News / Mary Weatherford

Opening Soon

Making Their Mark

November 2, 2023–January 27, 2024
Shah Garg Foundation, New York
www.shahgargfoundation.org

Making Their Mark, curated by Cecilia Alemani, showcases the works of more than seventy women artists from the last eight decades. The exhibition champions the lives and work of women artists, bringing into vibrant relief their intergenerational relationships, formal and material breakthroughs, and historical impact. Through drawings, mixed media, paintings, sculptures, and textile works, these artists aim to rechart art history through their singular, iconic practices. Work by Carol Bove, Jadé Fadojutimi, Sarah Sze, and Mary Weatherford is included.

Closed

Mary Weatherford
The Flaying of Marsyas

April 20–November 27, 2022
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice
polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it

This exhibition presents new paintings by Mary Weatherford, which are directly inspired by Titian’s late, eponymous masterpiece of 1570–76 and reflect her enduring fascination with the painting. Alluding to the Renaissance painter’s subdued palette, while paying tribute to the distinctive light of Venice, Weatherford uses Flashe paint and neon tubing to distill the historical canvas’s affect. The exhibition opens immediately prior to the commencement of the 59th Biennale di Venezia.

Closed

America. Entre rêves et réalités
La collection du Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection

June 9–September 11, 2022
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada
www.mnbaq.org

Featuring more than a hundred paintings, photographs, sculptures, and video works drawn from the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, this exhibition, whose title translates to America. Between Dreams and Realities, offers a broad overview of modern and contemporary American art. Organized thematically, it looks carefully and critically at the notion of the American dream and uncovers how artists have variously grappled with questions of identity, the challenges of globalization, the realities of everyday life in America, and the complexities of its technological and political revolutions. Work by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Mary Weatherford is included.

Closed

Mary Weatherford
Canyon—Daisy—Eden

April 16–September 5, 2021
SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico
sitesantafe.org

Over the past three decades, Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice, from her early-1990s target paintings based on operatic heroines to her expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass tubing. This exhibition presents a survey of Weatherford’s career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989 and 2017. Showing the artist experimenting with color, scale, and materials, these works together reveal the continuity of Weatherford’s interest in memory and experience, both personal and historical. The exhibition has traveled from the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Closed

Mary Weatherford
Neon Paintings

December 18, 2020–May 2, 2021
Aspen Art Museum, Colorado
www.aspenartmuseum.org

This exhibition examines pivotal pieces from the last decade of Mary Weatherford’s work, with a particular focus on her neon paintings. The artist began to incorporate neon tubing into her work in 2012 after driving around the California city of Bakersfield, where she was struck by the neon signage—both illuminated and burnt out—on bars, shops, and old factories. Weatherford’s neons arc over thin veils of color, illuminating her canvases even as they act as their own expressive marks. 

Closed

Mary Weatherford
Canyon—Daisy—Eden

February 1–July 12, 2020
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York
tang.skidmore.edu

Over the past three decades, Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice, from her early-1990s target paintings based on operatic heroines to her expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass tubing. This exhibition presents a survey of Weatherford’s career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989 and 2017. Showing the artist experimenting with color, scale, and materials, these works together reveal the continuity of Weatherford’s interest in memory and experience, both personal and historical.

Closed

Feel the Sun in Your Mouth
Recent Acquisitions

August 24, 2019–February 2, 2020
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu

This exhibition brings together artworks acquired by the museum over the past five years with a focus on art that incites sensation and demonstrates a renewed interest in sublime encounters with the world. Spanning a period of extreme technological growth that has led us from the first steps on the moon to the development of the Internet, this exhibition illuminates a return to the poetic, the intuitive, and the cosmic in current artistic practice. Work by Alex Israel, Tatiana Trouvé, and Mary Weatherford is included.

Closed

No Man’s Land
Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection

September 30, 2016–January 8, 2017
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC
nmwa.org

Drawing from the Rubell Family Collection, the paintings and sculptural hybrids in N0 Man’s Land demonstrate the expressive and technical range of work by a generationally, aesthetically, and politically diverse group of contemporary women artists. Collectively, they populate “no man’s land”—an open, liberated, and adaptable creative space. The presentation focuses on the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture as a way to highlight how women artists have pushed and redefined the boundaries of such categories. Work by Cecily Brown, Jennifer Guidi, and Mary Weatherford is included.

Closed

Pretty Raw
After and Around Helen Frankenthaler

February 11–June 7, 2015
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
www.brandeis.edu

Pretty Raw takes the artist Helen Frankenthaler as a lens through which to refocus our vision of modernist art over the past fifty years. In this version, decoration, humor, femininity and masculinity, the everyday, pleasure, and authorial control take center stage. The exhibition, curated by Katy Siegel, features works by artists from the 1950s through the present who have found personal, social, and political meaning in materiality. Work by Helen Frankenthaler, Mike Kelley, Sterling Ruby, Andy Warhol, Mary Weatherford, and Christopher Wool is included.

Closed

The Forever Now
Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World

December 14, 2014–April 5, 2015
Museum of Modern Art, New York
www.moma.org

Forever Now presents the work of seventeen artists whose paintings reflect a singular approach that characterizes our cultural moment at the beginning of the new millennium: they refuse to allow us to define or even meter our time by them. They represent a wide variety of styles and impulses, but all use the painted surface as a platform, map, or metaphoric screen on which genres intermingle, morph, and collide. Work by Joe Bradley, Mark Grotjahn, and Mary Weatherford is included.