NEW YORK, NY.- Core Memory brings together, for the first time, 88 Cores and 18 Cores, two of Peggy Weil’s visualizations of Earth’s climatic histories. A pioneer of digital portraiture, Weil has recently turned her attention to what she calls Extended Landscapes: portraits of the invisible layers “beneath our feet, above our heads, and back in time.” Her work opens a window onto the planet as a recording device, revealing how climatic and geological events are inscribed into polar ice sheets and sedimentary strata.
From the youngest snow to the oldest ice, 88 Cores descends two miles and 110,000 years through Greenland’s ice sheet. Unlike tree rings, which grow concentrically, ice preserves time vertically. Each annual layer of snow compacted into ice carries bubbles of air and gases. The inscriptions and distinct shades of blue noticeable in some cores—drilled between 1989 and 1993 as part of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project—document the evolution of imaging technologies used to digitize these ice fragments over the years. In 18 Cores, Weil shifts from polar cold to geothermal heat, assembling images of rock cores extracted from California’s Salton Sea between 1985 and 1986. The six vertical strands of cores unveil a subterranean landscape of shales, siltstones, and sandstones dating to the Pleistocene era.
“The pace of climate change is too slow to apprehend, and its substances—gases like methane and CO2—are invisible,” the artist observes. Through these vertical scrolls, Weil makes the physical evidence of environmental shifts perceptible and undeniable.
Peggy Weil: Core Memory is organized by Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, Curatorial Associate, Department of Architecture and Design.
Elizabeth Murray: Painters Progress
March 04, 2026 – May 25, 2026
The Museum of Modern Art
“I begin my work by making a big mess and then find my way out.” Over the course of her five-decade career, Elizabeth Murray sought to incorporate dimension and movement into painting by fracturing, splicing, and layering her canvases. In the 1980s, she experienced a breakthrough: after years of making flat, two-dimensional paintings, she began fragmenting her compositions across multiple canvases, adding dynamism and depth. Murray found catharsis in “taking something broken and trying to make it conceptually whole.”
This exhibition traces the development of Murray’s practice through a concise selection of works drawn from over 20 years, including Painters Progress (1981), one of the earliest examples of paintings the artist referred to as “shattered shapes.” Working quickly, to invite spontaneity, she began by making sketches of the forms that would become her canvases and arranging them directly on the wall. She chose to depict everyday objects such as cups and paintbrushes, distorting them into organic forms resembling heads, mouths, and uteri. Murray once likened the potential for endless interpretations of her work to searching for an image in the clouds.
This presentation is dedicated to the memory of Agnes Gund (1938–2025).
Organized by Mia Matthias, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, with Lydia Mullin, Manager of Collection Galleries, Curatorial Affairs, and Elizabeth Wickham, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
