Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s exhibition A Female Landscape and the Abstract Gesture explores how four artists nailed, glued, unraveled, twisted, folded, pierced, tied, and fastened—all to aesthetic effect—to highlight the labor of art making and materialize the line. Centering on the work of Mildred Thompson, the exhibition reveals the physical action of creating artwork and, in Thompson’s words, makes the invisible visible. The works in this exhibition demonstrate the ways in which their creators—Maren Hassinger, Howardena Pindell, Liliana Porter, and Thompson—navigated art making during times of social rupture and sought their way with novel, reparative gestures.

The exhibition takes its title from Thompson’s six-foot-long accordion-fold book A Female Landscape (1977), a gift from the artist to the writer, philosopher, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, which is on display in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery for the duration of the exhibition. This rarely exhibited artwork, generously loaned to the Institute by the Spelman College Archives, where it is housed, abstractly renders in pen and ink the intimate details and contours of a woman’s body. Although the work is highly abstracted, it never loses sight of the human form.

Reservations are recommended, but not required.