Hayv Kahraman | Christina Quarles

Our whole, unruly selves celebrates the boundlessness of human beings through an exploration of artistic figuration. The human form has inspired artists throughout history, and the desire to represent and respond to the nuanced experience of existing within a specific body continues to drive new visual languages and approaches. While the inclusion of underrepresented bodies has been a critical step in diversifying museum walls and collections, many artists who experience oppression and erasure—whether due to race, sexual orientation, disability, or immigration status—resist or recast the burden of representation, as the pressures of both hypervisibility and invisibility can eclipse the complexity of lived experience.

Centering artists of color as well as queer, immigrant, disabled, and undocumented artists, Our whole, unruly selves features over 90 works from the 1960s to the present, largely drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection. Demonstrating an alignment with philosopher and poet Fred Moten’s “consent not to be a single being,” the artists on view—including Laura Aguilar, Benny Andrews, Felipe Baeza, Rina Banerjee, Huma Bhabha, Woody De Othello, Carlee Fernandez, Genevieve Gaignard, Tim Hawkinson, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Oliver Lee Jackson, Steffani Jemison, Hayv Kahraman, Wardell Milan, Senga Nengudi, Kambui Olujimi, Christina Quarles, Miljohn Ruperto, Alison Saar, Aislinn Thomas, Axis Dance Company, and many others—insistently bring their whole selves, uncontainable and irreducible. Each of their artworks embodies strategies for a complex figuration, highlighting forms of resistance, flexibility, openness, and an embrace of opacity.