Grammy nominee and former Interlochen sculpture student Jewel is not one for standing still, in fact, she’s heading to Venice next year. The artist’s debut solo show, “Matriclysm: An Archeology of Connections Lost,” will open at Salone Verde on May 10 and run through November 22—aligning with the 62nd Venice Biennale. Crystal Bridges Museum of Art is presenting the show, which is organized by their curator-at-large Joe Thompson.
This won’t be Jewel’s first time working with Crystal Bridges. Last year, she debuted her revived art practice in “The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel,” a group show at Crystal Bridges’ stunning Bentonville, Arkansas facilities that featured a portrait and a sculpture by Jewel alongside art by contemporary stars like Julie Mehretu and Fred Eversely.
Jewel behind the scenes with Heart of the Ocean (2024). Photo by Matthew Takes.
“Matriclysm,” however, will focus totally on Jewel. Per its title, the exhibition will explore feminine power, cataclysmic climate change, and the places where they overlap—with an emphasis on universality. “My hope is that the show reminds us what it feels like to be in closer harmony, inviting us to unearth ways to reconnect us to ourselves, each other, and the world around us,” Jewel remarks in press materials.
The exhibition will present new paintings, sculptures, tapestries, installations, and sound works. It all starts outside with First Mother, a massive plaster sculpture depicting a pregnant woman on her knees—an allegory for the Mitochondrial Eve, humanity’s common mother. Jewel collaborated with South African-based Congolese artist Patrick Bongoy to bring this goddess to life. Together, they wove her skin from hessian thread.
“While ‘Matriclysm’ is inherently tied to the feminine divine, it is with men that life is created,” Jewel wrote over email regarding her decision to work with Bongoy on this sculpture, which visitors can touch. “The process felt like a mending and a healing of the feminine and masculine; it felt like cooperation, community, and equanimity. It also felt important to embody the First Mother in Africa, the cradle of our species and whom we can trace our matriarchal mitochondria to.”
Jewel creating at the Toledo Museum of Art’s glass-blowing studio. Photo by Ben Morales.
Inside “Matriclysm,” guests will enter a dark space illuminated by Seven Sisters—seven glowing orbs evoking the titular Pleiades star cluster. Jewel produced this piece in the glass blowing studio of Ohio’s ambitious Toledo Art Museum. She’s also converted open-source light wavelength data that NASA and UC Berkeley have gathered on the Seven Sisters into a 12-minute soundscape of seven women singing. Their “neuro-ceutical” chorus aims to alter visitors’ brainwaves. To that end, Jewel recruited Susan Mangsamen—the mother of the rising field of neuroaesthetics—to pen the introductory essay for the exhibition’s catalog.
Numerous oil paintings will surround . Some, like a portrait of Jewel and her son, will celebrate motherhood. Others will celebrate divine femininity more generally, through portraits of notable women like Henrietta Lack (whose cervical cancer cells led to the discovery of the first human cell line) and mathematician Mileva Maric (who married Albert Einstein). Four large paintings from Jewel’s surrealist “Ceremony” series of menopausal women will also appear here, facing off with digital works portraying the upsides and downsides of birth control.
Jewel, (2025)—an artwork from the “Ceremony” series set to debut in “Matriclysm”. Courtesy of the artist
The second gallery in “Matriclysm” will center on Heart of the Ocean, an eight-foot tall resin and steel sculpture animated by 60,000 dancing LED lights. Jewel devised a soundtrack for this sculpture, too, working with NASA, NOAA, Stanford University, and UC Berkeley to gather data on oceanic health metrics like temperature variations, migratory animal patterns, wave activity, and salinity. Historic and realtime fluctuations in these traits will be fed into “music algorithms” that Jewel created, generating a unique 12-minute soundscape that will sing on behalf of Earth’s oceans. A tapestry depicting a larger-than-life, green-suited girlboss will hang nearby, reminding viewers that gender equity and the environment are intimately related. We record feminism, after all, in terms of waves.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
