Bonnie Lucas — Dear Martin at ILY2, New York

Location: ILY2 Gallery, New York

Date: Sept 14 – Nov 1, 2025

Project: Dear Martin — solo exhibition by Bonnie Lucas

Why it Matters: Revisits the early and ongoing work of a feminist artist who built an entire visual language out of domestic debris

For nearly fifty years, Bonnie Lucas has been piecing together an alternate history of the feminine. Her materials—doll heads, costume jewelry, broken hair clips, scraps of fabric—come from the same economy that defined and dismissed women’s labor. In Dear Martin, her new solo exhibition at ILY2 Gallery, those fragments reappear as quiet but sharp commentaries on intimacy, care, and control.

Lucas began working in downtown New York in the late 1970s, sharing air with the feminist art movement but staying resolutely outside its institutional frame. Her studio has always been a kind of excavation site: drawers of discarded objects turned into relics, altars, or private constellations. The works in Dear Martin draw a line between past and present, linking her early assemblages from Avenue B Gallery to pieces that feel both fragile and defiant.

The sculptures are small, sometimes hand-sized, yet their density pulls you in. A doll’s arm extends from a field of pink lace. Strings of plastic pearls trace a body that isn’t there. Each piece walks a line between sentiment and discomfort. Lucas doesn’t parody femininity; she distills it to its raw, sometimes uncanny parts.

Bonnie Lucas- AVE-B-1985

Across the show, tenderness is laced with critique. Her work refuses nostalgia for craft or childhood. Instead, it reads as an unending process of reassembly—of taking what culture leaves behind and making it speak again. The title Dear Martin gestures toward correspondence, perhaps with a lost friend or mentor, but the real dialogue is with time itself: what remains, what breaks down, what still matters.

More info: https://ily2online.com/

Cover: Bonnie Lucas and Martin Hason