Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art (SCWCA) presents Celebrate! an art exhibition at the Betsy Lueke Creative Arts Center Gallery in Burbank, CA. Exhibition dates are September 5-25, 2025.

Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) presents Looking Out: A Connected Perspective

Sponsor: Amanda Banks, VP of Special Projects

Jurors: Mattie Sterling, Membership Chair, and Sam Roberts, Chapter Director

Exhibition Location: Savannah, GA

Exhibition Date: July 17 – 20, 2025

Virtual Exhibition: July 1 – 31, 2025

Looking Out: A Connected Perspective is a hybrid exhibition presented by the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA). This pop-up exhibition features work from 54 members who generously shared their art with us to support a special history project, launching in early 2026. We received over 100 captivating portraits in a variety of media, showcasing the breadth and depth of talent within our community. Looking Out is our way of saying thank you to our members who look out for one another, share generously, and make the WCA such a wonderful, diverse group. All work can be viewed virtually via Kunstmatrix throughout July 2025. Please note that some images are presented at an altered scale for optimal viewing in the online environment.

Additionally, postcards featuring the work are on display in a non-traditional venue during our Summer Board Meeting at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) from July 17 – 20, 2025.

WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR ART PRESENTS

PAIN POINTS:
Bearing Witness in the Present Tense

April 15 – June 15, 2025
Virtual Opening Reception: Sunday, May 18
4:00 PM EST (via Zoom)

View the Exhibition

What happens when artists speak from the wound?

Curated by Allicette Torres and Amanda Banks
Installed by Amanda Banks

Exhibition Statement:
What emerged was not a scream but a frequency.

When we issued the open call for Pain Points, we anticipated an emotional wave. What we received was a controlled burn - deliberate, dimensional, and resonant.

These responses organized themselves, almost organically, into constellations. Some works pressed into the politicized body: anatomy, autonomy, grief, and resistance. Others mapped landscapes scarred by extraction, loss, or quiet reverence. Still others turned inward, offering reflections on disability, identity, and survival. What bound them was not the subject alone but the insistence to bear witness, not in fear but in firm presence.

The submissions revealed a chorus of urgent interiority, each one a node in the collective nervous system of our time. The artists did not scatter into abstraction or recoil in fear. They rooted themselves. Not chaos but clarity, grounded responses to grief, fracture, and longing emerged. Their works held the weight of personal testimony while echoing wider ruptures, inequity, erosion, and survival, tethering the intimate to the political without losing either.

We are living through a moment of dislocation, a hinge in time. There is a collective unease, less apocalypse than entropy, a sense that we are standing at the end of one order and the uncertain beginning of another. There is casual talk of Rome, declining empires, and strongmen and salutes resembling old terrors. What rises in the vacuum is something newer and colder: techno-feudalism, in which power is networked, opaque, and indifferent. It is in this air that artists are speaking.

Audre Lorde reminds us: “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” The works in Pain Points trace every contour of that cycle. They neither romanticize pain nor neutralize it. They allow it to speak, to clarify, to mark what matters.

María Lugones's theory of the coloniality of gender reminds us that systems of oppression are never siloed but braided. Likewise, Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion tells us that pain is not simply personal. It circulates, attaches, moves, and sticks. The art in this exhibition enacts both of these truths: pain as structure and pain as motion.

What we witnessed in this collection of work was not fear but the metabolization of crisis, not a collapse but a recalibration. The artist’s role, still and always, is to transmute what feels impossible to carry. And they did.

These are our pain points. And also our coordinates forward.

Bibliography:
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. https://pratiquesdhospitalite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/245435211-sara-ahmed-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion.pdf
Lorde, Audre. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Lugones, María. “The Coloniality of Gender.” In Feminisms in Movement: Theories and Practices from the Americas, edited by Lívia De Souza Lima, Edith Otero Quezada, and Julia Roth. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2023. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839461020-002/html

***This exhibition contains images and themes that may disturb sensitive audiences. Viewer discretion is encouraged. ***