Grace Abdayem
April 29, 2026
April 29, 2026
Manic laughter echoes through a tall white room on the second floor of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Xandra Ilbarra’s shrill and visceral cackling generously welcomes you to “Subvert, Repair, Reclaim - Contemporary Artists Take Back The Nude.”
The multimedia exhibit features works by a dozen contemporary artists, all made since 2012. The pieces vary in presentation, ranging from a small screening of Ilbarra’s Nude Laughing (2014) to Cato Ouyang’s transformative Reliquary Corpus (2022) sculpture series.
The entryway effectively introduces you to the topics covered in the exhibit.
Beside Ilbarra’s Nude Laughing are two more of her pieces, including the short visual Colonial Peeps (2014), in which the Mexican-American artist examines her body’s relationship to itself through the pervasive colonial lens that cuts into her existence.
The left wall presents Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Moorish Bath (1870), which the MFA labels a “problematic fave.” The gilded frame houses a scene of two nude women reflecting European views of the “Orient” and ideas of racial hierarchy. While the Black woman works in the nude, the white woman turns away “modestly.”
Gérôme’s painting scorches the viewer with its complex portrayal of beauty. It begs the viewer to consider the history of women portrayed in the nude, and question the intentions of the artist depicting them.
The centerpiece of the room is a recording of Ilbarra’s Turn Around Sidepiece (2018). The filmed performance piece shows her naked frame posing on a revolving bed of marble, against the backdrop of the Vermont wood’s green and lush forest.
In the film, Ilbarra replicates the poses of the unnamed “sidepieces” of art history – women solidified into the minds’ of art critics by the "geniuses" of the era, their memory relegated to the purpose of generational objectification.
The models stripped themselves bare at a time when that taboo behavior guaranteed negative consequences, including social disapproval and ostracization.
By self-directing herself to imitate these women, Ibarra reclaims their stories: the lives which inspired celebrated male artists of the 1800s to create what traditional curators and scholars consider the “great paintings.”
The exhibit continues its radical examination of celebrated art by addressing the topic of consent.
Ouyang’s haunting sculpture series, Reliquary Corpus (2022), transforms figures from Balthus’s paintings. They fragment the disturbing poses of the adolescent Thérèse Blanchard into a beacon for discomfort.
Ouyang refuses to overlook the uncomfortable and exploitative circumstances that Balthus perpetuated for the sake of “art” or preserving an archaic canon. Their sculptures highlight the inequity of this work to exert pressure on systems that once authorized this form of looking and continue to hold it in high regard.
Strange Attractor (2022) explicitly brings museums into view. Beside Reliquary Corpus (2022), Ouyang and a physicist circle the Smithsonian American Art Museum in a car discussing the systemic inheritance of exploitative work like Balthus’s The Victim (1938).
Unfortunately, the screening of the video loops continuously, making it hard to get a grasp on their conversation even as you sit down to listen with headphones. Furthermore, the juxtaposition between the unsettling yet poignant reliquaries and the simply shot modern short film is jarring.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter’s work Consecration to Mary (2021) rests in two glass pedestals near Ouyang’s screening. An extravagantly designed but small frame presents the photograph. In it, Baxter shields a young Black girl with a tender embrace.
After coming across a photograph of the naked, unnamed child taken by the formerly celebrated Thomas Eakins on a museum collection website, Baxter felt outraged. Her frustration dealt with the fact that our art system failed to protect the child not only when Eakins took the photograph, but decades after, with it still being easily accessed on the web.
As a victim to child sexual assault herself, Baxter removed “preservation” from the conversation. Instead, she began a radical activist campaign that successfully removed the photograph from public circulation.
She took it a step further with Consecration to Mary, inserting herself into the frame to shield the child as no one ever did. Baxter’s eyes stare back, piercing the viewer. Her look is blatant in its intention: making the systems face their complacency in continuing this abuse.
Baxter and Ouyang’s work make the point that acknowledgment does not end violence, and visibility does not completely erase harm. They insist that work like theirs needs to exist to continually pressure the system to address its failures.
By contrast, Salman Toor’s work diverges from outrage, taking techniques from the canon to create his own revolutionary work. In Collection (2025), Toor’s signature queer Brown men drift through a cluttered gallery in self-reflection. The museum takes a backseat, serving as a background for Toor’s figures to exist in along their own emotional journey.
By immersing himself in the canon itself, Toor resists the idea of artistic “inheritance” as a tradition that can never be transformed or questioned. He does not wish to correct the canon, but rather to live and create in an artistic landscape that cannot be made whole.
“Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude” is not an exhibit about forgiveness or reclamation. The artists do not intend to repair the harm already perpetuated by the art canon. Their art asks powerful questions, serving as ammunition for curators and viewers to continue a much-needed conversation about how to move forward ethically.