CAA News Today
CAA Presents a Fair Use Workshop in Richmond
posted by CAA — April 10, 2017
Peter Jaszi speaks to participants at a fair use workshop in Richmond, Virginia, March 24, 2017.
On Friday, March 24, the University of Richmond Museums, Virginia, hosted a CAA Fair Use Workshop, co-sponsored with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Statewide Program, and made possible with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Elizabeth Schlatter, CAA Vice President for the Annual Conference, and Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums, led the planning effort to bring over 40 artists, museum professionals, archivists, professors, librarians, and communications experts to the daylong workshop.
The program was led by Hunter O’Hanian, CAA’s Executive Director, and Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law at American University, and one of the two lead principal investigators on the project. After a round of introductions by attendees, Jaszi began the day with an introduction to the doctrine of fair use, followed by a presentation by O’Hanian about CAA’s four-year fair use initiative and the methodology employed to develop the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts. The workshop continued with a focus on fair use in art museums, including when it can be invoked in exhibition projects, publishing, and online activities. During a working lunch, Jaszi and O’Hanian led discussions on reliance on fair use in teaching, publishing, and making art, and concluded the day with a discussion about fair use in libraries and archives.
Catherine G. OBrion, the Librarian-Archivist at the Virginia State Law Library, wrote afterwards, “I have a much better understanding of the legal standing of fair use, its intent, and how I can defend relying on it to my in-house counsel and others….One of the most useful workshops I’ve attended.” The workshop was followed by a reception at the University Museums for all CAA members in the local area.
CAA executive director O’Hanian also met with two University of Richmond classes the day before, one a museum studies seminar and the other a class on contemporary art and theory. The undergraduates benefited from O’Hanian’s advice on curating exhibitions, organizing public programs, surviving and thriving as a visual artist, and applying for artists’ residency programs.
People in the News
posted by CAA — April 07, 2017
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2017
Academe
Ira Goldberg, executive director of the Art Students League in New York, has resigned from his post.
Cordula GreweCordula Grewe has accepted a position as associate professor with tenure in the Department of Art History at Indiana University Bloomington, where she will teach European art between 1700 and today.
Alex Kitnick has been given the title of Brant Foundation Fellow in Contemporary Arts at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Jonathan MorganJonathan Morgan has become an adjunct professor of art at Lone Star College in the Woodlands, Texas.
Sheila Rae Neal has been named adjunct instructor at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York.
Jennifer RisslerJennifer Rissler has been appointed dean and vice president of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute in California.
Museums and Galleries
Esther Bell, previously curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in California, has been named Robert and Martha Berman Lipp Senior Curator for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Makeda Best, formerly assistant professor in visual studies at the California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco, California, has been named Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Connie H. ChoiConnie H. Choi, formerly assistant curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, has been appointed associate curator of the permanent collection at the Studio Museum in Harlem, also in New York.
Joey Orr, formerly Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois, has been appointed Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator for Research for the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
James Merle Thomas, professor of global contemporary art at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been appointed executive director of Vox Populi, also in Philadelphia.
Organizations and Publications
Conny BogaardConny Bogaard has been appointed executive director of the Western Kansas Community Foundation in Garden City, Kansas.
Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator emeritus for the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, has been appointed director of the Helen Frankenthaler Catalogue Raisonné, a project organized by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York.
How to Submit a Sharp Proposal for CAA 2018
posted by CAA — April 07, 2017
We are enjoying spring break as much as you are, but we also know that CAA has upcoming deadlines for proposing a session or paper for the 106th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, February 21–24, 2018.
In this video, Hunter O’Hanian, executive director of CAA, and Tiffany Dugan, director of programs, discuss what makes a great Conference proposal. We think your submission should contain clear writing, and your idea should be thoughtful. We want you to be accurate and complete when using the submission portal also.
The Annual Conference Committee, comprised of regional representatives, members of the Board, and CAA members at large, are in search of proposals that reflect the breadth and variety of our discipline and field, and demonstrate the expertise and curiosity of our membership also. Especially welcome are proposals from artists and on subjects in art before 1800.
The deadlines to propose a session or paper for the 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles are April 17 and April 24, 2017. Full details are available on the submissions website.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members
posted by CAA — April 06, 2017
Check out details on recent shows organized by CAA members who are also curators.
