CAA News Today

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.

March 2017

From the Collection: Sister(s) In the Struggle: Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver
Ryerson Image Centre
33 Gould Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Photographs of Angela Davis on view: January 18–March 5, 2017
Photographs of Kathleen Cleaver on view: March 7–April 9, 2017

Curated by Julie Crooks, Sister(s) In the Struggle: Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver features photographs of two leading female figures of the Black Panther Party taken from the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre. “They were photographed excessively,” Crooks said in an interview with Flare, “and their images were ubiquitous. They were in newspapers, they were in journals, they were on posters and their representations, or likenesses, were all over the place and that created this kind of cult presence…. At times the photographs could be detrimental to one’s image, especially someone like Angela Davis, but I think they also fed into this kind of iconic status.”

In choosing to pull photographs from the Black Star Collection from the civil rights area, Crooks explained that she wanted to humanize the representation of Davis and Cleaver, selecting images that offered a previously unexplored way of looking at them. The exhibition creates comparisons to many other women behind the scenes—those who are not remembered. “I wanted to highlight these photographs because the Black Power statement was, ‘black is beautiful’ and that was kind of a relentless message: that we are beautiful, despite hundreds of years of representation that told us otherwise, Crooks told Flare.

This exhibition is part of a collaboration between the Ryerson Image Centre and Black Artists’ Networks Dialogue, called Power to the People: Photography and Video of Repression and Black Protest, which will run until April 9.

Amy Jorgensen: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Elizabeth Houston Gallery
190 Orchard Street, New York, NY
February 8–March 12, 2017

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue by Amy Jorgensen is a series of delicate handkerchiefs emblazoned with historic images of suffragettes. In fact, displayed on each piece of linen is the surveillance images of eighteen women taken from the 1913 Criminal Records Office of Scotland Yard.

“Recognizing in this episode a peculiar confluence of gazes, Jorgensen re-contextualizes and re-situates these images into the wider question of how women’s identities are constructed, and how they are obstructed…. The gift of the handkerchief is a matrimonial tradition passed from mother to daughter, woman to woman. This work investigates the search for, or the making of, identity that draws upon the plurality and fraction of the self, and the span of influence that is made from generation to generation.”

These discrete portraits of women suffragettes were taken and cataloged by Scotland Yard after a series of acts of civil disobedience, including arson, window breaking, and other public disturbances, which in turn created a national scandal. Jorgensen, who transferred the photographs to the handkerchief using cyanotype, an early-nineteenth-century photographic process pioneered by a woman, first discovered the images while researching Edna Berg, her great aunt and an impassioned suffragette from New York.

“The juxtaposition of these two histories—that of the matrimonial ceremony and that of the women of the suffragette movement—provides a jarring collision point for the examination of patriarchal structures both in history and contemporary culture.”

Jennifer Brea: Unrest
Film
SXSW, Austin, Texas
March 10–19, 2017

After making its debut at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Unrest by the director Jennifer Brea travels to SXSW in Austin, Texas, this March. The film focuses on the life of Brea, who was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, commonly referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome. Brea, a PhD student at Harvard University, found that she could not sign a check at a restaurant, becoming progressively worse in the months before her wedding. When doctors told her it was “all in her head,” Brea turned her camera on herself, filming from the confines of her bed.

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) is a systemic neuroimmune condition characterized by post-exertional malaise—a severe worsening of symptoms after even minimal exertion. The root causes and physical effects are not fully understood, especially in women. As Brea described in a TED Talk, her neurologist diagnosed her with conversion disorder and said her physical symptoms were the result of some distance emotional trauma. “It is a perfect custom prison,” Brea observed. “How can a disease this devastating be forgotten by medicine?”

“As I got sick, I found myself as part of cohort of women in their late 20s whose bodies were falling apart,” Brea explained, “and how hard it was to be taken seriously.” Her film explores her own diagnosis but also seeks to address the millions of others with the same condition.

As SXSW nears, screening days and times for Unrest will be posted on the schedule page. The full TED Talk with Brea can be found online.

