By Brian Passey | Scottsdale Arts
Opening March 1, 2025, at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, ‘transfeminisms’ brings to light a multiplicity of urgent, pressing and ongoing issues faced by women and queer and trans people across the globe.
The major survey show has been unveiled in sections at London’s Mimosa House since March, and when it travels to SMoCA, a part of the nonprofit Scottsdale Arts, in 2025, it will take over all five of the museum’s galleries, remaining on view through Aug. 24, 2025.
“From the moment I heard the exhibition’s title, I understood it to be a project of curatorial activism — an exhibition that highlights and uplifts voices from vulnerable communities across the globe with the hopes of gathering broad support, understanding and empathy,” said Jennifer McCabe, director and chief curator at SMoCA.
“I am proud to be part of an exhibition that advocates for women and women-identifying people across geographies, races and cultures.”
Ms. McCabe, who is one of the exhibition’s four primary curators, said the advocacy nature of the show could be intimidating to undertake publicly, but the significant financial support it received from national funders speaks to the necessity of projects like this.
Grants to support the exhibition came from the National Endowment for the Arts, Terra Foundation for American Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
“transfeminisms” outlines strategies of resistance through collective action, care and radical imagination to generate a more equitable future. The exhibition explores the lineage of feminist art practices by facilitating dialogue between emerging and more established artists from around the world. In addition to the four curators, three assistant curators and ten global curatorial advisors helped bring the exhibition together.
“When I conceptualized this project in 2022, my intention was to organize an exhibition that would be in conversation with ‘Global Feminisms,’ another large-scale exhibition that I co-curated with Linda Nochlin 17 years ago,” said Maura Reilly, one of the show’s other curators.
“The aim with ‘transfeminisms’ is to investigate feminist art practice today, and again from an intersectional standpoint. The international curatorial consortium that collaborated on the project has culled together a superb selection of artists, whose themes range from feminist care and kinship to radical imaginations and collective action.”
Ms. Reilley is the director of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey and the Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She and McCabe first met a few years ago when Reilly came to Arizona State University to lead the school’s Museum Studies Program, where McCabe is also an instructor.
Ms. Reilly told Ms. McCabe of her idea for revisiting the “Global Feminisms” show. London’s Mimosa House was already on board to host the show. So, McCabe lined up SMoCA as its second stop, and the first location where the exhibition will be shown as a whole. Due to Mimosa House’s small size, “transfeminisms” has unfolded there over five distinct chapters.
Ms. Reilly is a leader in feminist art history, and under McCabe’s leadership, SMoCA has sought to elevate contemporary women artists in recent years through exhibitions featuring women artists and growing its collection with works by women artists.
Ms. McCabe notes that art history has systemically ignored women artists.
The title of “transfeminisms” is intentionally provocative. Ms. McCabe said it’s about “all the different definitions of feminism.”
The prefix “trans” implies “across, beyond, through, on the other side of,” while the plural “feminisms” recognizes the innumerable definitions of feminism worldwide. The curators’ intend for “transfeminisms” to be understood within an inclusive and decolonial context — one that takes museum patrons across feminisms and encompasses various ‘trans’ possibilities.
Organized into five themes, the exhibition will explore activism, labor, fragile archives, care/kinship and radical imaginations. While those five themes are being explored separately at Mimosa House, they will be on view together at SMoCA, spread across four galleries.
Meanwhile, SMoCA’s fifth gallery will be dubbed the ‘Forum’ space.
It will have resources for community groups to come in and use the space for meetings, whether it’s an organization of women in business or a collective from the LGBTQIA+ community. SMoCA also intends to program the space with monthly events, including film screenings, poetry readings, open mic nights and more.
