JOHS is pleased to present Sisters, Saints and Witches, a group exhibition exploring the archetypes women inherit: the mother, the martyr, the sister, the sibyl. Moving between the body and the emotional landscape, the exhibition brings together sculptural works that hold the weight of the figure and abstractions that trace the emotional and psychological imprints these roles leave behind.
Drawing inspiration from Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run With the Wolves, the exhibition considers the archetype of the Wild Woman, a figure of instinct, resilience, and renewal. Throughout history, women have been given many names, few of their own choosing. Passed down from mother to daughter, from sister to sister, these identities carry their own expectations, permissions, and prohibitions: saint, sinner, witch, lover, healer, martyr. Yet beneath these inherited roles lies a self that resists being defined by any single one.
In Estés's writing, the Wild Woman cannot be destroyed, only buried. She resurfaces through dreams, sudden longings, rage, creative impulses, grief, or an inexplicable sense of homesickness for something that cannot quite be named. Her return suggests that even after something has been lost or stripped away, what remains may still be enough to begin again.
For Estés, wildness is not synonymous with being uncontrolled, but with living in connection with one's instincts, boundaries, and natural rhythms. Its opposite is not civilization, but deprivation: a gradual estrangement from the self that may manifest as exhaustion, fragility, silence, or an inability to create. The loss of this instinctive nature does not necessarily announce itself through rebellion or rupture, but through the quiet accumulation of what has been suppressed or neglected.
Rather than treating the Wild Woman as a fixed ideal, Sisters, Saints and Witches approaches her as a shifting presence: instinctive, vulnerable, defiant, and capable of renewal. The participating artists explore the distance between identities assigned from the outside and those reclaimed through gesture, material, image, and memory. Their works suggest that transformation does not always arrive as a dramatic rupture; it may begin with tending to what has been neglected, recovering a voice, or recognizing strength within apparent fragility.
Amanda Atria (b. 1995)
Amanda Atria is a Chilean artist based in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art and a BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her work has been presented in New York, Santiago, and Buenos Aires, including at JOHS, Fragment Gallery, and Galería Metropolitana. She received Yale's Fannie B. Pardee Prize for Excellence in Sculpture and the Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship.
Johanna Bath (b. 1980)
Johanna Bath is a German painter based in Hamm. Working with figurative imagery, plants, and intimate details, she explores the passage of time, memory, and the fleeting nature of experience. Her softly blurred images and muted palettes evoke the atmosphere of recollection. Bath studied illustration and design in Hamburg and has exhibited internationally, including in London, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and New York.
Alina Bliumis (b. 1972)
Alina Bliumis is a Belarus-born artist based in New York. She earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1999 and studied at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy. Her internationally exhibited practice engages with culture, identity, migration, and social structures. Her work has appeared at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and MAC VAL, among other institutions.
Jo Dennis (b. 1973)
Jo Dennis is a London-based British artist working across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. Her practice explores the emotional possibilities of materials, often occupying a space between construction and collapse, architecture and ruin. She received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2022 and a BA from Goldsmiths in 2002. Recent exhibitions include presentations at Belenius, Saatchi Gallery, Carvalho, and JOHS.
Klodin Erb (b. 1963)
Klodin Erb is a Swiss artist based in Zurich whose painting practice draws on art history, popular culture, and digital imagery to explore contemporary social structures. Her expressive, often fantastical visual worlds extend into film, installation, and collage. She studied at Zurich University of the Arts and received the Prix Meret Oppenheim in 2022. Her work has been exhibited at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Istituto Svizzero, and Kunsthaus Pasquart.
Mie Olise Kjærgaard (b. 1974)
Mie Olise Kjærgaard is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen. Through large-scale paintings and sculptural environments, she depicts women as active protagonists who ride, sail, skate, and build, emphasizing freedom, humor, and agency. She holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins and a master's degree in architecture. Her work has been shown at Trapholt Museum of Art and Design, Foundry Seoul, and Journal Gallery, and is held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other collections.
Maja Malou Lyse (b. 1993)
Maja Malou Lyse is a Danish multidisciplinary artist working between Copenhagen and New York. Through video, performance, photography, installation, and interventions in mass media, she examines how images shape sexuality, desire, identity, and power. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. Her work has been exhibited at Overgaden, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Copenhagen Contemporary; she represents Denmark at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Cassandra Mayela (b. 1989)
Cassandra Mayela is a Venezuelan-born, New York-based multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, mixed media, installation, and participatory processes. Her practice explores memory, migration, belonging, labor, and healing, often treating personal belongings as living archives. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2025 and has presented solo exhibitions at Instituto Cervantes, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, Olympia, and JOHS.
Ruba Nadar (b. 1998)
Ruba Nadar is an artist based between London and New York whose practice spans painting and collage. Drawing from family archives, Egyptian cinema, sports imagery, and queer visual cultures, she explores tenderness, physicality, and memory through cropping, layering, stitching, and reassembly. Nadar received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024 and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 2021. Her work has been shown at Pipeline Gallery, OHSH Projects, and Guts Gallery.
Polina Osipova (b. 1998)
Polina Osipova is a UK-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with Indigenous Chuvash myths, craft traditions, and collective memory. Drawing on family archives and knowledge passed down through female ancestors, she works across textiles, sculpture, photography, wearable objects, and performance. Her works explore the connections between ancestral inheritance and contemporary life, with recent exhibitions in Berlin, New York, and Mexico City.
Melissa Ríos (b. 1986)
Melissa Ríos is a Costa Rican artist based in Mexico City who works primarily in painting and drawing. Moving between figuration and abstraction, she creates dreamlike compositions shaped by intuition, memory, and emotional experience. Her background in architecture and graphic design informs her layered pictorial spaces. Solo exhibitions include presentations at JOHS in New York and Cuarto 37 in Costa Rica; she has also exhibited internationally in Dubai, Madrid, and New York.
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler's work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions globally, with notable solo presentations including at the Tate Modern, London (2022); Museum of Recent Art (MARe), Bucharest, Romania (2022); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile (2019); The Jewish Museum, New York (2018); the Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle (2016); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2002); and Centre Pompidou, (2000).
A retrospective of her work toured five venues in Europe and the United States between 1998 and 2000 (Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; MACBA, Barcelona; ICA, Villeurbaine; Generali Foundation, Vienna; the New Museum, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York). Her exhibition on housing, homelessness, and the built environment, encompassing contributions by many individuals and groups, was initially held at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, in 1989, and has subsequently been mounted at many venues in the U.S. and Europe, including most recently at the MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome (2024).
The Martha Rosler Library, a selection of over 7,000 titles from Rosler's personal collection, has toured eight venues across Europe and the United States. Rosler has also published 17 books of photography, art, and writing, including on art and urbanism, in several languages. Her work, in photography, video, sculpture, and installation, is held in scores of public collections globally, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate Modern, London, UK; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Rosler is a recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Guggenheim Museum Lifetime Achievement Award, the College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award, the Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, the Spectrum International Prize in Photography, and a United States Artists Nimoy Fellowship, as well as four honorary doctorates and many other prizes and awards.