Exhibitions Curated by CAA Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2017
Yoshio Ikezaki, The Earth Breathes–Mind Landscape no.12, 2008 (artwork © Yoshio Ikezaki)Jacki Apple. Yoshio Ikezaki: Elements 1991–2016. Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, March 16–May 28, 2017.
Elena Gritsenko, Landscape, 1976, oil on canvas. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union (photograph by Jack Abraham)Anna Rogulina. A Vibrant Field: Nature and Landscape in Soviet Nonconformist Art, 1970s–1980s. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, March 4–July 30, 2017.
Jane A. Sharp. “Thinking Pictures”: Moscow Conceptual Art in the Dodge Collection. Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, September 6–December 31, 2016.
Julie J. Thomson. Begin to See: The Photographers of Black Mountain College. Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Asheville, North Carolina, January 20–May 20, 2017.
Invitation card for Social Fabric / Moral FiberMichaelann Tostanoski and Leila Daw. Social Fabric / Moral Fiber. Gallery West, Suffolk County Community College, Selden, New York, February 14–March 30, 2017.
Edward Weston, Two Shells, 1927, gelatin-silver print, Norton Simon Museum, Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection, PH.1953.609bGloria Williams. Maven of Modernism: Galka Scheyer in California. Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, April 7–September 25, 2017.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — April 04, 2017
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2017
Flora Brooke Anthony. Foreigners in Ancient Egypt: Theban Tomb Paintings from the Early Eighteenth Dynasty (1550–1372 BC) (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Jacki Apple. Yoshio Ikezaki: Elements 1991–2016 (Pasadena, CA: Art Center College of Design, 2017).
Caroline Boyle-Turner. Paul Gauguin and the Marquesas: Paradise Found? (Pont-Aven, France: Éditions Vagamundo, 2016).
Shira Brisman. Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
John Chaich and Todd Oldham. Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community (New York: AMMO Books, 2017).
Christine Filippone. Science, Technology, and Utopias: Women Artists and Cold War America (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Leonard Folgarait. Painting 1909: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Henri Bergson, Comics, Albert Einstein, and Anarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Elisabeth A. Fraser. Mediterranean Encounters: Artists between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017).
Francesca Granata, Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017).
Ray Hernández-Durán. The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History: Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Namiko Kunimoto. The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Catha Paquette. At the Crossroads: Diego Rivera and His Patrons at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).
Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi, eds. Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity (New York: Prestel, 2016).
Sarahh E. M. Scher and Billie J. A. Follensbee, eds. Dressing the Part: Power Dress, Gender, and Representation in the Pre-Columbian Americas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017).
Jane A. Sharp, ed. Thinking Pictures: The Visual Field of Moscow Conceptualism (New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum, 2016).
Tanya Sheehan, ed. Grove Art Guide to Photography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Victoria Surliuga. Ezio Gribaudo: The Man in the Middle of Modernism (New York: Glitterati, 2016).
Andrés Mario Zervigón. Photography and Germany (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members
posted by CAA — April 03, 2017
See when and where CAA members are exhibiting their art, and view images of their work.
Solo Exhibitions by Artist Members is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
April 2017
Mid-Atlantic
Jaz Graf, Traces of Absence (violet), 2014, monotype, faux feather plumes, pencil, and thread on paper, 15 x 15 in. (artwork © Jaz Graf)Jaz Graf. Paul Robeson Galleries, Engelhard Hall, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, September 6, 2016–July 31, 2017, Articulations. Prints, handmade paper, and mixed-media drawings.
Midwest
Ken Gonzales-Day, The Lynching of “Spanish Charlie,” Santa Rosa, CA (Inverted), 2016, C-print (artwork © Ken Gonzales-Day)Ken Gonzales-Day. Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, Minnesota, January 19–April 16, 2017. Ken Gonzales-Day: Shadowlands.
Northeast
Pat Adams. Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, April 1–June 18, 2017. Gatherum of Quiddities: Paintings by Pat Adams. Painting.
