CAA News Today

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following symposium, conference sessions, and exhibitions should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view.

January 2011

Women and the Word: Muslim Women Artists Explore Spirit, Form, and Text
Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California
1433 Madison Street, Oakland CA 94612
January 3–March 30, 2011

The art gallery of the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California is the first San Francisco Bay Area space to specialize in Muslim artists and Islamic art. From January to March 2011, the gallery will mount three one-woman shows of work by local artists who explore the Islamic tradition of calligraphy and abstract forms. The artists’s names and dates of presentations are: Rubina Kaz, January 3–February 2; Rabea Chaudhry, February 4–March 2; and Salma Arastu, March 4–30.

!Women Art Revolution
New Frontier at the Sundance Film Festival
Historic Miners Hospital, 1354 Park Avenue, Park City, UT 84060; and Salt Lake Art Center, 20 South West Temple, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
January 20–30, 2011

!Women Art Revolution is a documentary film exploring the feminist art movement in the United States from 1968 to the present. The filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson includes interviews with artists, innovators, art historians, and critics taken over a forty-year period, asking why so many female artists are little known and why museums fill their walls with the works of men. Accompanying the film is RAW/WAR, an interactive, community-curated video collection that allows users to access archival footage about the achievements and practices of women artists and to share their own stories through text, images, video clips, and links.

Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop
Grollier Club
47 East 60th Street, New York, NY 10022
December 8, 2010–February 5, 2011

Curated by Kathleen Walkup, Hand, Voice & Vision: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop features forty books by thirty-six artists created over a thirty-year period. The four artists who founded the workshop—Ann Kalmbach, Tatana Kellner, Anita Wetzel, and Barbara Leoff Burge—wanted to operate and maintain a workspace that would encourage the visions of individual women artists, provide professional opportunities for them, and promote programs designed to stimulate public involvement with and support for the visual arts.

The Grollier Club also presents two tandem events. On Tuesday, January 25, three of the exhibition’s artists (Clarissa Sligh, Susan Mills, and Emily Speed) will talk about their work from 2:00 to 4:00 PM. Jae Jennifer Rossman, assistant director for special collections at Yale University, will moderate the panel. On the following day, Walkup will speak on “Women Making Art: Artists’ Books from Women’s Studio Workshop” from 2:00 to 3:00 PM.

Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women
Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street, San Francisco CA 94105
October 1, 2010–January 30, 2011

The history of women in comics is well documented, and the Jewish contribution to the art form is widely acknowledged. Curated by Michael Kaminer and Sarah Lightman, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women is the first museum exhibition to combine both groups in a single exhibition. Many of the original artworks on display have never before been shown in public. Among the eighteen American, European, and Israeli artists are Sharon Rudahl of Wimmen’s Comix and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin of Twisted Sisters—all pioneers from the 1970s and 1980s—alongside younger artists. The exhibition catalogue was designed and published as an eight-page newspaper broadsheet.