January 31, 2025 – September 14, 2025
Long Island Girl: The Superrealism of Carole Feuerman
Revisiting the Fragmented Bodies That Preceded Her Iconic Swimmers
Museum of Sex, New York, NY
Long Island Girl: The Superrealism of Carole Feuerman returned to a formative and rarely seen chapter of the artist’s career. Presented at New York’s Museum of Sex, the exhibition focused on sculptural works begun in 1976, when Feuerman was experimenting with fragments of the human body before developing the full-figure swimmers for which she would later become internationally recognized.
Nearly five decades after these early works first challenged expectations around figurative sculpture, their presentation in a museum offered an opportunity to reconsider them not simply as provocative objects, but as the beginnings of a visual language concerned with sexuality, identity, bodily presence and interior experience.
Before the Swimmers
Long before water droplets, bathing caps and meditative swimmers became signatures of Feuerman’s work, the body appeared in her sculpture through fragments. Cast from life, these partial figures isolated gestures, surfaces and areas of anatomy, making the familiar body feel simultaneously immediate and unfamiliar.
The fragment was not simply a technical shortcut toward realism. Removing the completeness of the figure shifted attention toward questions of looking, desire and representation. The works emerged at a moment when Pop art, advertising and changing attitudes toward sexuality were reshaping visual culture, while women artists were increasingly challenging conventions surrounding the representation of their own bodies.
Seen from the perspective of Feuerman’s later career, these sculptures reveal important continuities. Her concern with convincing physical presence was already evident, but so was an interest in psychological suggestion: what the body might communicate beyond resemblance alone.
From Censorship to Reassessment
Feuerman’s early investigation encountered resistance almost immediately. An exhibition in Fort Worth in 1978 was censored by its organizers, bringing this particular phase of her work to an abrupt end. She continued to develop figurative sculpture, but moved progressively toward complete bodies and the highly refined Superrealism that would define the following decades.
The New York presentation changed the historical context in which the early fragments could be viewed. What had once been considered too provocative to exhibit could now be examined within a museum devoted explicitly to the cultural history of sexuality and representation.
That distance of nearly fifty years gives Long Island Girl particular significance. Rather than treating censorship as the final meaning of the works, the exhibition allowed their formal experimentation, humor, sensuality and psychological ambiguity to re-enter the story of Feuerman’s development as an artist.
The exhibition’s curatorial team was led by Ariel Plotek, Chief Curator of the Museum of Sex, with Amanda Assaf and Arasay Vazquez.
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