CAA News Today

Committee on Women in the Arts celebrate a selection of events, exhibitions and calls for work and participation featuring feminist and womxn artists, and address issues about social justice and ethics from intersectional and transnational perspectives. To acknowledge that Covid-19 continues but also to begin envisioning the re-opening of public spaces, we have decided to feature both on-line and in-person events.

Love Letters

April 10 to July 2, 2021 

On-line 

http://almanacprojects.com/public-programme/love-letters

An epistolary project developed by Basia Sliwinska and Astrid Korporall, Love Letters is a virtual platform that responds to the rise of gender-based violence around the globe and fosters feminist love across the national and cultural boundaries Covid-19 has made more severe. The October 2020 ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that abortions in the case of fetal defects are unconstitutional is its animating occasion. Love Letters features the work of six artists–Gaia Fugazza, Małgorzata Markiewicz, Amanda Millis, Joanna Rajkowska, Viktoriia Tofan, and Katarzyna Zimna—who have created work to reflect on the fraught political landscape that gave rise to such a ruling. Proceeds from the sale of the artwork will benefit the All-Poland Women’s Strike (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet: OSK). Composed by Sliwinska and Korporall, the letters that accompany the artwork featured in the on-line exhibition space attend lovingly to how they address the necessity of feminist solidarity in a broken, precarious world. 

 

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Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And 

March 5 to July 18, 2021 

Brooklyn Museum of Art, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art 

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/lorraine_ogrady

Long overdue and much-anticipated, Both/and is Lorraine O’Grady’s first retrospective. Featuring four decades of artwork that spans performance art, conceptualism, and institutional critique, this exhibition highlights the feminist and decolonial commitments of O’Grady’s oeuvre, which is materially idiosyncratic but thematically consistent. Both/and foregrounds O’Grady’s challenge to fixed positions while also tracking how she has kept western modernity’s reliance upon and erasure of Blackness squarely in view. 

 

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Born in Flames: Feminist Futures 

April 28 to September 12, 2021 

The Bronx Museum of the Arts 

http://www.bronxmuseum.org/exhibitions/born-in-flames-feminist-futures

This inter-generational group exhibition speculates on a damaged past for the possibilities of a joy-filled future. Taking its title from Lizzie Borden’s 1983 science fiction film that explored the unjust remainders of a socialist revolution, the spirited, phantasmatic, and highly physical artwork featured in Born in Flames seeks to imagine worlds beyond the entrenched logic of capitalist exploitation. Together the artwork declares that the figurations of women, and the oppressions they have carried in historical time, must be central to such hopeful gestures if they are going to take hold in future realities.

 

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Memorializing the Natural Environment: Maya Lin in conversation

Thursday, May 6, 2021, 6–7 p.m.

Virtual Conversation

https://www.colby.edu/lunderinstitute/memorializing-the-natural-environment/ 

Artist and designer Maya Lin will be in conversation with Colby University faculty about the process of remembering all that environmental degradation is taking from the planet and how to utilize that archive to forestall further disasters. She will reflect on What is Missing? her multimedia project devoted to the global biodiversity crisis related to the disappearance of habitats. What is Missing? underscores Lin’s talent for yoking the microscopic together with the monumental and sculpting the landscape with heavy but delicate inscriptions of loss. 

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Senga Nengudi: Topologies 

May 2-July 25, 2021 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

https://philamuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/senga-nengudi-topologies

Chronicling the entirety of her oeuvre, Topologies offers an in-depth look into Nengundi’s artwork and its precise deployment of the opaque, distorted, and porous. Featuring her sculptures, environmental installations, and performances, and going back to her career’s beginnings in the 1970s, Topologies shows the various and inter-related ways this key figure of the Black American avant-garde suspended the body in ceremonial planes composed of fragile and tough materials as it awaits a more just ground. 

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Family Tree Whakapapa: Elin, Madeleine, Sarah and Susanne Slavick 

April 21 to June 13, 2021

Long Gallery, The Pah Homestead, TSB Wallace Arts Centre

Auckland, New Zealand 

https://www.wallaceartstrust.org.nz/exhibitions/whakapapa

This exhibition brings together the artwork of four sisters living in different parts of the globe and focuses on the related and but distinct ways they engage with the arboreal imagination. Tangled into their photographs, paintings, life histories, and political commitments, the trees in their artwork are intricate lines, bold shapes, diffuse traces, and stylized patterns. Defying the ease with which the genealogical and botanical connect in the figure of the family tree, the Slavick sisters make it a thing of wonder: rooted in the ground and multiplying in our imaginations, family trees are botany and biology written with longing, hope, history, and loss. 

 

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Lygia Pape: Tupinambá

April 24 to August 1, 2021 

Hauser and Wirth, Los Angeles

https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/31619-lygia-pape-tupinamba

This exhibition, Lygia Pape’s first solo show in Los Angeles, features her Tupinambá series, one of the final bodies of work created by this founding member of Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement. Pape’s use of bright red artificial feathers is a central feature of Tupinambá. Sensuous and regal, they cover chairs, boxes, and balls and point to Pape’s sustained interest in the Indigenous people of Brazil. With her understated surrealism, Pape makes the objects look like dense fragments of far-away rituals. The Memória Tupinambá, a series of three balls covered with red feathers and punctuated with plastic body parts, suggests their sexualized violence: one holds out a hand streaked with blood, one shows a bloody foot, and the third displays two plastic breasts. 

