Selected Press

Artforum

Critics’ Pick
Review by Andrea Gyorody of the solo exhibition Away in the Catskills, 2025

Futernick’s prints perfectly capture the vernacular and milieu of middle-class New York Jews who once vacationed at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, a place whose heyday is now long in the rearview mirror…

Futernick successfully brings these women into the present and makes them feel both real and three-dimensional, their hopes and dreams as tangible as their evolving tastes in fashion and style. What lingers, though, is how impossibly far away they remain, inaccessible through the haze of belatedness and longing—a side effect, at least in part, of a family history of assimilation coincident with the Catskills’ decline…

Hyperallergic

Review by Renée Reizman of the solo exhibition Away in the Catskills, 2025

Futernick employs a technique theorist Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” which aims to help marginalized people reclaim their narrative from the colonial voices that largely wrote history, often mischaracterizing, overlooking, or stereotyping disempowered subjects. In Futernick’s dialogue, she gets to shape a more authentic representation of Jewish culture, and play a role in her family’s depiction in the future.…

Away in the Catskills is highly personal, but also universal for its demographic. As younger generations of Jewish people, like me, choose a more secular path, enclaves for Jewish Americans disappear. Futernick’s archives and fictions are an invaluable script for preserving a fading culture.

Musée Magazine

Review of the solo exhibition Away in the Catskills, 2025

Futernick explores themes of generational tension and how this haven of Jewish identity holds a complicated history, especially for women….

She effectively builds out the world of Jewish vacationers, bringing the men and women in frame to life…

Each image bursts with life, made more vibrant by Futernick’s addition of text… These women do not remain frozen in time, but morph into characters with the help of Futernick’s humorous dialogue.

Wallpaper*

Los Angeles art exhibitions: the best shows to see in May 2025 featuring Marisa J. Futernick — Away in the Catskills at the Skirball Cultural Center

This personal and poignant exploration of inclusion and loss, sifts through the artist Marisa J. Futernick’s inherited and imagined memories of midcentury family vacations at Jewish resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains, known as the ‘Borscht Belt.’ Through multimedia works that incorporate photography, text, and video, many created specifically for this exhibition (her first solo presentation at a U.S. museum), and on view for the first time, the artist juxtaposes her mother’s and grandmother’s strong feelings of the Jewish community with her own search for a deeper sense of belonging - sparking conversation about memory, assimilation, and loss.

Double Scoop

Review of the exhibition Modern Desert Markings, 2023

In Modern Desert Markings, 10 artists explore the history of contemporary landscape marking in Southern Nevada through the lens of land art.…The exhibition is masterful in its multi-lensed approach to deconstructing the functions of art within the landscape.

Marisa J. Futernick builds tone through temporality in the form of a slide show highlighting the shifting locations and experiences through a narrated slideshow, a catalog of region and emotion.

Southwest Contemporary

Review of the exhibition Modern Desert Markings, 2023

Marisa J. Futernick’s Mirage (2023) explores the region’s complicated sociopolitical histories when it comes to the land. Futernick’s video, poetically narrated and told through the artist’s rapturous still images, exposes the desecration, commodification, and governmental experimentation (atomic testing, mining) of the desert. “People can disappear out here,” says Futernick in the twenty-four-minute-plus piece. “Things disappear, too. Stories. Histories. Species. Money. Time. Rights.”

Los Angeles Times

Coverage of the exhibition Almost Presidential, 2020

Futernick stages photos of herself wearing a paper facemask to assume the identities of multiple presidential candidates — from Barry Goldwater to Hillary Clinton — in the “Concession” installation. Nearly all of the candidates are male. Each photo has corresponding green text panels where she weaves together fictional lines and direct quotes from their concession speeches….

LA Weekly

Coverage of the exhibition Almost Presidential, 2020

A film connected to Orange Coast College’s current online exhibition, Almost Presidential looks at vice presidents and failed presidential candidates, investigating names forgotten to history or reduced to one-liners and supporting roles. A 50-minute feature film oriented around a Zoom presentation, the piece presents new work by six artists who examine the American political landscape from an unfamiliar angle….

taz newspaper, Germany

"There is a lot at stake": an in-depth interview with the artist, considering art and activism, Presidential Libraries, Trump's legacy, and the current US political moment.

From the Saturday, January 17, 2021 edition (in German)

ART PAPERS Magazine

A 9-page text and photo extract from the artist's book 13 Presidents, published in ART PAPERS Magazine, November/December 2015 issue:

An artist’s research took her to all 13 Presidential Libraries in the United States; notes from her stopover at the Carter Center weave archival research into intimate historical fiction....

Aesthetica Magazine

An interview with the artist, ahead of the Multiplied Art Fair, Christie's, London:

Your art explores the past and its repercussions in the present day. Which historical period has influenced your work the most?

MF: My interests are very much in the post-war period of my parents’ generation, so mainly the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—the core years of the American Dream. I see 1980 as a real turning point in the story of that dream. It was the year that Ronald Reagan was elected, and the start of the erosion of the American middle class, and the widening of the gap between rich and poor. It also happens to be the year that I was born....

OUTPOST Open Film

A text by Adam Pugh about the short film Real Estate, exhibited as part of a program co-curated by Pugh and Jesse Ash:

On the surface, Marisa J. Futernick gives an account of an exploration of a specific place – Hollywood – in Real Estate, yet as the film’s title suggests, it mines more thoroughly ideas about proximity, about zones of access and zones of prohibition, around value and exchange, about capital....