Art Out and About: Winter Edition

If you are game for getting out in this winter weather there are a batch of exhibitions around the world that are well worth your time. A couple close this week or next, so we’ve listed them in order of closing dates. Here’s our wrap up:

India Art Fair
NSIC Exhibition Grounds
February 5 – 8, 2026
Okhla, New Delhi
India, 110020
https://indiaartfair.in

A celebration of art, the India Art Fair features dozens of exhibitors who will present a number of artists whose practice involves art textiles and fiber sculpture. Among them, are Latitude 28, which represents Monali Meher who works in wool and paper, Dminti who is collaborating with Judy Chicago who created the What if Women Ruled the World? quilt, Chanakya School of Craft, which has collaborated with celebrated artists Mickalene Thomas and Faith Ringgold, and Morii Design, which works with artisans to reinterpret age-old stitch vocabularies through a contemporary design lens.

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art
Through February 7, 2026
11 West 53 Street
New York, New York, 10019
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5768

Just one week remains to see this expansive exhibition of Ruth Asawa’s extraordinary work.

“I’m not so interested in the expression of something. I’m more interested in what the material can do. So that’s why I keep exploring,” said Asawa, artist, educator, and civic leader. Featuring some 300 artworks, Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective charts the artist’s lifelong explorations of materials and forms in a variety of mediums, including wire sculpture, bronze casts, drawings, paintings, prints, and public works. This first posthumous survey celebrates the ways in which Asawa continuously transformed materials and objects into subjects of contemplation, unsettling distinctions between abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, and negative and positive space.

Martin Puryear: Nexus
Through February 8, 2026
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
https://www.mfa.org/exhibition/martin-puryear-nexus

We are big fans of Martin Puryear, and see his basket-like sculptures fiber art adjacent. Just a week remains to see Martin Puryear: Nexus in Boston.

For more than half a century, the preeminent American sculptor has captivated the public with works of beauty, elaborate craftsmanship, and sophisticated sources of inspiration—from global cultures, social history, and the natural world, including representing the United States at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Assembling some 45 works from across his career, Martin Puryear: Nexus is the first substantial survey of the artist in almost 20 years. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s use of a rich variety of materials and media—from sculptures in wood, leather, glass, marble, and metal to rarely shown drawings and prints. It reflects Puryear’s singular artistic practice, one that combines the distinctive techniques of production with the formal histories he has encountered through a lifetime of movement, research, and study. (Note: You can also see a stunning “quilt” of aluminum, bottle caps, and copper wire by El Anatusi in the Richard and Nancy Lubin Gallery at MFA Boston while you are there.)

Enough Already: Women Artists from the Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell Collection
Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut (MoCA/CT)
Through February 15, 2026
19 Newtown Turnpike
Westport, CT 06880
https://mocact.org/exhibitions/

Just two weeks remain to see Enough Already in Westport, Connecticut.

The exhibition presents more than 80 extraordinary works by modern and contemporary women artists drawn from the significant private collection of Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell. This bold exhibition expresses the collectors’ personal interest in discovering emergent artistic voices and powerful artistic statements that speak to prominent social issues of the day, including domesticity, gender equality, motherhood, personal identity, and social transformation.

The show features lesser-known and renown artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Deborah Butterfield, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Ana Mendieta, Catherine Opie, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems. There are also works by the Guerrilla Girls and a wall papered with cheeky observations, Phrases in My Head, by local artist, Constance Old.

Otobong Nkanga: “I dream of you in colors”
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
Through February 22, 2026
11 Avenue du Président Wilson 75116 
Paris, France
https://www.mam.paris.fr/fr/expositions/exposition-otobong-nkanga

^{Otobong Nkanga, Unearthed Sunlight, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.}

Since the late 1990s, Otobong Nkanga (born in Kano, Nigeria in 1974 and living in Antwerp, Belgium) has addressed themes related to ecology and the relationship between the body and the territory in her work, creating works of great strength and plasticity. The Musée observes that, “[t]he concept of strata is central to the artist’s work—both in the materiality of her sculptures, interventions, performances, and tapestries, and in her way of thinking about the relationships between bodies and the land—relationships of exchange and mutual transformation. Otobong Nkanga explores the circulation of materials and goods, of people and their intertwined histories, as well as their exploitation, marked by the residues of environmental violence. While questioning memory, she offers a vision of a possible future.”

