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Recognizing an influential living artist having a retrospective or survey exhibition at a major US museum.
Maren Hassinger for “Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (June 6–November 29, 2026)
For five decades, Maren Hassinger has been making elegant, spare sculptures that have enlisted a diverse array of materials, from wire rope to pink plastic bags to newspaper to rose leaves. The objects she incorporates in her art are the kind that could easily be bent, twisted, or broken. In another setting, they might even be seen as flimsy. But Hassinger sculpts them in a way where they appear firm, monumental, and alive. Across an oeuvre that has included installations, performances, films, drawings, and more, Hassinger has repeatedly returned to the concept of motion, imbuing static objects with a sense of movement, as if they are shifting before our eyes. Frequently, she does so by referring to the natural environment, invoking trees and water with works that appear to undulate because of the way they are installed.
Her retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, billed as the most expansive show of her art to date, positioned her as a key figure in the transition away from Minimalism. During the 1970s, Hassinger began working with wire rope that she partially pulled apart. The use of a material associated with industry synched with a tendency seen at the time in New York, where a range of sculptors transformed steel, firebricks, and fluorescent lights into large and often heavy artworks. Hassinger’s approach differed in its overt allusions to the human body and its intentionally light touch. While Hassinger’s collaborations with artists like Senga Nengudi and Ulysses Jenkins are now well-known, the BAMPFA show put forward Hassinger as a performance artist in her own right, noting that she sought to become a dancer before settling on sculpture during her education. Her sculptures would go on to translate those choreographies, which could not be permanently viewable within gallery spaces.
The concept of ephemerality has also been core to Hassinger’s body of work, and the BAMPFA show highlighted it prominently by featuring her works that make use of pink plastic bags or old newspapers, objects that might easily be thrown in the trash but that Hassinger sees as worthy art materials. Ranging from large-scale installations to intimate weavings, she always seeks to make beauty of what could easily be treated as refuse. In the BAMPFA catalog, speaking to curator Lowery Stokes Sims of the newspaper pieces, Hassinger says, “Well I don’t want to look at something ugly. I want things to be as finished and pleasant as possible. And why not?”
Coco Fusco“Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island” at El Museo del Barrio, New York (September 18, 2025–March 1, 2026)
Suzanne Jackson“Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (September 27, 2025–March 1, 2026); traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (May 14–August 23, 2026) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (September 26, 2026–January 18, 2027)
David Lamelas“David Lamelas: The Machine” at Dia Chelsea, New York (March 6, 2026–January 16, 2027)
Martin Puryear“Martin Puryear: Nexus” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (September 27, 2025–February 8, 2026); traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Art (April 12, 2026–August 9, 2026)