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American Herstory: Vital Signs - Thinking Abstraction Through the Body or the Body Through Abstraction?
With the Vital Signs - Artists and the Body exhibition at MoMA in New York wrapping up on February 22, 2025, we can now look back on its ambitious exploration of the relationship between the body and abstraction in 20th-century art, showcasing over 100 works by around 65 artists, the majority of whom are women or gender-expansive individuals.
The exhibition aims to bring the concept of abstraction back to something more grounded, associating it with a material and bodily dimension, and, conversely, seeks to abstract the concept of the body and free it from constraints and limitations. In rethinking abstraction through the history of 20th-century art, it also seeks to offer new interpretative keys for the depiction of the body in art. This vision finds its synthesis in the words of artist P. Staff, who reflects on the work of Greer Lankton, an American transgender artist featured in the show with The Contortionist, a 1978 stop-motion film: “Greer’s work makes me think that abstraction really begins in the body. We think of abstraction as being divined somehow, from the universe, from some higher power, or from some kind of otherworldly formal experimentation. And really, I think that, without sounding really corny about it, abstraction begins inside. I can’t tell you the amount of people I know that feel that their own experience of inhabiting a body is deeply abstract.” If the goal of this column, in addition to offering the right visibility to female artists who have worked or are currently working in America, is also to provide an insight into how America tells the story of these women artists, it must also be noted when an exhibition like this is not unanimously received by critics. In fact, despite the always-appreciated intention to give space to female artists in the narrative, according to The New York Times “Vital Signs wants to address timely debates around identity but feels stuck in art history”, while the Financial Times described it as a real "mess," accusing it of politicizing the past through abstraction. In recent years, institutions and the market have started more systematically to fill the gaps left by centuries of exclusion, but the process is far from linear and often raises new questions rather than providing definitive answers. An explicit reference in the show is Cubism and Abstract Art, a 1936 exhibition organized by the MoMA, considered a starting point by Vital Signs curator Lanka Tattersall. At the time, the museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., had almost completely excluded female artists from the narrative of abstract art. Today, with Vital Signs, the MoMA seeks to rebalance this history, including a majority of female or gender-expansive artists. In the same direction, the museum will also hold a solo exhibition dedicated to Hilma af Klint in May 2025. A pioneer of abstraction, the Swedish artist was truly rediscovered only in recent years, especially thanks to the major 2019 retrospective at the Guggenheim, which led to a rethinking of her abstract works as chronologically preceding those of Wassily Kandinsky. These initiatives suggest a reconsideration of art history in stages, progressively addressing the omissions of the past, in this case focusing on the reevaluation of abstract art. That said, one of the perhaps most debated aspects of Vital Signs could be the attempt to tackle two complex and distinct themes—the relationship between abstraction and the body, and the issue of gender identity—trying to intertwine them into a single narrative.
Vital Signs explores abstraction through the body, focusing particularly on the works of female artists who, starting in the 1960s, have used it as a medium and tool of expression to challenge social and cultural norms, especially those related to the representation of the female body. Barbara Hammer (Still from Sync Touch, 1981) and Lorna Simpson (Untitled, 1992) analyze the body through the lens of feminism and gender identity, as do Judy Chicago (Cunt Hats), Ana Mendieta (Untitled (Amategram), c. 1982), Senga Nengudi (R.S.V.P., 1977) and Mary Kelly, the latter being featured with the renowned Post-Partum Document (1973–79). The exhibition does not aim to be a feminist art show per se, but the central focus remains the relationship between abstraction and identity, a theme explored by other artists such as Greer Lankton, who addresses transness, and Belkis Ayón, whose work Resurrection (Resurrección) (1998) blurs the boundaries between the masculine and the feminine. Speaking of Ayón, artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden, who has been strongly influenced by her work, stated: “These figures can exhibit feminine and masculine traits. I think that there’s a space where women have had to abstract and transfigure themselves to be able to survive and I think that Belkis twists and bends the image in thinking about that. She is not afraid to complicate the ideas and notions of gender within something that is strictly thought of as male”.
The exhibition also includes works that use the body to assert cultural and personal identities. My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (1936) by Frida Kahlo, for example, celebrates her multiethnic roots through the representation of her family tree, while Black Panther and Me (II) (1978) by Cecilia Vicuña reflects on Latin American identity.
And it features works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, whose connection between abstraction and the body had already been highlighted in Eccentric Abstraction, the landmark 1966 exhibition that inaugurated post-minimalism, curated by Lucy Lippard at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. Here, an abstract and minimalist form like the circle can evoke the sensuality of the body, as seen in Ringaround Arosie (1965) by Eva Hesse, currently on view at the MoMA.
Alongside these historical works, the exhibition features recent acquisitions such as Galla Placidia (1973) by Rosemary Mayer, presented here for the first time: a work in which the body is evoked on a monumental scale through drapery and fabric, and Out of the Web (1976) by Ann Leda Shapiro, one of the first members of the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, which, through a mix of scientific and spiritual reflection, addresses female emancipation. In a more contemporary language, Martine Syms (Misdirected Kiss, 2016) employs GIFs and personal photographs in a wallpaper to explore the representation of Black women. As the artist states: “Blackness is a discourse, and rather than say what it is or ain’t, I think about how blackness and other identities are constructed […] They’re abstractions that are made concrete by social, economic, and legislative phenomena.”
In stark contrast, there are works like Painting Bitten by a Man (1961) by Jasper Johns, a controversial piece in which the artist imprints a bodily trace directly onto the surface of a small encaustic on canvas, suggesting a physical and almost aggressive interaction with the painting material.
Vital Signs thus emerges as a complex investigation of abstraction and the body, spanning eras, languages, and identities. While the exhibition seeks to fill the gaps in art history by giving space to often marginalized female artists, it also raises questions about the very nature of abstraction and its relationship with the representation of the body in contemporary art. The attempt to rethink the canon intertwines with a broader reflection on identity, gender, and cultural belonging, leaving the debate open on how these themes can be addressed today.
Sources:
Diehl T. (2024, December 19). Bodies in Repose? Not at This MoMA Show. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/arts/design/vital-signs-review-moma.html#:~:text=“Vital%20Signs”%20wants%20to%20address,nipples%2C%20that%20insinuate%20human%20anatomy
McStay C. (2025, February 6). The Polyphony of the Body. ArtReview. https://artreview.com/vital-signs-artists-and-the-body-museum-of-modern-art-new-york-review-chantal-mcstay/
MoMA. Vital Signs: Artists and the Body. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5725
P. Staff (2024, November 8). Create the World You Don’t Have Access To. MoMA Magazine. https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/1145
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