Image: Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte
The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art in Charlotte is opening the latest edition of its annual summer series, Collection, Reframed, with a project centered on Jiha Moon. Running June 13 to November 9, 2026, the exhibition invites a contemporary artist to engage the museum’s permanent collection, and this iteration focuses on representations of women across time.
The Bechtler says Moon’s presentation spreads across the museum’s first-, second- and third-floor galleries, where her work is placed in dialogue with holdings by artists including Alberto Giacometti, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso and Walasse Ting, alongside contemporary artists such as Julie Curtiss, Gina Gilmour and Elizabeth Turk. The exhibition also includes works cited by the museum as part of Moon’s curatorial framework, including a portfolio from Walasse Ting’s 1¢ Life and pieces that explore shifts between visibility and concealment, agency and subjectivity, and presence and absence.
Collection, Reframed is designed as a conversation between the museum’s collection and a guest artist’s point of view, and Moon’s edition expands that premise through a sustained focus on female subjects, makers and images. According to the museum, Moon examines how women have been depicted by others and how they have shaped their own image, while also paying attention to figures that are partially obscured or hidden within compositions. That emphasis gives the exhibition a broader art-historical frame, linking modern and contemporary works through questions of looking, interpretation and representation.
The artist’s own work is part of the exhibition as well, extending the show’s themes through her distinctive visual language and wide range of cultural references and art historical traditions. In her note for the exhibition, Moon says she was born in South Korea and has lived in Atlanta, Georgia, for more than 20 years, describing that Southern identity as part of her practice. She also writes that the project offered an opportunity to bring regional and international artists into dialogue, with selections that challenge how “roots, cultures, spirituality, and political frameworks” are defined.
Moon further describes the exhibition floor by floor. On the Plaza Gallery level, she says the presentation brings together narrative and iconic imagery, strong figurative elements, and a mix of media and scale, including works by modern and contemporary artists as well as examples from her own practice. On the second floor, she focuses on Walasse Ting’s 1¢ Life and places those prints alongside work by Bridget Riley and Tom Wesselmann so viewers can consider “women as makers and as subjects.” On the third floor, she turns toward a quieter and more spiritual sense of female presence, pairing a textile by Hannele Ollakka with surreal works by Julie Curtiss and Giacometti.
The exhibition’s related program is an artist talk on Wednesday, July 8 at 6:30 p.m., featuring Jiha Moon in conversation with Bechtler curator Dr. Katia Zavistovski. The museum says the discussion will address the curatorial process, the themes of Collection, Reframed and the cultural influences behind Moon’s work, followed by a celebration with music and a cash bar.
The project matters because it reflects a growing museum model in which collection displays are not fixed but actively reinterpreted. By asking a contemporary artist to read across the Bechtler’s holdings through the subject of women, the museum is using its own collection as a site of comparison rather than a closed canon. For visitors, the result is not just a summer exhibition, but a reminder that collections can be re-seen through new relationships across periods, styles and identities.
