Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, ranging from works she produced in art school in the fifties to her last works. In doing so, the exhibition centers and decenters Marisol’s status within the Pop art sphere, where she never fully situated herself. Her works are too brutal and too strange (in the best sense of the word) for Pop. She was undoubtedly exhibiting with Pop artists and part of their networks, as her films with Andy Warhol included in the exhibition attest. However, she was somewhere else, too. Her works contain the brute force of politics, history, culture, and climate change, and, in her practice, she engages with how those forces take place primarily upon the bodies of women. The body morphs and sometimes breaks under these forces.
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Her work is remarkable in its contemporaneity within its time, then and now. Her wooden sixties sculptures, her best-known works, evoke the period with ease through political figures, the loneliness of modern life, and the overwhelming advancement of technology into lives and onto bodies. Yet, her works contain a resplendent strangeness and vibrate with a sense of how these experiences are still present in today’s experiences.
The materiality of wood and her play of size and scale amplify connections to children’s toys, a way to play with memory and nostalgia. Baby Boy (1962-1963) and Baby Girl (1963) exemplify her use of memory and childhood connections in subject and presentation, especially as both figures hold much smaller and, thus, doll-like versions of the artist. The pair, according to exhibition labels and Marisol, were political, rooted in Cold War politics. The gargantuan children in their proper clothes make playthings of others (such as the Marisol effigies held by each). Her engagement with these figures as political forces, giant babies making playthings of the bodies of women, creates further contemporary meaning today.
Another work, The Party, uses Marisol’s face and body to create “a lonely crowd” at a cocktail party. Within the sculptural arrangement, hands hold cocktails, and a man’s hand reaches to grope a woman’s body.
Her Dinner Date (1962) presents two Marisol figures eating dinner at a table with “TV dinners” in front of them. They don’t interact with one another, existing together without any interaction. Another work, Marisol’s The Hungarians (1955), greets you when you enter the exhibition space as the first work you see. It is an example of her earliest works which, according to the label, envision the refugee experience of a family fleeing Nazi or Soviet regimes. Then and now, past and present, collapse. We all fall down.
Another gallery focuses your attention on her seventies works, amalgams of science fiction or environmental damage; fish/people beings beyond the human. in her catalogue essay, the exhibition’s curator, Cathleen Chaffee, describes Fishman (1973) as “her iconic human-fish hybrid” and sculptures of other fish that Marisol compared to war weapons. As Chaffee notes, the works were not critical darlings at the time, but they also present foreboding connections to today’s oceanic devastations due to climate change.
The DMA exhibition contains a wall of hanging faces—face casts meant to disturb, which are grouped together for the exhibition. While bodily damage reverberates throughout the exhibition, from early starts to the exit, these horrors linger. She uses her own face, which is never presented as a whole or healthy face: a mouth full of large, animal teeth protruding, a soda bottle or a beer can smashed into clay as damaged flesh, or a sculpted foot stomped face. While the vignette starts with the surrealistic, animal-human mask-like form, the violence to the body quickly takes on more daily forms of violence: a thrown bottle, a punch to the face. In every instance, the face cannot hold its form against the brutality.
Marisol: A Retrospective, in its DMA installation, presents an important and, I would argue, essential viewing experience today. Daily, political, global, and individual violence and the brutality of life in the sixties—and now—make Marisol’s work a perceptive artery into the past and present.
Marisol: A Retrospective is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach, Chief Curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The Dallas version is curated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. @dallasmuseumart
Marisol: A Retrospective runs at the Dallas Museum of Art through July 6, 2025.
About the writer: Melissa L. Mednicov is Associate Professor at Sam Houston State University. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in art history from Pennsylvania State University and her B.A. in art history from Smith College. Her first book, Pop Art and Popular Music: Jukebox Modernism (2018) published with Routledge, offers an interdisciplinary approach to Pop art scholarship through a recuperation of popular music into art historical understandings of the movement. Her new book, Jewish American Identity and Erasure in Pop Art, reconsiders Pop art within the context of Jewish artists, gallerists, and collectors in New York City in the 1960s and was published in 2024 by Routledge. Additionally, she works on research related to Texas Modernism. Her essays have appeared in Art Journal, Panorama, Imago Musicae, and The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt. Her contemporary art criticism has been published in the College Art Association’s caareviews and Glasstire. @mmednicov