WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR ART PRESENTS PAIN POINTS: Bearing Witness in the Present Tense

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. ***