05/29/2026
The Long Beach Museum of Art is pleased to present Positive Fragmentation: From the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, opening June 26, 2026, in connection with our annual summer kick-off party, AfterDark. Ticketing info coming soon.
For many artists, the act of creation begins with one of destruction as they dissect shape, color, perspective, text, idea, or stereotype. For some, the result is enough: pulling apart and fragmenting images and ideas exposes what lies beneath or heralds the inherent value of each part. Other artists assemble fragments to create a new whole defined by its different parts. This exhibition explores the impulses that drive these creative approaches in the work of contemporary artists.
Positive Fragmentation includes over 180 prints drawn from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, each a work by a contemporary artist who employs fragmentation in different ways. Feminist scholar and critic, Lucy Lippard, describes positive fragmentation, or the “collage aesthetic,” as particularly suited to historically marginalized artists (including women), as it “willfully takes apart what is or is supposed to be and rearranges it in ways that suggest what it could be.”
Major exhibition funding is provided by:
• Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation
• BCM Foundation
• Bess J. Hodges Foundation
• RVCA Artist Network Program
Organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts
Curated by Virginia Treanor, Senior Curator, National Museum of Women in the Arts; and Kathryn Wat, Deputy Director for Art, Programs, and Public Engagement, and Chief Curator, National Museum of Women in the Arts
Kara Walker, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated): Buzzard’s Roost Pass, 2005, offset lithography and screenprint, edition 21/35, published by LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY, Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer
