In 2015, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University organized The Brood, Lisa Yuskavage's first solo show at an American museum since a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia fifteen years prior. Elegantly curated by Christopher Bedford, the Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose, The Brood was not a comprehensive survey but instead a sampling of works dating from 1991 to 2015. Though a chronological, complete account of the artist's oeuvre will have to occur down the road, the occasion afforded the opportunity to see twenty-five of her paintings in the (tumescent, voluptuous) flesh and allowed new insights into her work. What emerged was a painter consistently engaged with the art of earlier epochs, an engagement that Yuskavage has used throughout her career to push herself in directions that are rarely predictable or schematic.
The exhibition borrows its title from David Cronenberg's 1979 cult horror film The Brood, in which an isolated mother undergoing experimental psychotherapy unleashes mutant children upon the world. Yuskavage's Brood is her paintings, replete with hyper-stylized figures, many with engorged bellies, breasts, and butts, set against brightly hued monochromes or dystopian landscapes. The show opened with her Bad Babies, four paintings from 1991 of single figures set against intensely keyed monochromatic backgrounds. These works, along with her Tintoretto-inspired Bad Habits maquettes, are her prime objects. She uses these original figures as a basis for all subsequent works, like a Renaissance artist working out individual saints in preparatory studies before placing them into more elaborate istorie. These Bad Babies eventually grew up and learned to play with others.