that embraces humor, home, surrealism, and, at times, unease. Skoglund creates dramatic tableaux in vibrant color schemes and then photographs people within them.
Jennifer Steinkamp became interested in digital media while studying at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the early 1980s. There she witnessed some of the first computer animations and was instantly drawn to the technology. Speaking to her desire to work with digital media, Steinkamp says: “You could just go on forever. I have.”
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