CAA News Today

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship.

Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism

Tatiana Parcero, Cartografia Interior #43 , 1996. Lambda print and acetate. 43 x 31 in. Scripps College. Photo credit: jdc Fine Art.

October 22, 2017–January 14, 2018
Denver Art Museum
100 W 14th Avenue Pkwy
Denver, CO

Her Paris: Women Artists in the Age of Impressionism features works created by women in Paris from 1850 to 1900, including well-known artists Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Rosa Bonheur, to lesser-known painters such as Anna Ancher and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

At a time of great cultural change, women were barred from attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and it was socially unacceptable for a woman to be unaccompanied in public spaces. The exhibition at the Denver Art Museum  traces “how, despite societal challenges women embraced their artistic aspirations and helped create an alternative system that included attending private academies, exhibiting independently, and forming their own organizations, such as the influential Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs.”

Her Paris is organized by the American Federation of Arts, curated by Laurence Madeline, independent curator and formerly chief curator of Fine Arts at the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, and curated locally by Angelica Daneo, curator of painting and sculpture at the DAM. Following its run at the DAM, it will travel to The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky (February 17–May 13, 2018), and to its final destination at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 6–September 3, 2018).

Sobey Art Award Exhibition
October 24–December 9, 2017
Art Museum at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto Art Center
15 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario

The winner and four finalists for the prestigious Sobey Art Award will be on exhibit at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto from October 9 through December 9, 2017. The 2017 finalists for the award, promoting Canadian contemporary art, are Ursula Johnson, Jacynthe Carrier, Bridget Moser, Divya Mehra, and Raymond Boisjoky. The shortlisted artists question and challenge preconceived notions of diversity and identity and performance.

Installation and performance artist Ursula Johnson, of Mi’kmaw First Nation ancestry, often deploys a collaborative process in her place-based performances. “At this time when Canadians are celebrating and  challenging the memory of nationhood, Johnson’s work embodies a considered, critical, yet generous lens through which multiple histories and communities may be considered,” juror Sarah Filmore writes.

Finalist Jacynthe Carrier uses photography and video to explore “the different relationships the body has with the environment and ways of conceptualizing and appropriating the land.” Bodies and objects are assembled as intervention in the landscape.

Bridget Moser, selected for the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists, hits “all the bewildering emotional registers of internet culture,” writes juror Sarah Robayo Sheridan. “Moser’s singular voice joins a sentinel species of millennial artists alerting audiences to the new paradoxes of commodity culture gone wild, and offers tragicomic remedy in excess of even the most bombastic late night infomercial.”

“Divya Mehra’s work is an astute example of how art can destabilize our collective and individual perceptions about race and gender,” Jenifer Paparo writes. Mehra explores diasporic identities, racialization, otherness and the construct of ‘diversity’ through a variety of mediums,  addressing the effects of colonization and institutional racism re-contextualizing references found in hip hop, literature and current affairs.

The fifth finalist, Indigenous artist of Haida descent, Raymond Boisjoly’s practice “concerns the deployment of images, objects and materials, in and as, Indigenous art, using a reflexive approach to foreground the discourses that frame and delimit the work produced by Indigenous artists.” Boisjoly works in various media, from photography to installation, murals and video.

Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Parcero
August 26, 2017–January 7, 2018
Scripps College
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery
251 E. Eleventh Street
Claremont, CA

Celebrating three Mexican woman photographers, Revolution and Ritual features work by Sarah Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide, and Tatiana Pacero. Through the work of the three women, the exhibit explores notions of Mexican identity and considers how photography has been transformed over the past century in Mexico and “responds to the artists’ interest in representing present and past, self and other.”

From documentary photography to more poetic photography, the women in the exhibition explore themes of war, indigenous culture, body and self. Castrejón’s images portray people under the intense pressure of war during the Mexican revolution, while Iturbide’s images reflect the daily life of Mexican Indigenous cultures, and Pacero places herself within the frame through self portraits that “incorporate spliced images of her body with cosmological maps and Aztec codices.

The exhibit is accompanied by a catalog with essays Latin American photography scholars John Mraz, Marta Dahó, and Esther Gabara. Revolution and Ritual is a part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, exploring Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.

Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making
October 20, 2017–March 4, 2018
Brooklyn Museum of Art
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY

Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party has been a touchstone for feminist thinking about representation, research, and the politics of identity in art history (and history, broadly conceived). Ten years ago the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened in the Brooklyn Museum; a triangular gallery, its centerpiece was, and remains, The Dinner Party. This has no doubt been a challenge for the Center’s curator, Catherine Morris—to know that any exhibition will alaways be read in dialogue with Chicago’s monumental work. Yet for an exhibition like this, the gallery’s organization is a boon. This exhibition plumbs Chicago’s process and the processes of her collaborators. Test plates, notebooks, preperatory drawings, and research documents that will be on display attest to the staggering amount of research and prototyping that went into creating The Dinner Party, a work that does its political work– visiblizing women’s contributions to art, science, myth, and all the rest.

Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making is part of A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum, a yearlong series of exhibitions celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell
September 16, 2017–February 10, 2018
Vincent Price Art Museum
1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
Los Angeles, CA

This exhibition provides the first opportunity to view a diverse sampling from photographer Laura Aguilar’s complex and rich oeuvre. Raised in the San Gabriel Valley, where her family traces its roots back generations, Aguilar was dogged in using her camera to render herself and her various communities visible. You see this in the touching portraits of the women who populated the Plush Pony, a working-class Chicana/Latina lesbian bar. Or in the series “Latina Lesbians” series, wherein Aguilar’s subjects have added their own handwritten words to their portraits. Throughout the show one can follow the various ways Aguilar deploys her own body in her photographs—as bounded to national and ethnic lines of identification, as the repository for the unruly affects of depression, as something solid like a boulder. In one self portrait Aguilar stand between two small table-top displays of toys and catholic ephemera. A Pee-Wee Herman doll shares space with the Virgen de Guadalupe. These heterogenous objects, bespeaking both spirituality and pop culture, are emblematic of just a couple of the many thematics that can be drawn out from this remarkable retrospective.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that is equally impressive, containing essays by: Mei Valenzuela, Christopher A. Velasco, Deborah Cullen, Amelia Jones, James Estrella, Tracy M. Zuniga, Stefanie Snider, Macarena Gómez-Barris, and Sybil Venegas, the curator of Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell and Aguilar’s former mentor.