Joyce Pensato opens at ICA Miami in December 2025
27 June 2025
This December, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) will open a major survey for Joyce Pensato (1941–2019), bringing together some 65 works across five decades, including rarely seen works from the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Marking the artist’s most comprehensive museum survey to date, the exhibition traces the development of Pensato’s practice, providing greater understanding of the artist’s context and the range of her powerful imagery. Curated by Alex Gartenfeld, Irma and Norman Braman Artistic Director; Gean Moreno, Director, Art + Research Center; and Stephanie Seidel, Monica and Blake Grossman Curator, the exhibition will be on view at ICA Miami until March 15, 2026.
Joyce Pensato examines the evolution of recurring motifs and characters in the artist’s work over the course of five decades, from her early Batman drawings from 1976 and vividly coloured gestural abstraction rendered in oil from the 1980s, to her first enamel paintings in the early 1990s—gathering the most substantial group of works from this period to date—alongside her works from the early 2000s to 2019. Together, they trace the relationship of Pensato’s imagery to iconic cartoon and live-action figures from the 20th and 21st Century—ranging from Depression-era early animations like Felix the Cat, to early animations of the Disney canon, to the late-night television characters of South Park from the early aughts. These characters serve as a reflection of both the history of American culture and the transformations of technology over the past century.
Joyce Pensato is accompanied by a major exhibition catalogue, featuring new scholarly essays and photography. The catalogue contextualises and situates Pensato’s work in the historical narratives of postwar abstraction and its reverberations in the 1980s and 1990s and documents her influence on younger generations of artists and contemporary discourses.
The exhibition is on view from 2 December 2025 to 15 March 2026. Find out more via ICA Miami.
Image: Joyce Pensato, I Must Be Dreamin', 2007. Enamel on linen, 228.6 x 182.9 cm, 90 x 72 inches, Photo by Larry Lamay © The Joyce Pensato Foundation
