When Nina Yankowitz first broke out into the 60’s New York art scene, Draped Paintings, her series of painted, draped unstretched canvases, earned the artist critical praise and solo exhibits at the Kornblee Gallery. After one of the pieces, “Cotton Duck Thread Reading,” landed a spot in the inaugural Whitney Biannual, it was obvious she had found her ticket to success.
But more than six decades later, Yankowitz has instead pioneered a multidisciplinary career through experimental design and decennial reinvention.
“I am very interested everything, I mean that my palate is everything’s the world,” Yankowitz said. “Before, after, astral, below ground, above ground. For me, it’s always reaching out to the outliers.”
The Parrish Art Museum is displaying Nina Yankowitz: In the Out/Out the In, a retrospective exhibit that telescopes the multidisciplinary artist’s 60 year-long career, from Oct. 9, 2025, to Feb. 22, 2026.
The exhibit features the alumna’s myriads of mediums and artistic periods beginning with her esteemed Draped Paintings and spanning her entire career through ceramics, written works, experimentation with sound, 3D technology, digital games and more.
The exhibit was organized by senior curator of contemporary art Katherine Pill at The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and displayed there from June 21 to Sep. 21, 2025. The exhibit was a “course-correct” of Yankowitz’s career, curated to ensure the artist was honored for her work.
“It’s like Nina-land,” Yankowitz said. “I know that sounds narcissistic but it’s my journey that I’m taking people through and it’s not a consecutive thing.”
Corrine Erni, chief curator of art and education at the Parrish Art Museum, accepted the invitation to host In the Out/Out the In at the conclusion of St. Petersburg’s showing. Erni previously featured Yankowitz’s work in Parrish’s 2023 collective exhibition “Artists Choose Parrish.”
Erni curated The Parrish Art Museum’s iteration of the retrospective with collaboration from Yankowitz and site-specific architectural design in mind.
“It was very much a conversation with [Yankowitz], she’s a curator in her own right,” Erni said. “She’s an artist who likes to curate her work because there’s a lot of thought processes attached to the work when she creates it.”
Yankowitz’s multidisciplinary approach lends Nina Yankowitz: In the Out/Out the In as an interactive and multifarious exhibit. In 1980s, Yankowitz produced poetry, ceramics and sculpture — a pivot from the Draped Paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Early in the 1980’s, she published her second artist book and opera, “Scenario Sounds,” which used different voices woven together to sound like instruments.
“I wouldn’t choose a discipline,” Yankowitz said about her time at the School of Visual Arts. “I would say, ‘I want them all. I want to take them all.’ And I got them to give me studio in the basement.”
The artist’s recent work in the exhibit infuses interactive technology with artistic vision. Yankowitz’s “Criss~Crossing The Divine” combines mannequins, digital games and a 3D glass cathedral to examine religious intolerance.
With roots in the ‘60s counterculture movement, Yankowitz has maintained a strong political element throughout her interchanging mediums.
“I was always interested in using the technology of the day to expose the politics of the day and the social issues and concerns of the way society and cultures are structured,” Yankowitz said. “There were always exclusionary things going on so I felt I wanted to address that and make ‘having people’ be part of the piece. It’s their perception that’s important.”
Jennifer Samet, senior director of the Eric Firestone Gallery, saw audience interaction as the common thread in Yankowitz’s multimedia work. Samet first met and worked with Yankowitz in 2022 when displaying her draped works from the 1960s-70s.
Even Draped Paintings changed with their environment, Samet realized, and responded to the viewer.
“She’s a very caring and generous person in personal interactions, but I think it’s also an important aspect of her art,” Samet said. “It’s very much about community, interaction and different viewpoints.”
Yankowitz is relishing in her retrospective being exhibited at two museums and has no intentions of slowing down.
“When I stop working or creating, I’m dead. It’s over. I can’t not. It’s just part of who I am,” Yankowitz said. “It doesn’t mean object making, it could be in the form of writing ideas down, or the visions that I’m having or how I see things, drawings, whatever. I just can’t imagine ever stopping.”