Abstraction & Ourselves
Cafesjian Art Trust Museum
March 6–July 31, 2026
Shoreview, MN
Helen Frankenthaler once noted that you can’t “prove” beauty. “It’s there as a fact,” she said on Charlie Rose’s show in 1993. “It gives no specific message other than itself, which in turn should be able to move you into some sort of truth and insight, and something beyond art.” Frankenthaler’s embrace of the righteous ambiguity of beauty permeates a group exhibition currently on view at the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum. The show explores abstraction in glass sculptures, paintings, mixed media projects, and works on paper by various twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists—mostly women—from around the globe. Reflecting on the unknowability of abstract forms, the exhibition invites viewers to approach their own experiences with intention and consciousness.
Jill Ahlberg Yohe, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, unpacks abstraction’s ability to shape meaning by creating moments of visual connection between very different works. Toots Zynsky’s luscious red Carmen Mizimah (2005) glass piece speaks to the bright red color of the nearby Basta Uno Soffio (One Breath is Enough) (2009) by Roberta Silva. Meanwhile, the blues in Petr Hora’s portal-like glass work Hercules (2004), Georgia O’Keeffe’s In the Patio IX (1950), and Patricia Treib’s Shoulder (2020) bounce off each other and two gallery walls in a near-rhyme. The jagged shimmering green glass of Vladimir Prochazka’s Emerald (ca. 2000) playfully dances with the jewel tone color conversation of those works and flirts with the forest green of Udo Zembok’s Colorfields 27a (2007). Elsewhere in the gallery, Howardena Pindell’s pixelated square within a rectangle, Homage to the Square (2022), pays tribute to color theorist Joseph Albers, joining a lively color discourse that shows up in surprising ways throughout Ahlberg Yohe’s curation.
As for Frankenthaler, her Cravat painting (1973) suggests a horizon line and a sense of locality in ways similar to Jin Jeong’s psychedelic Monument Valley (2022) and Steven J. Yazzie’s grand Erupter (2024), a rich, energetic painting that throbs with the beauty of nature.