The Art of Suor Plautilla Nelli
Uffizi Gallery
Piazzale degli Uffizi, 6, Florence, Italy
March 8–April 30, 2017

In the first of an open-ended, annual series of exhibitions dedicated to women artists—what the Italian press is calling “pink exhibitions”—the Uffizi Gallery will showcase the work of Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523–1587), an artist nun who was Florence’s first known female Renaissance artist. Works culled from her Domenican convent, as well as from churches and museums across central Italy, will go on display on March 8 to coincide with International Women’s Day; they will remain on view until April 30. The Florence-based organization Advancing Women Artists Foundation, which has been instrumental in facilitating the restoration of Nelli’s works, published the exhibition catalogue. Eike Schmidt, the Uffizi’s current director, was motivated to pursue this initiative after a conversation with the Guerrilla Girls.

Leila Alaoui: No Pasara
Musée des Beaux-Arts
1380, rue Sherbrooke O, Montreal, Canada
Through April 30, 2017

On January 18, 2016, a young French-Moroccan photographer named Leila Alaoui was killed in an attack in Burkina Faso. Alaoui, who had been in the West African nation on assignment for a report on women’s rights for Amnesty International, used her photography to highlight issues related to migration, displacement, and cultural identity. The twenty-four images of No Pasara, which means “no entry,” depict young Moroccans who dream of a better life on the other side of the Mediterranean. The series was commissioned by the European Union in 2008.

In a review of her work last year, a critic for the Economist wrote: “Alaoui’s photojournalism drove the reasons for the movement of humans—before and beyond today’s crises—home, by turning a lens on those who have been and continue to remain unseen between world crises. Economic migrants in the regions she captured, including young Moroccans, Lebanese and Sub-Saharan Africans willing to make perilous crossings for a life in Europe were the consistent thread through her projects.” Alaoui’s hauntingly beautiful images offer a trenchant and poignant vantage point from which to consider the global immigration crisis.

Walled Garden in an Insane Eden
Sara Zanin Gallery
Via della Vetrina, 2, Rome, Italy
February 9–March 25, 2017

“Is it only the external landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons all too well. However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.”
—J. G. Ballard from The Drowned World (1962)

Borrowing its title from J. G. Ballard’s science-fiction novel and one of its dystopic tales, this exhibition brings together a contingency of London-based artists whose work engages with the political uncertainties introduced into the European landscape in 2016. Their responses, which include drawings, paintings, sculptures, textiles, and performance, range from skeptical to hopeful. Organized by Marcelle Joseph, the exhibition features mostly women artists, including Rebecca Ackroyd, Gabriella Boyd, Kira Freije, Marie Jacotey, Florence Peake, and Zadie Xa.

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.

February 2017

Susan Hiller: Lost and Found
Pérez Art Museum, Miami
1103 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, FL
October 14, 2016–June 4, 2017

Commissioned by the Pérez Art Museum and making its debut, Lost and Found, by the London-based artist Susan Hiller, features an audio collage of voices speaking in twenty-three different languages, including Aramaic, Comanche, Livonian, and other extinct or endangered idioms. A pioneer in video installations, Hiller creates immersive, psychologically charged environments. In Lost and Found a translation appears as subtitles to the anecdotes, songs, arguments, memories, and conversations. Oftentimes the themes revolve around language itself.

“A constantly shifting oscilloscopic line gives visual form to the work’s soundtrack, suggesting the poignant idea that individuals separated by time, geography, and worldview remain linked by the physical experience of sound as it resonates through the human body during verbal communication.”

See Red Women’s Workshop Feminist Posters 1974–1990
Published by Four Corners Books
ISBN 978-1-909-82907-7

Released in September 2016, See Red Women’s Workshop Feminist Posters 1974–1990 collects sixteen years of posters, calendars, silkscreens, and more from the See Red Women’s Workshop. Founded in 1974, the group “grew out of a shared desire to combat sexist images of women and to create positive and challenging alternatives. With humor and bold graphics, they expressed the personal experiences of women as well as their role in wider struggles for change.” The 184-page book is written by See Red members and features the history of the group, including all of their original screenprints and posters commissioned for radical groups and campaigns.

