Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is an immersion into the richly complex vision of an artist—whose practice spanned painting, quilting, drawing, writing, and collecting—deeply attuned to the body as a site of resistance. On view at The Philadelphia Art Museum or PhAM (formerly The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PMA) from February 8 to June 1, 2025, the exhibition marked the third and final stop of its travelling tour, which offered audiences the fullest breadth of Ramberg’s (1946–1995) work to date. Ramberg was a pivotal member of the Chicago art scene before her untimely death at the age of 49, yet her oeuvre has been largely unknown outside of the Midwest. Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is reparative in that it positions Ramberg as a leading feminist artist and thinker of her time even if she did not think of herself in those terms. Despite Ramberg’s singular focus on the white female figure, the exhibit also makes a compelling case for the continued, and extensive, relevance of her artistic practice, which ranges from paintings to photographs, drawings, quilts, and even intimate diary entries. As long as individuals are expected to contort their bodies and desires to fit within societal standards, Ramberg’s constrained, yet nevertheless sensual, aesthetic remains transgressive.

The exhibition begins with a puzzle. A glass vitrine located near the entrance displays two of Ramberg’s early works, both titled Cabbage Head and dated to 1968—the year Ramberg graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) with her BFA. The Cabbage Heads each feature a small painting of the back of a head, whose hair is manipulated by a hand with red manicured nails. Most visitors must crouch down to observe the Cabbage Heads, which are installed at the height of a boudoir table, and in doing so also face their own reflection in a mirror. To create the Cabbage Heads, Ramberg replaced the backs of vanity mirrors with painted Masonite board, a smooth, industrial surface she used almost exclusively as the ground for her paintings. The artist further transformed the mirrors by painting their structural support to evoke ersatz surfaces, such as woodgrain or marble with glare marks to suggest lighting effects. Painstakingly aware of the artwork’s status as an object, Ramberg would continue to simulate material surfaces as a strategy throughout her artist-made frames. Based on the placement and angle of the hand in each Cabbage Head, the manicured hands do not belong to the head they caress. Throughout Ramberg’s work, female hands touch other female bodies—whose faces are always withheld. To observe the Cabbage Heads is akin to trying to solve an ever-illusive, tantalizing riddle, which seems to ask: What is the relationship between depicted body parts? And, what is the viewer’s relationship to these highly stylized and fragmented bodies when the only faces we encounter are our own?

Ramberg’s paintings are striking in how they anticipate feminist critiques of visual culture that would only later be theorized. Before feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey published “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” in 1975, Ramberg’s paintings of the early 1970s staged contorted female figures in satin and lace lingerie as though in a cinematic freeze frame mid striptease. Ramberg’s cropped, faceless torsos bear traces of the voyeuristic pull Mulvey identified in cinema, yet the paintings deny the viewer the full satisfaction of mastery or fetishistic closure. While Mulvey’s trailblazing analysis would eventually be criticized for its centering of the heterosexual, white male gaze as the default viewer, the power dynamics in Ramberg’s artwork are much more ambiguous—especially when placed in dialogue with her diaries, which she sustained for over a decade, and which appear as reproduced excerpts throughout the exhibit and its accompanying catalog. While on a trip to Paris in 1971, for instance, Ramberg wrote that her drawings of cloth-bound hands “began with a rather elaborate idea about women-in-pain but loving it” (Ramberg, 1971). Ramberg’s diaries are remarkable in that she wrote in three voices that coexist on the same page: a reflection of her day, including, on occasion, intensely private desire; a rigorous account of her incremental artistic process; and a record of words or phrases uttered by her toddler son. She grappled with the intersectional, and often paradoxical, roles of mother, artist, and wife, as well as her sexual desires, which she understood as deviant.

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective was developed at the Art Institute of Chicago before the exhibit first traveled west to The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and then east to culminate at The PhAM. Working with a team of artists and installation designers, exhibition curators Thea Liberty Nichols and Mark Pascale designed the retrospective to unfold chronologically within a contained exhibit space, where visitors encountered Ramberg’s final paintings of loose brushwork only after observing the meticulously smooth surfaces and cropped bodies of her early work, as well as her rigorous exploration of the figure on the brink of disintegration and her turn to quilt making. The retrospective was further activated through robust programming, which drew connections between Ramberg’s furtive figures and the lived experiences of persons with disabilities and the contemporary field of disability studies (Riva Lehrer, Body Partings, 2024), along with speakers who found resonance between Ramberg’s erotic fantasies of women in bondage with today’s expanded vocabulary around desire as formulated by LGBTQI+ studies (Judith Russi Kirshner, Christina Ramberg’s Diary: 1969–1980, 2024). For most of the time that Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective was on view at the Art Institute, visitors could also encounter Ramberg’s work in Four Chicago Artists: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi, and Christina Ramberg, a drawing exhibit situating Ramberg as an active member of Chicago’s intergenerational community of artists. Bolstered by institution-wide support, curators Nichols and Pascale achieved something usually reserved for canonical white male artists—presenting Ramberg as a multivalent and generative artist and teacher, who was at once visionary and deeply embedded within her artistic ecosystem.

At The PhAM, the chronological and self-contained Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective was installed across six galleries (Galleries 150–155 in the Main Building), most of which open onto a main hallway. From the hallway, a decal of Ramberg’s drawings—exploring the shared morphology between women’s hairstyles and corsets—delineated the scope of the exhibit. Even as The PhAM aimed for continuity, visitors experienced the exhibition as porous. For instance, because Ramberg’s quilts were all designated to one gallery—a decision that reflects the chronological design of the retrospective, I overheard some visitors assume that the Ramberg retrospective concluded with the previous gallery of paintings. During my two visits to the exhibit at The PhAM, I did not encounter anyone who made it to the end of the retrospective and saw the reveal of Ramberg’s final, loosely painted works on canvas that resemble energetic vortices or interconnected satellites—paintings that inspired me to audibly gasp when I first saw them. It is understandable that a hosting museum cannot allocate as many resources to a traveling exhibit as the home institution, but more—and clearer—wayfinding would have offered a relatively low-cost and high-impact way to support the visitor experience and honor Ramberg’s artistic legacy.

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective will likely spark a plethora of new scholarship on the artist precisely because the exhibit traveled. The titular exhibition catalog (Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective, 2024) is a treasure trove of research into Ramberg’s varied artistic practice and firsthand accounts of her impact as a teacher and mentor. Ramberg’s work is an important bridge connecting figurative painting, abstraction, surrealism, and conceptual feminist and queer practice. If her work was largely unknown outside of Chicago before the retrospective, Ramberg is now a clear forerunner to such contemporary figurative painters as Julie Curtiss and Emily Mae Smith, who have both developed a personal vocabulary of fetishized objects that address themes of femininity, identity, and gender, and which are sometimes discussed and exhibited together under the umbrella of surrealism. Ramberg’s more conceptual inquiry into the power dynamics of fetishized bodies also resonates with such contemporary multidisciplinary artists as Tiona Nekkia McClodden, who uses the language of BDSM to explore the experience of consensual pain as self-care for Black persons, whose bodies are often severely restricted (McClodden speaking about The Brad Johnson Tape, X—on Subjugation, MoMA, 2017). Ramberg’s exploration of the frictions of embodiment—of roles and responsibilities chafing against each other and of having to contort one’s body and desire to navigate, and perhaps even to survive, within tightening societal standards—continues to resonate, finding new viewers and communities of affinity.