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.

June 2013

Carolee Schneemann, Untitled (from the Dust Paintings series), 1984, ink, ashes, acrylic paint, string, vegetable dye, glass particles, photograph on fabric, and circuit board on heavy rag paper, 37½ x 49 in. (artwork © Carolee Schneemann)

Carolee Schneemann: Flange 6rpm
PPOW Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10011
May 11–June 22, 2013

Titled after a multisensory installation that immerses the viewer in an environment of projected foundry fires, animated by motorized hand-sculpted components cast in aluminum, the fourth exhibition of the pioneering feminist multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann at PPOW Gallery brings together an assortment of works that date from the 1980s to today, illuminating diverse aspects of her expansion of media and her exploration of materials, as well as revealing the politics of her work. In addition to Flange 6rpm, the show features four examples from her Dust Paintings series (1983–86), created with degraded materials, layers of dust, spilled paint, and circuit boards in critical reference to the effacement of Lebanese and Palestinian villages by continuous bombardment. Two major grid installations of photographs and text—Saw Over Want (1980–82) and Vulva’s Morphia (1995)—are also included.

Nicole Eisenman / Matrix 248
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2625 Durant Avenue, No. 2250, Berkeley, CA 94720
May 3–July 14, 2013

Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248 brings together approximately forty paintings and works on paper by this New York–based artist created after 2009 that variously contemplate the human condition—though they are specifically inspired by and reflect the post-Bush-era economic crisis and sociopolitical instability. The exhibition includes examples of Eisenman’s first reaction to social turmoil—a series of monotypes featuring weeping people—and other works in which she idiosyncratically grafts historical styles such as American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, updating familiar art forms to make timely social commentaries, as in Triumph of Poverty (2009), based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of the same name, and Tea Party (2011).

Ellen Gallagher, Wiglette from DeLuxe, 2004, photogravure and plasticine, 13 x 10¼ in. (artwork © Ellen Gallagher)

Ellen Gallagher: AxME
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, England
May 1–September 1, 2013

The first overview of this American artist’s twenty-year career and the first major survey of her work in the United Kingdom, Ellen Gallagher: AxME illuminates signature themes of her exploration of myth, nature, social issues, and art history through painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film, and animation, while inviting the viewer to closely study her fascinating mode of production. Along with key works such as the various series of wig-map grid collages that cast sharp commentaries on black beauty ideals, along with the intricate relief Bird in Hand, the exhibition presents Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–4), her ongoing series of watercolor collages Watery Ecstatic, and a new series called Morphia, comprising two-sided drawings that combine “the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical, and history with the present.”

Nicola L: Body Language under the Sun and the Moon
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2013

Focusing on Nicola L’s radical perspective on the gendered body, whether in pain or in joy, this exhibition introduces the work of an overlooked French artist. Although based in New York since the 1980s, Nicola began her career in Paris in the 1960s as a conceptual artist working in installation, performance, and functional art (since 1976 she also turned to film). A larger-than-life-sized installation, a penetrable sculpture for three performers called The Cylinder, debuted at the Biennale de Paris in 1967 with the rock group the Soft Machine; it was then shown at La MaMa Theater in New York. Pierre Restany welcomed her exceptional vision in his essay “A Long Day’s Journey to the End of the Skin” for her first exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in 1969, the same year he hailed Evelyne Axell’s nudes, shown in the same gallery, as signs of sexual liberation.

Nicola’s functional objects became classics of 1960s experimental furniture and soft-art design. But their eroticism is underpinned by an early feminist perspective that merits comparison with the work of several women artists of the sixties onward, whether in France or elsewhere: see, for instance, La Femme Commode (1969–2012), The Lover’s Wardrobe (1967–70), and The Lips Lamp (1969), and soft sculptures such as The Giant Foot (1967–2013) and Giant Woman Sofa (1970–2012). In 1969 Nicola created The Red Coat for Eleven People or Same Skin for Everyone—whose original is included at Broadway 1602—that was first performed with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. Characterized as her pivotal “collective object of performance,” the work was used for performances around Europe, including one in Barcelona, where she was arrested by Francisco Franco’s army.

In 1974, Nicola participated in the exhibition Grandes Femmes, Petits Formats at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, presenting her provocative multimedia sculpture Woman Pregnant from TV (1970). By 1979, the artist moved definitively to New York, where she witnessed and was inspired by the city’s countercultural movements and vibrantly experimental art milieu. In 1981, she directed a film on Abbie Hoffman, the radical social activist and leader of the Yippie movement, called My Name Is Abbie: Orphan of America. Nicola continues to work on her Penetrable Universe series.

Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
April 12–November 3, 2013

Featuring the Rape of the Sabine Women (2004) and 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2007) and complemented by an interventional installation of photographic stills from both works alongside historical portraits from Bass Museum’s collection, this exhibition interweaves masterpieces of Eve Sussman’s film productions through Rufus Corporation (which she founded in 2003) that dazzle with their opulent settings. Conventionally screened in a darkened room, the twelve-minute 89 Seconds at Alcázar delights with Sussmann’s enactment of the enigmatic moment of court life captured in Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656).

With its five acts inventively presented as a five-part video installation, Sussman’s celebrated Rape of the Sabine Women is a potent interpretation of the myth of Rome’s founding—filmed in Germany and Greece and set in the Cold War sixties—as ideal vehicle for her critique of utopia, power, and gender relationships in comparable historical settings of hope and decadence. Although Rape of the Sabine Women was made as a feature film, the action of its presentation at the Bass unspools on over thirty screens—including sprawling wall projections, a houselike construction, several tiny video monitors, and a massive installation of television sets piled randomly on the floor—and offers a mesmerizing immersive filmic experience that enhances the visual poetics and the power of Sussman’s reinterpretation of the Roman legend with government agents and Greek butchers’ daughters.

Niki de Saint Phalle, My Monster, 1968 (artwork © Niki de Saint Phalle/BUS 2013)

Niki de Saint Phalle: The Girl, the Monster, and the Goddess
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
April 20–December 1, 2013

Capitalizing mainly on the Moderna Museet’s comprehensive collection of works by Niki de Saint Phalle, largely thanks to Pontus Hulten and a generous donation by the late artist, this exhibition captures the centrality of the figures of the girl, the monster, and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s artistic universe, exploring its autobiographic and feminist underpinnings and advocating the importance of the artist in the twentieth-century postwar avant-garde. Enhanced by archival material that reflects the reception of her Ur-Goddess, She – A Cathedral, constructed for the museum in 1966, the exhibition evokes the meeting of the girl, the monster and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s film Daddy and is accompanied by a new documentary on the artist.

VALIE EXPORT: Images of Contingence
Żak | Branicka
Lindenstrasse 35, Third Floor, Berlin D-10969 Germany
April 26–June 16, 2013

“For me, contingence is how and where you perceive borders, and how and where and when borders explode,” said VALIE EXPORT, and it is the exploration of a variety of borders that Images of Contingence illuminates by highlighting the artist’s interest in physical contact and its implications in various media, including installation, drawing, photography, film, and archival materials. Along with the installation Fragments of Images of Contingence (1994), in which light bulbs hanging from poles and wires are sensuously yet dangerously immersed into cylinders filled with fundamental-to-our-existence liquids such as milk, used oil, or water, and its rhythmic pendant, The un-ending/-ique melody of cords (1998), a recording of a threadless sewing machine and its sound, the exhibition brings together a selection of videos permeated by issues of contingency, liminality, and sensual experience. The show also includes the artist’s celebrated Touch Cinema, performed in Munich in 1969, for its political activation of touch. A series of drawings from the early 1970s, depicting hands that protect and caress or cause suffering, complements this showcase of EXPORT’s negotiation of borders by illuminating her contradictory exploration of touch and the female body as ciphers of intimacy, sensuality, and carnality, as well as violence and aggression.

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.

May 2013

Hung Liu, Avant-Garde, 1993, oil on shaped canvas and on wood, 116 x 43 in. Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley (artwork © Hung Liu)

Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu
Oakland Museum of California
1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA 94607
March 16–June 30, 2013

Curated by René de Guzman, Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu is the first comprehensive survey of one of the most prominent Chinese painters working in the United States. It features approximately eighty paintings as well as personal ephemera, such as photographs, sketchbooks, and informal painting studies from private and public collections around the world. Bringing together examples of her socialist-realist drawings from the 1970s, made at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, with paintings realized since her immigration to the United States in 1984, Summoning Ghosts offers an illuminating exploration of Liu’s development and technical experimentation and captures the expressive bending of her training as social realist and muralist in Maoist China and the sophisticated ways in which she interlaces portraiture and documentation for her exploration of memory and history, among other themes.

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27705
March 21–July 21, 2013

Bringing together about fifty works from the mid-1990s to the present, including previously unseen sketchbooks, this first comprehensive survey of the internationally renowned artist Wangechi Mutu thoroughly investigates her work and its contribution to transnational feminism, Afrofuturism, and globalization. It also presents the artist’s first-ever animated video, made with the pop producer and singer Santigold, commissioned for the Nasher Museum, as well as site-specific installations that enliven her collages. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, A Fantastic Journey is accompanied by a major catalogue that contains essays by the artist and the curator, as well as texts by dream hampton, Kristine Stiles, and Greg Tate.

Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, 1973, seven color photographs on wood panel, 48¼ x 40⅛ in. (artwork © Gina Pane; photograph by Francoise Masson and provided by ADAGP, Anne Marchand, and Kamel Mennour, Paris)

Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas and Gina Pane
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, TX 77006
March 22–June 30, 2013

Presented in the Brown Foundation Gallery, Parallel Practices celebrates two major female contributors to early performance art working on both sides of the Atlantic—Joan Jonas and Gina Pane—and captures the complementary and disparate natures of their contemporaneous practices. To illuminate the multidisciplinary apects of their work as an essential element of their performative poetics, the exhibition brings together a great selection of early and later sculpture, photography, video, drawing, installations, and performances. Importantly, Parallel Practices is the first major presentation of Pane’s work in the United States and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that explores the intersections of the two artists through texts by the art historians Barbara Clausen, Élisabeth Lebovici, and Anne Tronche, as well as an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Dean Daderko.

Les Immémoriales
49 Nord 6 Est – Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine
1 bis, rue des Trinitaires
F-57000 Metz, France
March 2–June 23, 2013

A rare meeting of Agnes Denes (b. 1931, Hungary), Monica Grzymala (b. 1970, Poland), and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Chile) at Frac Lorraine by means of three installations that poetically interweave past and future through references to the rituals, languages, and material culture of Andean, Native American, and Australian Aboriginal people, Les Immémoriales offers an evocative contemplation on “the vital connection of human and Earth” with timely political resonance. The exhibition also ruminates on timeless questions regarding our passing from Earth and addresses a variety of political issues that hint at its modern abuses.

Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, I’M DESPERATE, 1992–93, c-type print mounted on aluminium, 44.5 x 29.7 cm (artwork © Gillian Wearing)

Gillian Wearing
Pinakothek der Moderne
Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35, 80333 Munich, Germany
March 21–July 7, 2013

Gillian Wearing’s first major retrospective in Germany showcases photographic works and film installations, providing an overview of her entire oeuvre and illuminating the sophisticated ways in which this British artist uses portraiture to make social relationships visible. Organized by Bernhart Schwenk and meant to travel to London and Düsseldorf, Gillian Wearing is distinguished by the evocative framing of Wearing’s works through several pieces by Andy Warhol from the museum’s collection.

Marie Laurencin
Musée Marmottan Monet
2 Rue Louis Boilly 75016 Paris, France
February 21–June 30, 2013

The first French museum exhibition to celebrate the work of Marie Laurencin (1883–1956), one of the most successful female artists of the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, features more than ninety paintings.

Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603
February 21–August 11, 2013

Kara Walker returns to the cut-paper medium in monumental form for a new commissioned installation that includes five large framed graphite drawings and forty small framed mixed-media pieces, along with cut-paper silhouettes. The exhibition’s title refers to comments made by Barack Obama in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, about the challenges of community organizing in Chicago, in which he quotes the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey. Merging handwritten text with images, the work revolves around The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce; it also investigates the notion of “race war” as it exists in the contemporary imagination. Walker has referred to the work as “a kind of paranoid panorama wall work—with supplemental drawings large and small, to chronicle what can be called a diary of my ever-present, never-ending war with race.”

Installation view of As it were … So to speak at the Jewish Museum (photograph by David Heald)

As it were … So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue
with Barbara Bloom
Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 15–August 4, 2013

Inspired partly by Talmudic discourse unfolding across time and space and capitalizing on the use of objects as “placeholders for thoughts,” the artist Barbara Bloom interestingly weaves artworks and objects from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection with her own texts, creating polysemous narratives and unpredictable encounters that pressure and energize the museum experience.

Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery
Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
January19–July 28, 2013

The well-deserved attention that Sister Corita (1918–1986) has been receiving internationally during the past couple years is topped with this major survey of her work, organized by Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, that brings together more than two hundreds items spanning her entire career. Someday Is Now offers serigraphs, paintings, ephemera, and videos of protests and performances with her students that illustrate the complexities of Sister Corita’s visual language as a printmaker and capture the diversity of her political agenda as an activist, teacher, and Catholic nun. An extensive catalogue that sheds further light on the complexities of her life and work accompanies the exhibition.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005, gelatin silver photograph, 15½ x 18½ in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2011.63.1 (artwork © LaToya Ruby Frazier)

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
March 22–August 11, 2013

With about forty photographs of the artist’s family and their hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania—a formerly prosperous steel-mill town that became a “distressed municipality” of fewer than 2,500 residents—LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital showcases the way the artist uses social documentary and portraiture to metaphorize an industrial town’s decline, comment on the effects of deindustrialization on individuals and communities, and critique recent forms of Braddock’s corporate exploitation that continue to threaten and distort the dire realities of the working-class community to which her family belongs.