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clyfford still | museum
Black construction paper with a red line drawn in pastel moving upwards
Clyfford Still, PP-734, 1975 (detail). Pastel on paper, 18 x 12 in. Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver / ARS, NY

Held Impermanence (Artists Select: Katherine Simóne Reynolds)

Jan 25–Sep 14, 2025

Katherine Simóne Reynolds’ guest-curated exhibition, Held Impermanence, draws deeply upon the collections and archives of the Clyfford Still Museum. In the six largest galleries, Reynolds illuminates multiple competing desires held in constant tension within the Museum. The collection testifies to Still’s ambitious attempt to keep his entire corpus intact. The commitment to the integrity of that body of work allows viewers to see not only the acclaimed masterpieces but also paintings made in painful transitions and others that bear the scars of time.

Artworks change over time; their materials carry the stain of what conservators describe as inherent vice. Viewers see paintings that need to rest and heal and bear marks that suggest, through their surfaces, condition, and textures, metaphors of viscera, bile, and wounds. Archivists have worked to organize Still’s manuscripts, diaries, photographs, and ephemera, collectively marking the passage of time and its effects. And here, too, we find the impulse on Still’s part to document, witness, and rebuke a fallen world, a world ruined by war, market forces, and the thin values of modernity.

Reynold’s exhibition asks viewers how to gaze upon healing over time, how to respond with their bodies to this corpus, how they might approach Still’s achievements from a perspective that contends with his and their own senses of mortality, and with it, a shared desire to hold impermanence.

Guest Curator Bio

Katherine Simóne Reynolds is an artist, scholar, and curator who investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness. Her art physicalizes emotions and experiences through portrait photography, video, choreography, and sculpture. Reynolds has exhibited and performed work at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and The Luminary in St. Louis and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Solo exhibitions include the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, and the Graham Foundation. She has lectured widely, including at the Contemporary Art Museum and The Saint Louis Art Museum. Reynolds is also a member of the Black Midwest Initiative at the University of Minnesota. Alongside her visual art practice, she has embarked on curatorial projects at The Luminary, SculptureCenter, and exhibitions for Counterpublic 2023, the Stanley Museum of Art, and the Clyfford Still Museum.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds
Katherine Simóne Reynolds self-portrait

Lead sponsorship provided by:

Henry Luce Foundation

Additional support provided by:

The Deborah Buck Foundation

Uovo Art Fashion Wine logo

 

Held Impermanence follows a chronological display of Still’s works in the Museum’s first three galleries.