Lucinda Bliss, Borders Over Pie: Passamaquoddy Bay, 2016, graphite pencil and watercolor on paper, 14 x 10 in. (artwork © Lucinda Bliss)Lucinda Bliss. Common Street Arts, Waterville, Maine, January 11–February 25, 2017. Tracking the Border: An Interrogation of Political, Natural, and Interior Borders.
Dear Volunteers (Tra Bouscaren and John Schlesinger). AC Institute, New York, March 7–31, 2017. Dear Volunteers. Neon, Styrofoam, painted photographs cast in resin, lab clamps, rebar, and interactive video.
2017 TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION GRANT WINNERS
posted by CAA — April 03, 2017
CAA is pleased to announce the 2017 recipients of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. This program, which provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, is made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. For this grant, “American art” is defined as art (circa 1500–1980) of what is now the geographic United States.
“This year’s publication grant recipients demonstrate once again how this program serves the mission of advancing and internationalizing scholarship on American art,” says Francesca Rose, Program Director for Publications at the Terra Foundation for American Art. “Whether by funding translations or supporting original research in languages other than English and publications by early-career U.S. scholars, the 2017 publication grants allow for the dissemination of important scholarship to the global Americanist community. In addition, providing for travel to the CAA Annual Conference facilitates participation by non-U.S. authors in U.S. professional networks.”
The six Terra Foundation grantees for 2017 are:
- Philippe Artières, Attica, USA, 1971, Le Point du Jour
- Emily Burns, Transnational Frontiers: The Visual Culture of the American West in the French Imagination, 1867–1914, University of Oklahoma Press
- Sophie Cras, The Artist as Economist: Art and Capitalism in the 1960s, Yale University Press
- Kenji Kajiya, Formless Modernism: Color Field Painting and 20th-Century American Culture, University of Tokyo Press
- Kate Lemay, Triumph of the Dead: The American War Cemeteries in France, University of Alabama Press
- ShiPu Wang, The Other American Moderns, Pennsylvania State University Press
Two non-US authors of top-ranked books have also been awarded travel funds and complimentary registration for CAA’s 2018 Annual Conference in Los Angeles; they also received one-year CAA memberships.
The two author awardees for 2017 are:
- Sophie Cras
- Kenji Kajiya
“The Terra Foundation award is unique in that it supports publishers in the United States and abroad and also provides funds for authors of award-winning books to attend the CAA Annual Conference,” says Betty Leigh Hutcheson, Director of Publications at CAA. “Scholars outside the United States who receive travel grants can expand their networks, gain exposure to new ideas, meet publishers at the Book and Trade Fair, and apply to present papers at the conference. The success of the Terra Foundation program is grounded in the high quality of manuscripts CAA receives each year and our ability to financially support these projects. CAA has played a vital role in this process for the past three years, which is particularly gratifying as we see awarded projects reach completion.”
About CAA
The College Art Association is the world’s largest professional association for artists, art historians, designers, arts professionals, and arts organizations. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of advocacy issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching.
About the Terra Foundation for American Art
Established in 1978, the Terra Foundation for American Art is dedicated to fostering the exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States. With financial resources of more than $350 million, an exceptional collection of American art from the colonial period to 1945, and an expansive grant program, it is one of the leading foundations focused on American art, supporting exhibitions, academic programs, and research worldwide.
We’ve Got Your Back, We Want You Back
posted by CAA — April 01, 2017
Dear Friends,
We want to get as many former members to rejoin in the month of April as we can. We’ve heard you, through surveys and our Annual Conference, through emails and phone calls. We know that the economy of higher education is changing. We know it can be hard to find a department position or a museum gig or publish your groundbreaking work. Rejoining the largest professional organization supporting art historians and visual artists is one step you can make to help you thrive in the field. Our impact as an organization and as a profession depends on our membership.
Rejoin during the month of April and we will take 25% off your CAA membership (offer excludes Life Membership level). That means you will be able to attend our next Annual Conference in Los Angeles in February 2018 for a reduced rate. You will receive our publications (Art Journal or The Art Bulletin) delivered to your home. You will have access to the online career center, with over 430 jobs and opportunities listed. You will get discounts on car rentals, health insurance, magazine subscriptions, and more.
But most importantly, you will be a member of the professional organization setting the lead on issues of fair hiring practices, academic freedoms, publishing standards, and connecting visual arts professionals across subjects, practice, and geography regions.
Offer valid from April 1-April 30, 2017 to individuals whose membership has lapsed in the past five years. Log in to your CAA account to view the discount code. Code will be visible after log in from April 1-April 30, 2017.
New in caa.reviews
posted by CAA — March 31, 2017
Stephanie S. Dickey reads Facts and Feelings: Retracing Emotions of Artists, 1600–1800, edited by Hannelore Magnus and Katlijne Van der Stighelen. The book’s goal “is not to gauge the expression of emotion in art, but instead to plumb the emotions of artists themselves.” Interestingly, “the visual record is mostly avoided in favor of documentary sources that find artists in emotionally charged situations.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Eric Palazzo discusses Jeffrey F. Hamburger’s Script as Image, “a deeply engaging book, or rather a lengthy essay, on the ‘double page’ in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.” The author starts “by exploring the possibility of considering writing as an image,” and “his approach focuses on a new exploration of the common nature of the written word and image” in visual culture. Read the full review at caa.reviews.
Arthur J. DiFuria reviews Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination by Stephanie Porras. The “well-written, beautifully produced book” brings “a supremely important aspect of Bruegel’s art” to light, offering “a carefully considered take on his notion of the Netherlandish past” and portraying him “as an erudite artist who formulated a Netherlandish antiquarian vernacular.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.
John P. Bowles examines the exhibition Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, curated by Pamela McClusky and Erika Dalya Massoquoi. The show and catalogue question “how African cultural traditions circulate and influence global contemporary art,” arguing that “the artists of ‘global Africa’ have begun to address this issue, changing how we understand African art.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.CWA Picks for April 2017
posted by CAA — March 30, 2017
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events 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 or touring.
Maria Sibylla Merian, Chinese Vase with Roses, Poppies and Carnations, ca. 1670–1680 (photograph © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Dietmar Katz)
Maria Sibylla Merian and the Tradition of Flower Illustration
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin
Matthäikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin, Germany
April 7–July 3, 2017
Städel Museum in Frankfurt
Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
October 11, 2017–January 14, 2018
Academic conference
University of Amsterdam
ARTIS Library, Plantage Middenlaan 45-45A, 1018 DC Amsterdam, Netherlands
June 7–9, 2017
In commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the death of the German-born illustrator and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin (April 7–July 2, 2017) and Städel Museum in Frankfurt (October 11–January 14, 2018) are sponsoring a joint show of approximately 150 of her works on paper and vellum. Known for her exquisite depictions of flowers and insects, Merian had an international reputation in her lifetime. Her illustrated texts include a volume of engravings of flora and fauna she produced while on a scientific expedition to the Dutch colony of Surinam in 1699. As a complement to this exhibition, the University of Amsterdam is sponsoring an academic conference titled “Changing the Nature of Art and Science: Intersections with Maria Sibylla Merian” (June 7–9, 2017), where her contributions to the history of printmaking, natural history, and botanical art will be honored.
Invitation for Kate Kretz’s #bullyculture
Kate Kretz: #bullyculture
39th Street Gallery and Corridor Exhibition Space
Gateway Arts Center, 3901 Rhode Island Ave, Brentwood, Maryland
March 11–April 15, 2017
#bullyculture represents the first phase of an ambitious in-progress series that Kate Kretz commenced in 2011 and will conclude later this year. In her quest to find the common denominator to all the crimes against women, children, “minorities,” animals, and the earth, she has produced a large corpus of works on paper, sculpture, paintings, textiles, and mixed media. Some of the themes she explores in this series include “trophy hunting, VIP culture and ‘the 1%’, corporate destruction of the earth, rape culture and sexual entitlement, the fetishization of guns and their use for intimidation.” The artist, who has received numerous awards and grants, including the Southeastern College Art Conference’s 2016 award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement and a position on the Fulbright Specialist Roster through 2021, will be giving a lecture on April 1.
Shagha Ariannia: Who Sings the Nation-State?
