Selected Press
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)
Detail of Grits, from ART PAPERS Nov/Dec 2015
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....
Marisa J. Futernick leading an artist's walk as part of OUTPOST Open Film 2013
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....