The debut explores the idea that while we create the world around us, that world simultaneously creates us. It's a concept long familiar to architects, for whom design has often been framed as a civic duty. Yet Censori's approach is not without precedent. A surge of feminist artists in the 1960s and 1970s, including Alina Szapocznikow, used the body, or its absence, in conjunction with furniture to explore domesticity and sexual liberation.
Art, at its very best, reminds me that there is a world out there that I not only belong to but trust - perhaps even love. Sandra Vázquez de la Horra's beeswax-dipped drawings of erupting women, mystical landscapes, and hallucinatory flora in The Awake Volcanoes at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, did just that. Oh, that old mystery of finding oneself reflected in the material fragments of someone else's private imaginary.
The show features painting, sculpture, photography, film and assemblage, tracing how artists working in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and New York grappled with identity, sexuality, race and power in ways often overlooked in canonical art histories. Though the women's liberation movement didn't enter wider public consciousness until the early 1970s, Sixties Surreal showcases how women artists were creating an early feminist aesthetic and imagining new fields of possibility for themselves and their work.