What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms

This exhibition brings together an evolving body of contemporary works from the museum’s collection that addresses questions about life and art. These quiet works propose celebration, mourning, and transcendence. Together, they initiate a stimulating composition about life and freedom.​​

Presented as related episodes over time, it offers deep engagement with ideas, materials, and structures that order meaning, understanding, and purpose. This second episode includes recently acquired works by Patty Chang, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Sky Hopinka, Deana Lawson, Minouk Lim, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Oscar Murillo alongside those by Matthew Barney, Walter Hood, Byron Kim, Yoko Ono, and Ebony G. Patterson that remain on view from the first episode.

Murillo’s canvases from for the souls of the rotten mighty (2016) were made in the Korean city of Anyang in collaboration with a local mudang, or shaman, to harness the spiritual power of the land in his works. Hopinka’s elegiac video I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become (2016) offers a new mythology for reincarnation and presence among the living. In Discreetly (2021), Lim attached drops of liquid adhesive to strands of fishing line to form an invisible wall of tears to process loss and transformation. Made of found materials gathered over thirty years, Cruzvillegas’s Rastrojo (2021) conceives the life of objects as regenerating in a cyclical way, nourished by and strengthening the environment.

Credit: Overview from museum website