CIRCLES, SPOKES, ZIGZAGS, RIVERS: CONTEMPORARY ABSTRACTION AT WHITNEY MUSEUM
Artist Grace Rosario Perkins’s solo exhibition reveals a dynamic process of layering, erasure, and renewal, where personal and collective histories converge.specifically for this exhibition.
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers, the first solo museum exhibition in New York City for Grace Rosario Perkins (Akimel O'odham/Diné, b. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico). The show brings together approximately ten recent works—primarily largescale paintings made between 2022 and the present, including two created specially for this exhibition, as well as a new sculpture on view for the first time.
The title of the exhibition draws on imagery that connects the artist’s family to their tribal homelands in the southwestern United States. Perkins’s vibrant and densely layered works are shaped by an intuitive, dynamic process of addition and removal. Working with acrylic, spray paint, and collage, she often incorporates wide-ranging materials that speak to both individual and collective memory, including found objects and personal belongings such as photographs, jewelry, pages from books, fabric, plastic bags, plaster, and botanicals.
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Grace Rosario Perkins. Lets Go Back To That Magic Place That Only You and I Have Seen (Illuminations), 2023. Acrylic, spray paint, paper, and transparencies on canvas, 77 × 60 in. (195.6 × 152.4 cm). Collection of Sasha and Charlie Sealy. © Grace Rosario Perkins, courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery
Guided by diaristic encounter, DIY ethos, spirituality and plant medicine, Perkins references popular and material culture, language, music, and sports as they converge with more intimate reflections on grief, love, and hope. Through abstraction, Perkins resists reductive representations of Indigenous identity, instead presenting an expansive vision rooted in both ancestral knowledge and the urgencies of now. Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers offers a vital and multifaceted portrait of an artist creating new forms of storytelling.
The show is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant.
The exhibition will be on display from October 18, 2025, until February 8, 2026, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street New York, New York (United States).
*Cover image: In Season/A Reason/Let Me Down, 2025. Acrylic, flashe, and spray paint, 110 x 84 inches. Courtesy of Sky High Valley Farm (Grace Rosario Perkins).
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