Åse Ljones: Light Broken
Visningsrommet
February 27 – March 8, 2026
USF Verftet
Georgernes Verft 12
5011 Bergen, Norway
https://www.visningsrommet-usf.no/ase-ljones/

Åse Ljones writes that in her upcoming exhibition in Bergen, Norway, she investigates “the experience of colors and changes in colors in relation to light.” Her work changes character with the light depending on the direction the viewer sees it from. Then the shine and colors come into their own. “I am constantly looking for the shine, the light, the movement, and the restlessness in stillness.” Ljones’s technique is hand embroidery on linen, stretched on a frame. It is only when the embroidery is stretched that one can see the effect of the light refraction.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, the Thread of Existence
Musée Bourde
Through April 12, 2026 ️
18 rue Antoine Bourdelle
Paris, France
https://www.bourdelle.paris.fr/en/visit/exhibitions/magdalena-abakanowicz-thread-existence

A major artist on the Polish scene in the 20th century, Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) experienced war, censorship, and deprivation imposed by the communist regime from an early age. She produced immersive, poetic, sometimes disturbing and often political sculptures and textile works. Inspired by the organic world, by seriality and monumentality, her work possesses an undeniable power and presence, resonating with contemporary issues—environmental, humanistic, and feminist ones.

The Musée Bourdelle presents the first major exhibition dedicated to the artist in France, featuring 80 ensembles—40 sculptural installations, 12 textile works, drawings, and photographs. The Musée explains that the subtitle of the exhibition, the Thread of Existence combines two terms used by the artist to define her work. Abakanowicz considered fabric to be the elementary cell of the human body, marked by the vagaries of its destiny.

Beyond our Horizons: from Tokyo to Paris 
Through April 26, 2026
la Galerie du 19M
2 pl Skanderbeg 75019
Paris, France
https://www.le19m.com/en/agenda/beyond-our-horizons-from-tokyo-to-paris

^{Works from Beyond our Horizons: from Tokyo to Paris, including works by Simone Pheulpin at la Galerie du 19M, Paris/Aubervilliers. Photos courtesy of laGaleriedu 19M}.

Building on the success of its Japanese counterpart, Beyond our Horizons: from Tokyo to Paris travels to France in a reimagined presentation, celebrating a creative dialogue between Japanese and French artisans and designers. Among these artists are Simone Pheulpin who created work of cotton webbing in Japan and worked with others designers created similar works in metal. A journey  through materials, creativity, and craftsmanship, the exhibition explores the deep connections between nature and creation, inspired by a conception by elemental forces — earth (土, do), water (水, sui), fire (火, ka), wind (風, fu) and void (空, ku). These principles describe a world in perpetual dialogue, where harmony and impermanence, stability and movement, body and spirit respond to one another.

Dawn MacNutt: Timeless Forms
Owens Art Gallery Through May 12, 2026
61 York Street
Sackville, NB
E4L 1E1 Canada
https://www.bourdelle.paris.fr/en/visit/exhibitions/magdalena-abakanowicz-thread-existence

Spanning four decades of work, this exhibition, organized in partnership with MSVU Art Gallery, traces the evolution of Dawn MacNutt’s unique practice through a selection of key sculptural works. Moving from delicate miniatures crafted in silver and copper wire to impressive human forms woven from locally sourced willow, this gathering of works charts the development of a complex and nuanced oeuvre that explores the depths of the human condition. By the 1970s, her work had moved from on-loom weaving to life-size woven trees in hand-spun wool. Over the next decade, her work moved towards the haunting figural forms she is known for today.  

MSVU Art Gallery and Owens Art Gallery published a work in conjunction with the exhibition.Timeless Forms brings together over a hundred images of MacNutt’s sculptures and textiles, weaving them into the story of her life: from growing up in rural Nova Scotia during the Second World War; through her studies at Mount Allison University under the guidance of Alex Colville; to marriages, motherhood and finding, in her 40s, the courage to throw herself into art full time. Timeless Forms is available through browngrotta arts’ online bookstore.

The Baskets Keep Talking
Ongoing
Sharlot Hall Museum
415 West Gurley Street
Prescott, Arizona
https://sharlothallmuseum.org/museum_exhibits/sharlot-hall-building-exhibits/

Housed in the Hartzell Room and opened in 2007, The Baskets Keep Talking tells the story of the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe…in their own words. Viewers can explore their history and culture in this vibrant exhibit.

Enjoy!

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