Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, turns a familiar art-historical subject into a site of contention and revision. On view from April 4 to August 2, 2026, the exhibition gathers works by 12 contemporary artists who challenge the Western tradition of the nude by exposing its ties to objectification, exclusion, and power.
Rather than treat the body as a timeless motif, the exhibition looks at how museums, archives, and art history have framed it. The artists involved work across performance, video, painting, sculpture, photography, sound, and collage, using redaction, reuse, and interruption to unsettle inherited images. Their interventions do not simply criticize the canon; they enter it and alter its terms from within.
The range of work is broad, but the concerns are closely linked. Xandra Ibarra’s Turn Around Sidepiece sits on a rotating marble pedestal, giving the viewer a scene that shifts as it is seen. Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano returns to Paul Gauguin’s diaries through photography, video, and collage, while Betty Tompkins overlays familiar art-historical imagery with language from the #MeToo era, making apology itself part of the visual field. In each case, nudity becomes less a matter of display than a record of resistance, authorship, and self-definition.
The exhibition also reflects a wider cultural shift. Questions of bodily autonomy, accountability, and representation now shape public debate as much as museum interpretation, and these works meet that moment without reducing themselves to slogan or illustration. Artists including Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Nona Faustine, Derek Fordjour, Maya Jeffereis, Joiri Minaya, Cato Ouyang, Katherine Sherwood, Salman Toor and others use the nude to examine race, gender, desire, labor, and visibility on their own terms.
At the MFA, the result is a pointed reconsideration of an old category. The nude remains present, but it no longer behaves as it once did. It is questioned, corrected, and claimed.
Image: Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, I was hopeful to find in this place my happiness, 2018. Paper, pigment, mat board. Courtesy of the artist.
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