What Is Left Unspoken, Love

Is love intrinsic, or is it a habit? What is the difference between love and friendship? What is the relationship of love to truth, freedom, and justice? These are just some of the questions to be explored in What Is Left Unspoken, Love, a thirty-year survey of contemporary art featuring artworks that address the different ways the most important thing in life—love—is expressed.​

Organized during a time of social and political discord, when cynicism often seems to triumph over hope, this exhibition will examine love as a profound subject of critical commentary from time immemorial yet with a persistently elusive definition. As poet and painter Etel Adnan wrote, love is “not to be described, it is to be lived.”

What Is left Unspoken features nearly seventy works, including paintings, sculpture, photography, video and media art, by more than thirty-five international artists based in North America, Europe, and Asia. Artists include Ghada Amer, Rina Banerjee, Thomas Barger, Patty Chang, Susanna Coffey, James Drake, Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, Alanna Fields, Dara Friedman, Andrea Galvani, General Idea, Jeffrey Gibson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kahlil Robert Irving, Tomashi Jackson, María de los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez, Rashid Johnson, Gerald Lovell, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kerry James Marshall, Felicita Felli Maynard, Wangechi Mutu, Ebony G. Patterson, Paul Pfeiffer, Magnus Plessen, Gabriel Rico, Dario Robleto, RongRong&inri, Michelle Stuart, Vivian Suter, Jana Vander-Lee, Carrie Mae Weems, Akram Zaatari

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website