PAST EXHIBITION
The Family of the Artist
Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective
What rescues us when everything around us is on the verge of falling apart? What sustains us? What allows our species to endure? Among the myriad answers that art can offer, we find a guiding principle in the landmark exhibition that Edward Steichen curated seventy years ago (in 1955) with photographs from sixty-eight countries: The Family of Man. In the opening lines of Carl Sandburg’s unforgettable prologue to this celebration of “the stories we all share,” dedicated “to the dignity of man”, he wrote:
“The first cry of a newborn baby in Chicago or Zamboanga, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and the same intensity; each one says, ‘I am! I have arrived! I belong! I am a member of the Family!”
Revisiting that foundational sense of belonging, Aluna Curatorial Collective invited twenty-three artists to transform the first floor of the Tower Hotel with works inspired by their own families. Beyond the iconic history of familial bonds in artistic creation—from Dürer’s Praying Hands to Picasso’s Paul as Harlequin, or Anguissola’s The Chess Game and Carrie Mae Weems’s Family Pictures and Stories—this curation reaffirms the inseparable relationship between art, life, and the care that family provides within our multicultural city.
The Artist’s Family openly embraces deeply personal narratives, weaving together works across diverse media with true stories that cement our membership in the human family—a genealogy where hybrid cultures converge. The exhibition also resonates with the spirit of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, which reframed everyday acts of care (both in the household and within institutions) as vital artistic practice. In a world captivated by the new and the novel, Ukeles championed “the care of what already exists,” beginning with the family itself and extending to the invisible labor that sustains our shared lives.
Here, participating artists evoke countless acts of care. Their works nurture memory, presence, and even collective dreams, celebrating art’s power to uphold the familial ties that sustain us through different moments.
