A trio of exhibitions opening this month put the spotlight on contemporary women artists who weave folk traditions into global-minded art. In her first U.S. solo show, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (August 17 through January 26), the American-born artist Maya Hayuk turns the lobby wall into a graphic mural using psychedelic colors and patterns usually found in traditional Ukrainian crafts (Heavy Lights, 2012). At the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum in Georgia (August 17 through January 5), Syrian-born Diana Al-Hadid rebuilds ruins of the past— both real and fictional—into drawings and sculptures that offer new takes on how we view the remnants of civilization (her At the Vanishing Point, 2012). And at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, She Who Tells a Story (August 27 through January 12) gives us a rare look at work by 12 pioneering Iranian and Arab women photographers (Gohar Dashti’s Untitled #5, 2008, is above), each of whom infuses Middle Eastern identity politics with a decidedly Western, pop sensibility.
