Throughout a career spanning six decades, Nina Yankowitz (American, b. 1946) has continuously pushed against traditional boundaries, forging a practice that defies singular definition. From loosening canvas from the stretcher and allowing it to drape and fold, to creating immersive multimedia environments that spotlight underrecognized histories, Yankowitz has harnessed an experimental approach to material and discipline to engage themes of feminism, environmentalism, and social justice. Nina Yankowitz: In the Out/Out the In, the artist’s first retrospective, presents the full breadth of her wide-ranging and innovative work and brings long-overdue recognition to her significant contributions to the art world.

Spanning six decades of work, Nina Yankowitz opened “In the Out/Out the In,” her first retrospective, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on October 11. The artist, who continues to push the boundaries between painting, sculpture, video, installation and new media, is known for her interdisciplinary practice approach to creating work.

One question kept surfacing: where is the art itself in relation to her objects? In the work of Nina Yankowitz, this varies hugely. Is it in the physical fabric of her objects? In the images that emerge from woven or painted surfaces? Or does it dwell somewhere more elusive and further afield, in the mental space where I, as a viewer, complete her open-ended sentences? Moving through Yankowitz’s career retrospective, In the Out/Out the In, at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg this question would not settle.

In the Out/Out the In, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, is a career retrospective spanning six decades of work by Nina Yankowitz. She is often characterized as a multi-media artist: Yankowitz is a painter, she is a ceramicist, she is a sculptor; she works in fiber, in video, in installation; she composes soundscapes and operas. She has not just worked in a variety of media, she has innovated in each and brought media together in unexpected and forward-thinking ways.

Throughout a career spanning six decades, Nina Yankowitz (American, b. 1946) has created a multidisciplinary practice that defies singular definition. Her work pushes against traditional boundaries: her paintings have resisted not just frames, but seemingly gravity; her abstract compositions have gone beyond the canvas to embrace the aural. Most recently, Yankowitz has deepened her interest in technology and new media to create immersive environments that spotlight women-centered histories that have gone unknown for far too long.

Nina Yankowitz | In the Out/Out the In will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg from June 21 through September 21, 2025. The exhibition will then travel to The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, where it will be on view from October 5, 2025 – February 22, 2026. 

Nina Yankowitz takes over an entire gallery to literally offer alternate perspectives for experiencing art: Reclining lounge chairs invite viewers to look up at works by Tara Donovan, Rashid Johnson, Louisa Chase, Mary Heilmann, and Vija Celmins; a 7-foot platform allows a view from above of a visual sound score woven into a rug. Seated in a heavy chair with tiles, viewers confront Chuck Close‘s self-portrait, while small works hang at tilted angles in the distance. Yankowitz chose works relevant to life in America today, including Jackie Black’s Last Meal (Series), 2001–2003, 24 photographs of meals requested by death-row inmates, paired with Yankowitz’ uncanny sculptural paintings of body parts protruding from the wall to imagine “what’s on the other side.”

Described by Monica Ramirez-Montagut as a "homecoming" for artists who have worked with the Parrish Art Museum over the years, the museum's 125th anniversary celebration has officially begun, with the first iteration of its "Artists Choose Parrish" series of exhibitions now on its walls.

In 1972, the year that art historian Cindy Nemser cofounded the Feminist Art Journal, she fired off a letter to the New York Times, taking critic James Mellow to task for labeling a female artist’s exhibition a “one-man show.” “Evidently,” she wrote, “Mellow still has not caught on to the fact that women are not ashamed of their sex and resent being mistaken for men.” After protesting the reviewer’s chauvinistic language—the work was “seductive,” “feminine,” even “en déshabillé”—Nemser closed with a scorcher: “Sexist critics take note. When you start seeing scantily clad females in every abstract painting, they may start calling you ‘a dirty old man.’”

The artist in question was Nina Yankowitz, and the show was her second solo at Kornblee Gallery in New York. This past autumn, some of the same paintings were back on public view in “Can Women Have One-Man Shows?” at Eric Firestone’s two-floor space on Great Jones Street. By alluding to Nemser’s letter so directly, the exhibition not only positioned Yankowitz as a significant figure in feminist art, but also raised the issue of her early work’s reception—or lack thereof.

Toward the end of the 1960s and into the early ’70s, Nina Yankowitz was engaged with core questions about the nature of painting. Then an undergraduate student at New York’s School of Visual Arts—at a time when two- and three-dimensional objects inhabited distinctly separate realms—she voiced a seditious desire to upend the binary: “I want to do both,” she told the head of SVA, according to her 2018 oral history interview for the Archives of American Art. In 1969, at age twenty-three, she had her first full-scale solo show at Manhattan’s Kornblee Gallery (during a period when gallery representation for women was exceedingly rare), where she showed her series of “Draped Paintings,” 1967–72, ten of which were on view in her exhibition here. Freed from the stretcher and large in scale (two of them are more than ten feet high), the reconfigured works were imposing but not overpowering. Using sailboat canvas as her ground, she engaged both surface and space with a playful spirit of experimentation. She applied spray paint with varying degrees of saturation to make colorful abstractions; she then attached the works to the wall with staples, arranging them to accentuate their voluminous folds. In their most elegant iterations, such as the sunrise-hued Goldie Lox, 1968, which modulates from a sparingly pigmented left edge to a warmly saturated right, they married subtleties of color and form. Two pieces from Yankowitz’s series of “Pleated Paintings,” 1970–72, also on view here, showed yet another way in which she pushed her experiments with three-dimensional form, adopting highly textured commercial pleating as an additional compositional tool. Pleated Diptych, 1972, revealed the complex compositions made possible by the combination of the folded substrate and spray, although its overall impact seemed more constrained than in the draped paintings.