Melissa Messina

Melissa Messina
Curated Exhibition
A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture
Harvard Radcliffe Institute
February 2024

“Throughout the 20th century, many artists began to replace traditional artistic gestures with other operations, thereby creating new abstract languages and vocabularies. Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s exhibition A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture explores how four artists nailed, glued, unraveled, twisted, folded, pierced, tied, and, most importantly, fastened—all to aesthetic effect—to highlight the labor of art making. Centering on the work of Mildred Thompson, the exhibition represents the physical action of creating artwork and, in Thompson’s words, makes the invisible visible. The works in this exhibition demonstrate the ways in which Thompson, Howardena Pindell, Maren Hassinger, and Liliana Porter navigated art making during times of social rupture and sought their way through with novel, reparative gestures.

The exhibition takes its title from Thompson’s six-foot-long accordion-fold book A Female Landscape (1977), a gift from the artist to the writer, philosopher, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, which is on display in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery. The rarely exhibited artwork, housed by the Spelman College Archives, …” Read More

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Melissa Messina
@melissa_messina
Harvard Radcliffe Institute

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