 

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Oh, I’m definitely a dessert person 

April 24 to May 28, 2021 

WHATIFTHEWORLD 

Western Cape, South Africa 

http://www.whatiftheworld.com/presentation/oh-im-definitely-a-dessert-person/

The I-phone plays multiple roles in Talia Ramkilawan’s charming pictures, which she makes by “rug hooking” bright pastel fabrics, wools, and hessian. It is clear from the accidental fragments, titillating hints of sex, selfie shots, and everyday domestic scenes (birthday parties) and objects (a cake, vases of flowers, a dildo), that Ramkilawan draws from her camera roll, but she also places I-phones in the images themselves. Complete with heart emojis, the phones transmit the unabashedly sweet touch of these images, their “hand-held” feel and hot-pink youth. Ramikilawan’s titles, talky poem-“texts” of one or two lines, crystallize the Black femme wit of her crafty depictions. 

October Picks from the Committee on Women in the Arts celebrate the return of major international museum surveys dedicated to the creativity and power of women artists throughout the centuries, drawing attention to the seventeenth-century Italian Baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi, Venezuela’s twentieth-century Concrete sculptor Gego, and the women of Surrealism. As always, our global highlights are informed by shows and events that explore social justice issues and intersectional feminism.

One Million Roses for Angela Davis

October 10, 2020–January 24, 2021

Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden

Celebrating the singular life of Black activist and feminist Angela Davis, One Million Roses takes a closer look at Davis’s complex cultural relationship with East Germany almost fifty years after the launch of the postcard campaign, “A million roses for Angela,” in 1970-72, when she was held in prison under terrorism charges.  This exhibition builds upon the formative commitment to Davis’s revolutionary aims, ideologies, and actions that was supported by the GDR, where she was welcomed as a state guest after release. On display are works by contemporary international artists who acknowledge and promote Davis’s calls for hope and non-racist democracy.

Artemisia

Until January 24, 2021

The National Gallery, London

A major retrospective dedicated to the Baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi, following the artist’s career from Rome to Florence, Venice, Naples, and London; includes the artist’s recently discovered personal letters, and promotes virtual events unearthing Gentileschi’s dramatic life and tremendous production.

Gego

October 9, 2020–March 21, 2021

Guggenheim Museum, New York

The first major retrospective survey in New York dedicated to the career of Venezuelan artist Gertrud Goldschmidt, known as Gego (b. 1912, Hamburg, Germany), a pioneer of postwar geometric abstraction and kinetic art, whose early career as an architect and engineer galvanized new spatial modalities in sculpture, textile, print and drawing. 

Real and Imagined: Fabric Works and Video Animations by Heidi Kumao

September 15, 2020–December 4, 2020

Stamps Schools of Art & Design, Ann Arbor, MI

Heidi Kumao’s narrative fabric works and experimental animations are on view in this singular exhibition that explores the pervasive dynamics of sexual power, trauma, and incident. The title, “Real and Imagined,” underscores the contradictions of women’s voices in the public realm, inspired by testimonials and experiences from the #MeToo movement, when ‘truth’ and ‘memory’ are inevitably questioned or dismissed.  Kumao’s industrial felt works utilize interesting references to simple quotidian objects—chairs, roots, ladders—allowing narrative to unfold in subtle ways as the images and stories are constructed and abstractly revealed on the heavy felt surfaces.

Hommage à Valie Export

Curator Sabine Folie

September 30, 2020–January 10, 2021

LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

To honor Valie Export’s 80th birthday, LENTOS has organized an exhibition dedicated to the “history of the body,” a theme broadly negotiated throughout the artist’s early career and further explored in the context of the technological and digital age.  On view are early works from the 1970s and contemporary projects, including performative actions, conceptual photographs, and “re-enactments” of Old Masters.

Fantastic Women

July 25–November 8, 2020

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, in cooperation with Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

This presentation explores the contributions and positions of 34 women artists from Europe, the US, and Mexico who were identified with the art historical movement of Surrealism or connected to surrealistic activities beyond the status of muse or model.  Fantastic Women features well-known figures, such as Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Meret Oppenheim, among other pivotal figures, such as Kay Sage, Leonor Fini and Toyen.

What Are You Voting For? A Virtual Exhibition

October 9–31, 2020

Woman Made Art Gallery, Chicago, IL

Jurors: Karen Gutfreund + Sherri Cornett | Gutfreund Cornett Art

In response to the November 2020 US elections, Woman Made Gallery (WMG) has organized a virtual exhibition of 37 “self-identified” women artists whose artworks address pressing topics about race, intersectionality, politics, privilege, health care, as well as other groundbreaking subjects.  Exhibiting artists include: Beth Costello, Alicia Decker, Jacqueline DesForges, Karen Fiorito, Lisa Freeman, Christine Giancola, Linda Gleitz, Leah Golberstein, Jae Green, Susan Hale, LucyJulia Hale, Edwina Jaques, Tulika Ladsariya, Beth Lakamp, Holly Ballard Martz, Sandy Mayo, Penny McElroy, Cristin Millett, Cherie M Redlinger, Sawyer Rose, Caren Helene Rudman, Gigi Salij, Sarah Schneiderman, Suzannah Schreckhise, Durba Sen, Sarah Sipling, Pauline Hudel Smith, Laurie Szujewska, Salma Taman, Millette Tapiador, Amy Usdin, Winnie van der Rijn, Mary Vaneecke, Michelle Victoria, Dominique Vitali, Kelsey Merreck Wagner, Maria Wolf.