Dallas, TX—November 21, 2024—Called a “must-see exhibition” by The New York Times and The Washington Post, Marisol: A Retrospective will make the final stop of its tour at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) on Sunday, February 23, 2025. Organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, to which the artist bequeathed her estate in 2016, and curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, this exhibition is the most significant retrospective to date dedicated to the art of Marisol, offering a comprehensive survey of her nearly 60-year career. Marisol was lauded as one of the most influential artists of the mid-1960s for her delightfully satirical and deceptively political life-size totemic figures and her enigmatic glamour, yet she remains little known today. Marisol: A Retrospective showcases more than 250 artworks and documents—including 39 making their public debut with the exhibition tour—that contextualize Marisol’s powerful body of work and demonstrate the extraordinary relevance of her unique vision of culture and society. Curated for Dallas by Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and presented by Bank of America, Marisol: A Retrospective is on view at the DMA February 23 through July 6, 2025.
“This exhibition is a rare opportunity to experience the true breadth of Marisol’s decades-long career,” said Brodbeck. “She masterfully navigated through a wide range of media, techniques and sensitive subject matter throughout her years as an artist, and her work is prescient for a society still gripped by the fight for women’s self-determination, environmental preservation and freedom from geopolitical conflict. While her radical way of thinking and her refusal to be boxed into one category was not always embraced by critics of the time, audiences today are ready for the complex conversations that Marisol tackled throughout her career, and we’re excited to reintroduce them to this once-household name.”
“It is thrilling to support the DMA in bringing Marisol: A Retrospective to North Texas and to pull back the curtain on Marisol’s intriguing career and thought-provoking work. At Bank of America, we believe that investments in arts and culture help to build communities and have a positive impact on the lives of our clients and employees. That is why we are proud to sponsor the final stop of the exhibition’s tour and are looking forward to seeing the DMA once again engage diverse audiences and provide a space for inspiration,” said Jennifer Chandler, President, Bank of America Dallas.
Organized both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition begins with Marisol’s emergence as an artist in the 1950s and her early work in sculpture, in addition to presenting a number of previously unseen drawings. The retrospective then sheds light on her work from the 1960s, when her totemic portraits associated with Pop art established her as a major artistic figure of her generation. She practiced self-portraiture by incorporating casts of her face, mouth, hands and other body parts into her sculptures. Iconic works from this period include her masterpiece The Party (1965-1966), an assemblage of 15 life-size, free-standing figures, all bearing Marisol’s facial features. Also on display are Baby Girl (1963) and Baby Boy (1962-1963), two sculptures that provocatively address Cold War concerns and the pressures of femininity and motherhood.
From the 1970s on, the artist’s work is marked by her commitment to issues such as environmental precarity, social justice, feminism and war. While Marisol’s work may not have found wide critical success at the time, it speaks to several of the most pressing issues of today.
Moreover, an extensive installation of the artist’s figurative drawings from the 1970s points to the relationship between her sculptural self-portraits and these almost confessional works, suggesting new biographical as well as feminist approaches to Marisol’s positioning and self-presentation. Subsequent sections of the exhibition present documentation of costumes and sets designed by Marisol for some of the leading dance companies of the late 20th century, including the Louis Falco Dance Company and the Martha Graham Dance Company.
In addition to drawing extensively on the Buffalo AKG’s collection of works by Marisol, personally bequeathed to the museum upon her death, the retrospective also features loans of major works from renowned institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
About Marisol
Born in Paris to a Venezuelan family, María Sol Escobar spent her adolescence traveling between Venezuela, the United States and Europe. After attending the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she settled in 1950 in New York, where she studied at the Art Students League and the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Art and developed her interest in sculpture. Her early work is strongly influenced by the Abstract Expressionist painting she encountered in New York and the pre-Columbian art she discovered on travels to Mexico. Marisol’s practice in the 1950s and 1960s established core themes that she would address for decades to come, many of which are prevalent in contemporary art today, including the harsh realities of the experiences of women and immigrants, social justice, environmental precarity and interpersonal violence. By the mid-1960s, Marisol became famous not only for her groundbreaking and radical works of art, but also for the place she occupied in various avant-garde social worlds in New York, among them Andy Warhol’s circle, and for her apparent exoticism and beauty. Marisol was always more than a muse or an icon of a single decade, and her nuanced work would transcend the Pop art movement that helped bring her to prominence.
Catalogue
Accompanying the exhibition is a 272-page catalogue published in English and French by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, DelMonico Books and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The most comprehensive catalogue dedicated to Marisol to date, this publication includes essays by curator Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and host curators Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art; Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Chief Curator, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Jessica Hong, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Toledo Museum of Art. The book features additional essays by Estrellita Brodsky, Alex Da Corte, Delia Solomons and Julia Vázquez, and contributions by Jason Hose.
The catalogue is richly illustrated with full-color reproductions of the works included in the retrospective, an exhibition history, a robust bibliography and an illustrated chronology.
Support
Marisol: A Retrospective is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The exhibition is supported by a major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Critical work related to this exhibition and collection was made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The exhibition is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The Dallas presentation is curated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art.
This exhibition in Dallas is presented by Bank of America. The Dallas Museum of Art is supported, in part, by generous DMA Members and donors, the Texas Commission on the Arts and the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture.