Body Matters

Between January and May of 2023, the galleries housed the exhibition What Now? (Or Not Yet), a critical reflection on the way in which museum collections evolve and move us to see the past, experience the present, or shape the future. To underscore the theme of evolution, the curators of What Now? (Or Not Yet) invited a group of six Vassar students and a recent graduate to re-curate the existing exhibition, their task to reimagine the layout and design, highlighting different thematic groupings and interpretive text, while pulling from roughly the same body of artworks.

The new curators (speaking now as a collective and often self-contradicting “we”) reworked our predecessors’ chronological investigation into art collections. We chose instead to interrogate a more visceral, yet equally enigmatic, question: how do bodies move through art, space, and time?

Our definition of the body is unconventional and broad. We are not always referencing bodies with heads and belly buttons. Our “body” refers to a variety of moving, lively assemblages: perhaps book collections or artworks, migration patterns or even museums. We imagine a world composed of bodies, rather than objects. And all of these bodies, regardless of their shape or orientation, exist in relation to other bodies. Throughout Bodies Matter, we introduce you to the bodies that matter to us. We explore how bodies overlap and tell stories together, especially stories that have generally been marginalized in institutions like the Loeb.

Bodies Matter is generously supported by the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center Fund.

The Loeb wishes to acknowledge the generosity of Forge Project in loaning works by Nicholas Galanin and Sky Hopinka; Art Bridges in loaning works by Jeffrey Gibson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kerry James Marshall, and Nari Ward; and artists Audra Wolowiec and Andrea Geyer / Hales Gallery for individual loans. These loaned works do not appear on this website.