There are exciting exhibitions in diverse locales worldwide to visit this summer — from China to California, Italy to Connecticut.
Federica Luzzi and Naoya Takahara: Exercises in Being Like Others
June 4 – August 2, 2026
Mattatoio di Roma, Slaughterhouse
Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 4
00153 Rome
https://www.mattatoioroma.it/mostra/federica-luzzi-e-naoya-takahara-esercizi-per-essere-come-gli-altri
In Rome, sculptures, installations, fragile sheets, fabrics, stitching, and false monuments transform the pavilion of a former Slaughterhouse into a visual journey in which each piece is a song and a constant fear of suffering violence to the body, to one’s own body, and to its play. The two-person exhibition features Federica Luzzi, an Italian born in Rome, and Naoya Takahara, a Japanese born in Ehime but living in Rome since 1977. Separated (soul is never accessible), each works for the other; each dreams of the other’s respective East and West. The exhibition highlights two cultures and a shared search for propitious places — Luzzi through the constant trepidation of the body, the paralysing feminine sense; Naoya with the only comfort of being childlike.
Material Matters: Sheila Hicks and Shi Hui
Through August 2, 2026West Bund MuseumGallery 3
2600 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District
Shanghai, China
https://wbmshanghai.com/en/exhibition/1452-event-material-matters
In this pair of solo exhibitions in Shanghai, visitors are captivated by how Sheila Hicks intertwines threads, colors, and histories, and engages with softness and monumentality. At the same time, they decipher the multiple lives Shi Hui gives to paper pulp, and revel in the ways her work rekindles Chinese artistic traditions.
Subconscious Surfaced
Through August 29, 2026
Moderne Gallery
1705 N American St. STE 3,
Philadelphia, PA 19122
https://modernegallery.com/subconscious-surfaced/?mc_cid=ebd45972ba
Subconscious Surfaced is a group exhibition featuring works from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The exhibition, which includes the work of Norma Minkowitz, explores a shared thread of surreal, otherworldly sculptural form across a range of expressions, techniques, and contexts. A number of works in the exhibition were acquired by Marc and Diane Grainer, renowned patrons, collectors, and champions of the arts, who assembled a singular collection over the course of more than 45 years. On view are works featuring figures, narratives, and compositions drawn from deep within the subconscious, emerging from a realm beyond the threshold of immediate awareness.
Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night
Through August 23, 2026
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA
https://ybca.org/event/diedrick-brackens-gather-tender-night
Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night is the textile artist’s first solo exhibition in the Bay Area of California, featuring fifteen weavings created since 2020, that consider tenderness, migration, and connections with the natural world. Executed on the loom in hand-dyed, cotton fiber and acrylic yarn, Brackens’s works convey a masterful and meditative process of physical discovery and storytelling.
WRIT and WEFTED: Sally Van Doren, paintings and drawings; Nancy Koenigsberg, woven wire sculptures
Through June 21st.
Daphne:art Gallery and Advisory
Bantam, CT. Through June 21st.
By appointment: daphneadeeds@gmail.com
In reviewer Julie Durkin’s words, the exhibition pairs, “two artists who both work at the boundary between language and material.” Sally Van Doren is a poet who works with illegible handwriting. Nancy Koenigsberg “draws” with wire — nets and mats, cubes and chains — that suggest fascinating interior and shadow lives
Mark your calendar for the fall: Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America, which will include work by Ruth Asawa and Kay Sekimachi, among others. It will open at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 20, 2026.
Enjoy!