Vincent Price Art Museum
East Los Angeles College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, CA
March 18–June 10, 2017
A little over fifteen years ago, and one week after 9/11, Shagha Ariannia and her family arrived to Los Angeles as migrants from Iran. Ariannia has mined this particularly potent history of travel, place-finding, and identity-in-transit throughout her artistic career by, for example, annotating her family’s photographic archives in a series called What would America/Iran do without Iran/America? (2012). This solo exhibition focuses on a series of works Ariannia has been creating using national anthems from various countries (Iran and the United States included, among many others). In this way she takes seriously the titular question posed by Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler in their 2007 dialogue Who Sings the Nation-State? As Butler says in that text, in regard to hearing the US national anthem sung in Spanish in the streets of Los Angeles, “The monolingual requirement of the nation surely surfaces in the refusal to hear the anthem sung in Spanish, but it does not make the anthem any less sing-able in that or any other language” (60).
Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser
Blanton Museum of Art
200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Austin, TX
March 12 – June 11, 2017
A few years ago I recall seeing a dozen or so clickbait-y articles written about Nina Katchadourian’s Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style, a series in which the artist constructed toilet-paper and neck-pillow costumes during long-haul flights and photographed herself wearing them in the tiny, and poorly lit, spaces of onboard lavatories. This midcareer survey—the artist’s first touring museum exhibition—promises to flesh out Katchadourian’s wide-ranging work. The Flemish lavatory portraits, for example, are only one piece of a larger series of works using the airplane as studio space (Seat Assignment, 2010–ongoing). One of the works on display, and one of her most well-known, is the video Accent Elimination, wherein the artist hired a speech coach to teach her parents (both foreign born) to speak in a “standard” American accent, and, in turn, to teach her how to speak with her parents’ accent. Her collaborations with her family, other artists, international agencies, and even animals are potent reminders that the activity of art is almost never a solitary endeavor, and her interest in quotidian acts of creativity suggests that art can be found anywhere. One just has to know how to look.
May Stevens: Alice in the Garden
Ryan Lee Gallery
515 West 26th Street, New York, New York
February 23–April 8, 2017
May Stevens, a celebrated activist committed to the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements, used painting to combat social injustice and to revise women’s history throughout her seventy-year career. The exhibition Alice in the Garden comprises several large-scale paintings depicting Alice Dick Stevens, her elderly mother, during the final years of her life.
From 1983 and 1990, Stevens turned her attention to her mother and producing the five-panel painting Alice in the Garden (1988–89). “The mural-like images confront the viewer with the massive figure of Alice—fleshy, fragile, and vulnerable. In her hands, Alice manipulates flowers—dandelions Stevens had playfully thrown at her during an afternoon visit.”
In a conversation with the art historian Patricia Hills, Stevens explained the importance of Alice as a subject: “For me I think it means I want her [Alice] to be known, even for the individual person that she is, but it also means that I want people like that not to be forgotten. For me she’s not just a single person, because we all know this person. We all know her and we may become her. She’s a problem. As aging is a problem, as illness is a problem, as being a woman who does not fulfill herself is a problem.” (Patricia Hills, May Stevens [San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2005], 45.)
Today May Stevens, now 92, lives with Alzheimer’s disease in a memory-loss facility in New Mexico. She has received numerous awards including ten MacDowell Colony residencies, the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (1990), a Guggenheim fellowship in painting (1986), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in painting (1983), an Andy Warhol Foundation residency (2001), and CAA’s own Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement (2001).
Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St, London
January 18–April 16, 2017
Featuring over seventeen contemporary artists working across mediums, Terrains of the Body: Photography from the National Museum of Women in the Arts assembles an impressive collection from Washington, DC, for display across the water in London. “By turning their camera to women, including themselves, these artists embrace the female body as a vital medium for storytelling, expressing identity and reflecting individual and collective experience.”
Many works in the display extend the scope of 1970s feminist art, including performance and video. This display celebrates their legacy today. Moving between photography’s ability to document and tell stories, these works present women as creator and subject of their work. Several artists in the exhibition, including Nan Goldin and Daniela Rossell, photograph women in expansive series that appear documentary in nature. Other artists include Marina Abramović, Rineke Dijkstra, Anna Gaskell, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Candida Höfer, Icelandic Love Corporation, Mwangi Hutter, Kirsten Justesen, Justine Kurland, Nikki S. Lee, Hellen van Meene, Shirin Neshat, Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, Janaina Tschäpe, and Adriana Varejão.