NEW YORK, NY.- At 80, Marta Minujín is still as stylishly bold as her art has been over her long career. She fashions platinum blonde hair and signature bangs. Aviator sunglasses usually cover her eyes; bold rings cover her fingers. Her ultra-colorful jumpsuits are an extension of her art, as if she is wearing a live piece of the striped mattresses and paintings that have become synonymous with her name.

A Buenos Aires, Argentina, native born to a prominent Russian-Jewish family in 1943, Minujín began her career in the late 1950s. During the 1960s she experimented with mattresses, creating biomorphic soft sculptures, painted in striped patterns with fluorescent colors, which became her signature style. Each was a different iteration: Some were small; others one could crawl inside; some referenced the body, which evoked intimacy, play, even eroticism.

“Half of your life takes place on a mattress. You are born; you die; you make love; you can get killed on the mattress,” said Minujín, during a recent interview with Rebecca Shaykin, associate curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, who is the co-curator of a project that will highlight the artist this year. “That’s why mattresses are so important. I started with mattresses in the ’60s, but then I stopped for 40 years, and then I started again in 2007. I went back to my roots.” (Shaykin’s interview appears in the show’s catalog.)

Minujín is not the only one returning to her origins. For the first time in her expansive 60-year career, she and her work will be honored in a stand-alone show at the Jewish Museum, in “Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!,” Nov. 17to March 31. The exhibit will showcase nearly 100 works from the artist’s archives along with private and institutional collections, including her mattress-based soft sculptures, fluorescent large-scale paintings, psychedelic drawings and performances, and rarely seen photographs and film footage.

“There’s a deep frustration that a generation of women artists have been overlooked. Marta is one of them,” said Shaykin, 38. “As curators, we have an obligation and a commitment to bring unheard, unrecognized or underrepresented artists into the discussion.”

For six decades, Minujín has created large-scale, politically playful art, purposely placed in experiential settings. In 1965, while traveling in a helicopter, she dropped live chickens and lettuce on an audience below that had gathered in a football field. In 2015, she mobilized people on a bridge in Buenos Aires and released flower petals in an attempt to create instant soul mates on a massive scale. Those events often forced the viewer not only to encounter the art but also to become part of the experience itself.

Though considered one of Argentina’s most recognized and celebrated creative people, who collaborated with American and French avant-garde colleagues like Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo, Charlotte Moorman, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, she has remained an overlooked and unknown name here in the United States.

That fact is one more reason “this is a long overdue show for a female artist who is a defining force with a distinctive hallmark in Latin American art,” said Darsie Alexander, 57, the acting director and the Susan and Elihu Rose chief curator at the museum. “In addition to being a woman artist coming into her own at the same age as Warhol and Rauschenberg in this generational milieu, Marta’s work never quite sat within the popular market driven trends.”

The Jewish Museum, on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, has always focused on celebrating women artists. Over the past decade its monographic exhibitions have featured Barbara Bloom, Rachel Feinstein, Martha Rosler, Laurie Simmons and Florine Stettheimer. Minujín will be their first female Jewish and Latin American artist profiled.

The exhibition will also be the museum’s first bilingual show. “We hope that will bring in a Spanish-speaking audience and an audience that is more familiar with Marta but less familiar with the museum,” Shaykin said.

Alexander and Shaykin, the curators responsible for spearheading the four-year-long project, talked about paying tribute to an unappreciated artist; what the museum is doing to be more inclusive; and how they plan to bring in younger audiences.

Q: Why are you calling this a survey rather than a retrospective?

DARSIE ALEXANDER: A survey suggests a more carefully chosen selection of works across an artist’s trajectory, as opposed to a retrospective, which is an exhaustive, deep dive into all phases of the artist’s career. We have works from every decade of Marta’s practice — mattress works from the ’60s, her performances and paintings from the ’70s, schematic drawings for her large-scale public sculptures made in the ’80s, to works made today.

Q: At 80, she is still creatively prolific; what was her most recent work?

ALEXANDER: Her “Pandemia/Endemia” paintings were made during the pandemic. We are showing three works from the group that correspond to the different stages of the evolution of COVID. They are composed of thousands of tiny colored strips of fabric, which are adhered to a large canvas, forming an optical field of gyrating lines. They are stunningly beautiful and intricately labor-intensive works that were made in isolation while working quietly in her studio.




Q: Do you have to be Jewish to be highlighted here or have some kind of Jewish thread?

ALEXANDER: Though we’ve always viewed ourselves as an inclusive institution, Jewish identity is at the core of who we are and what we do. Over time what that identity means has changed. Marta is a descendant from a Russian-Jewish family that came to Argentina in the 1890s.

REBECCA SHAYKIN: She has also drawn attention to her Jewish identity and the history of the war and the Holocaust in her work, “The Parthenon of Books,” (“El Partenón de libros”), particularly the reproduction of that work at Kassel, Germany, in 2017.

Q: That piece, originally done in 1983, seems particularly significant to showcase given the current climate, wouldn’t you say?

SHAYKIN: Yes. The push to abandon books that focus on Black, Jewish, queer and trans experience in the United States is under fire. It’s important to make sure those conversations and connections are happening when we present a work like “The Parthenon of Books” — that it’s been shown specifically in an Argentine context, and in a German and Nazi context, and that it’s relevant for American audiences and for young people today.

Q: Is bringing in a younger viewer part of the museum’s initiatives?

ALEXANDER: Yes, we’re focusing on younger artists, but it’s important to recognize the work of people that are at the end of their careers, too. We tend to focus on what’s new and hot, but we are committed to recognizing the arc of someone’s trajectory. Marta has had a long career. She continues to make work in a relentless, tireless, exhaustive way while constantly reinventing herself. Her works are getting bigger, more prominent, more ambitious. We don’t lose sight of the fact that artists who are well into their 80s can still be making great work.

Q: How are you expanding and including other audiences?

ALEXANDER: We are actively collecting a young generation of artists like Alex Bradley Cohen, Ilana Savdie and Kali Spitzer. We have a new curator, Liz Munsell, whose focus is of that generation and our shared commitment to diversity, equity, accessibility and inclusion work.

Q: Since Minujín is Latina, how are you including her community?

SHAYKIN: Marta’s show will be the first one we’re doing that’s bilingual. We hope that will bring in a Spanish-speaking audience and an audience that is more familiar with Marta but less familiar with the museum. Jews are in interfaith families of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, and so the artists on our walls and the stories that we tell in our exhibitions should reflect that.

Q: Marta, who currently has more than 250,000 followers on Instagram, is thriving on social media. Was that part of her appeal in drawing a younger audience?

ALEXANDER: Social media and Instagram have had a huge impact on museums and the way word-of-mouth spreads about exhibitions. It can be incorporated into the experience of viewing art. Social media has enabled Marta to secure an incredible following of admirers of artists and fans. She was one of the first women artists to really understand how technology plays a role in shaping both her identity as an artist and the dissemination of her work. She will be posting during the run of the show, and I think that will generate interest in the exhibition.

Q: What do you want the viewer to take away from this exhibition?

SHAYKIN: An incredible sense of joy and discovery. Marta’s work is timeless, playful, engaging and tactile. She’s also a serious, rigorous artist. We also want to highlight the voice of a significant, underrecognized, not as critically evaluated artist like Marta, who is an extraordinary person, and put her on the map of contemporary art for this next generation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.