NEW
Barbie®: A Cultural Icon
This exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design charts the 65-year history of Barbie and the doll’s global impact on fashion and popular culture through an expansive display of more than 250 vintage dolls, life-size fashion designs, advertisements, and other ephemera, along with exclusive video interviews with the doll's designers. Visitors to the exhibition trace the evolution of Barbie from a child’s toy to a global icon across six distinct sections, each exploring the style trends, careers, and identities that Barbie has embodied and popularized since her debut in 1959.
The opening section relays the Barbie origin story and presents all twenty-two original ensemble outfits, while subsequent areas consider the influence of the Space Age; the creation of Christie™, the first Black Barbie doll; the arrival of Ken™; and the creation of the Barbie Dreamhouse™. Visitors will also see Barbie in the iconic fashions of the 1970s, including Groovy Style, beachwear, and disco-themed designs, while sections on the 1980s and 1990s present a selection of diverse Barbie dolls representing a range of ethnicities, body types, and careers, including a feature on the first Black Barbie. The exhibition culminates in the 2000s, spotlighting the continued diversification of characters within the Barbie universe and connecting them to contemporary fashion trends, perspectives, and identities.
The exhibition features more than 50 historical objects and five unique photo opportunities, including a life-size Barbie Ultra 'Vette™ with which visitors can interact. The exhibit will also showcase the Barbie Signature 65th Blue Sapphire Anniversary Fashion Dolls, paying homage to the iconic history and legacy of Barbie.
The major exhibition first debuted in 2021, welcoming thousands of visitors in both Phoenix and Las Vegas. “Barbie®: A Cultural Icon” marks its exclusive East Coast engagement at MAD, celebrating the 65th anniversary of Barbie.
2. andrea geyer / a promise of lightning
Geyer takes form and inspiration from the network of connections made among trees in the forest—a vast, evolving web of visible and invisible layers in which resources, distress signals, and memories are in continual exchange, and intergenerational communication is key to survival. Interspersed among silkscreened prints and video documentation culled from southern Germany's Black Forest (where the artist grew up and experienced her own queer formation) are images of organizing and protest from the Leslie-Lohman Museum's collection, proposing ways to rethink queer histories of activism, organizing, and representation.
Taking its title from a line of Audre Lorde’s 1973 poem “Movement Song,” which explores both loss and hope, the exhibition asks: How can queerness be considered as a form of multi-temporal relations to and within wider hegemonic cultures? How might still-underknown frameworks of the natural world conceptually and emotionally expand our capacity for resilience?
3. Audrey Flack Mid-Century to Post-Pop Baroque
The Parrish Art Museum presents a career-spanning exhibition celebrating Audrey Flack. The exhibition blends Flack’s iconic photorealist painting techniques with her early background in Abstract Expressionism and newest “Post-Pop Baroque” series. Ranging from paintings and drawings to prints and sculptures, the exhibition will include new and recent works as well as works from the 1940s and 1950s.
4. Flow States– LA TRIENAL 2024
Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 is El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art. the exhibition features 33 participating artists working across the United States, Puerto Rico, and—for the first time—extending into new geographies that reflect the complexities of diasporic flows, with artists based in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia.
Emphasizing plurality and a sense of movement, the title, “Flow States,” is a pun on creative focus and the fluidity of geographic boundaries and cultural exchanges. This phrase connects to diasporic themes—broadly defined as a dispersion, scattering, and flux of populations, languages, and cultures—that inform the exhibition. The selected artists share interests related to transformation, porosities of landscape and the built environment, spiritual connections, collective memories, hybrid belongings, and material exchanges. This edition builds on the framework of the critically acclaimed “ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21,” the museum’s inaugural survey of Latinx contemporary art—the first of its kind in the United States.
