Exhibition News: "Wild Life" opens at Carnegie Museum of Art

Installation view: “Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves” at Carnegie Museum of Art. Photo Jason Andrew

Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Through January 9, 2022

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“Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves” brings together the work of Elizabeth Murray (1940—2007) and New York-based sculptor Jessi Reaves (b. 1986). Although Murray and Reaves are generations apart, the exhibition highlights each artist’s simultaneously lyrical, playful, and rigorous engagement with the decorative, domestic, and bodily.

Works by Murray spanning the 1960s to the 2000s are presented alongside a selection of Reaves’s sculptural assemblages of the last seven years, including her signature ottomans. In their raucous questioning of so-called “good taste,” Murray and Reaves each elevate and emphasize the aesthetic value of the “detail”—historically associated with the ornamental, domestic, and everyday, and thus the feminine—only to violently unsettle and explode such “bad objects.”

Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) and curated by Rebecca Matalon, CAMH curator. Carnegie Museum of Art’s presentation is organized by Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director, with Kiki Teshome, Margaret Powell Curatorial Fellow, and Hannah Turpin, curatorial assistant for modern and contemporary art and photography.

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