“Ambitiously, See Red were not about selling a product or even getting over a party political message,” writes the British socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham in the book’s foreword. “They were up to something far more complex and far more difficult. They aimed to convey ideas about a transformed society in which relations of gender, race and class would no longer be marked by inequality and subordination.”

Ambreen Butt: I Need a Hero
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 
25 Evans Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02115
January 11–June 26, 2017
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Ambreen Butt is the ninth artist in residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, invited to create a temporary site-specific work for the museum’s façade. Throughout this project, Butt explores the ways in which women struggle to find and make use of their own power. Paying tribute to a fellow young Pakistani woman, I Need a Hero is inspired by the story of Mukhtar Mai, who was brutally raped in 2002 by order of her village tribal council as punishment for speaking out against archaic codes of justice. Refusing to be silenced, Mai not only became a spokesperson for women’s rights in Pakistan, but she also created two schools for girls and a crisis center for abused women.

In the Gardner façade piece, the heroine fights a dragon and a monkeylike creature (her inner and outer demons?). The wrestle is set against the background of a dollar bill as a reminder of today’s global economy, while other young women look at her from below and above, expectant on the results of the battle and a possible emergence of their hero(ine).

Butt was born in 1969, in Lahore, Pakistan, where she trained as a miniature painter. As a storyteller, the artist makes use of dramatic imagery from this traditional art form to comment on contemporary issues.

Tschabalala Self
Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art
14 Wharf Road,London N1 7RW
January 17–March 12, 2017

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art presents the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom by the New Haven–based artist Tschabalala Self. Curated by Ziba Ardalan, the exhibition brings together paintings, prints, collage, and sculptures drawn from the first five years of Self’s artistic career. The young artist (born New York, 1990) is concerned with the study of the black female body within contemporary culture. Self examines the confluence of race, gender, and sexuality through a variety of forms and narratives, in which each of her “characters,” as she calls them, explores the emotional, physical, and psychological impact of the black female body as icon.

Self’s paintings play boldly with figuration, deconstructing and reconstructing the black female body, sewing together pieces of African or African-inspired cloth, given to her by her mother, with fragments of unresolved pieces of work. Self’s fractured figure seems to assert its own self-defined identity, while mixed media allows her to explore how the black female body functions as a social and political symbol.

In addition to painting, collage, and sculpture, Self presents at Parasol unit her most recent animation work, My Black Ass (2016). Through a series of GIF portraits of abstractly drawn black female figures in a motion that suggests they are twerking, the black female character comes to life, displaying her buttocks and genitals in an energetic dance. Although based on a particular ethnicity, Self’s innovative works nonetheless speak universally of all humanity and its collective concerns.

Elena Dorfman: Syria’s Lost Generation
Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613
January 18–March 12, 2017

The Mills College Art Museum presents the Los Angeles–based artist Elena Dorfman’s Syria’s Lost Generation, a humanistic perspective to the ongoing Syrian conflict that has claimed more than 470,000 lives and forced the displacement of 6.5 million people.

Dorfman (born Boston, 1965) was on assignment with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2013. While documenting exiled Syrians in Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, she was drawn most strongly to Syrian teenagers, a small fraction of a population that has been disproportionately affected by the war. As Dorfman explains, “They seemed particularly shell-shocked and bereft…. [T]hey spoke to me of powerful longing and frustration.”

Dorfman has specialized in documenting extreme circumstances and unusual subjects. Syria’s Lost Generation builds on her previous work as a documentarian—in particular, The C-Word (1998), a series of photographs of teenagers living with cancer. Through visual and audio portraiture, Dorfman brings into exposure their voices, the physical and psychological ills suffered, their uncertain futures, and the fearful of retaliation. Displaced teenagers spoke about the powerful longing and frustration, where the dispossession seems absolute, and the future, lost.