Through November 29, 2026
It took my second visit to Maren Hassinger’s retrospective for the show to come alive in a way that I had missed on my first go-round. Not because I hadn’t been moved by her impressive body of work or how well curated were the selections made by Margot Norton and Anthony Graham, but because Hassinger’s practice leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Spanning an array of media from sculpture, drawing, and installation to video, performance, and participatory workshops, there are no holds barred in her creative explorations. The throughline between what at first seems like disparate bodies of work in fact reflects the artist’s dedication to making objects and performances that hold the weight of material and of history.
Hassinger’s practice has reflected many trends in the art world over the course of her 55-year career, notably including the Black Arts Movement, the earthworks artists of the 1970s, early Conceptualism and video art. Ruth Asawa’s wire structures come to mind in many of the works in the exhibition’s last gallery. Her early passion for dance appears in numerous works, and in the way in which she has choreographed her own movements in different media. Hassinger has always refused to limit herself to a single formal style or theory, allowing for a more expansive conversation about the body and the earth.
One work located off-site is a pyramid built of tree branches in the nearby Botanical Garden. It might be categorized as ‘land art’ in the vein of Andy Goldsworthy or Robert Smithson, but in concept and practice it aligns more with a participatory and collective vision. The piece was designed to be made collaboratively, compiling objects located on site to resemble a pyramid and a beaver dam all at once. It’s as if she has given instructions for humans to act like nature while implying, as the Egyptians did, that nothing great has come out of the work of someone acting alone.
Hassinger approaches materiality with a light touch. Her interest is less in transformation and more in peeling apart and re-positioning, choreographing the interrelationship of materials to convey meaning between things people have made, including tools, stories and families. All of these things are connected to their ultimate situation in and of the earth. The wire installation titled “Consolation” (1996) is a repetitive grid made of small lengths of wire unfurled toward the top that resemble dandelions on scientific display. “Dry/Flow” (1976), “Deep Down” (1977), and “Pas de Deux” (1977) operate as drawings in space as well as sculpture, with found branches and wire rope interlocked in dialogue with one another. These are some of the artist’s most striking works. Arms of branches evoke dance moves, and while the work conveys the abstract joy of choreographed movement, it also conjures the devastating connection between rope and tree that is forever embedded in our country’s history.
While Hassinger’s touch is light, the works’ occupation of the museum galleries is grand. As Hilton Als puts it in his essay for the show’s catalog, “she does not, so to speak, gender space,” recalling the tired slur against women in general, and women of color in particular, of “being too much.” The work aesthetically commands each room from ceiling to floor. It is never polite and it is not always generous to the viewer. There is an insistence, particularly in the grainy video and photo-documentation of archived performances, on the importance of coming together, even as the experience of that documentation can at times be dry. But that dryness is a product of its dated nature and is itself meaningful in its evocation of an experience, time, and context to which we no longer have access. The curators are able to convey Hassinger’s notion of “performance as a way of breaking the frame in which artworks are so often viewed.” Performance comes off as the heart of her practice.
In “Wrenching News” (2026), strands of newspaper are twisted and tied together to hang down from the ceiling like a curtain. Made from pages of the New York Times (selected, Hassinger notes, for its place in our culture as the newspaper of record), the work is made by Hassinger and completed by visitor participants, intended to grow throughout the course of the exhibition. It begs the question of “record,” a word whose meaning originates in “going back to the heart of things.” But this literal twisting of the pages negates our access to the content of the paper. With the concealment of information comes an emphasis on the collective act of making anew, together, from the rubble and an incomplete knowledge of the past.
