CAA News Today

In honor of Election Day, we present a roundtable discussion from the 108th CAA Annual Conference in Chicago on women and voter suppression. Sponsored by the Committee on Women in the Arts, this session took place on February 13, 2020.

Chairs: Sally Brown, West Virginia University; Liz Kim, Texas A&M University-Kingsville

Discussants: Karen Mary Davalos, University of Minnesota; Jo-Ann Morgan; Marshall Reese, of LigoranoReese, Independent Artists

This session considers how artists and scholars have explored voter suppression as a subject matter across historical and cultural boundaries with a view toward examining the present. In the US, voter suppression targets particularly women who are black, immigrant, elderly, young, low-income and disabled, keeping them from the polls. Since 2010, 25 states have placed new restrictions that make the exercise of fundamental voting rights harder. This change has been exacerbated by the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key provision in the 1965 Voting Rights Act, enabling states to institute discriminatory voting laws. The legacy of Jim Crow laws persists through these recent shifts in policy, while disproportionally affecting growing voter groups such as Latino/a voters in the US. In these political times, historical lessons can be drawn from the past, in the ways women have collectively fought against political silencing. Our roundtable panelists address and illuminate how artists and activists work and have worked creatively to resist and fight voter suppression for women, as well as reflect on broader political suppression issues for women voters. From the Chicana feminist art of the 1970s, to the imagery of the revolutionary women of the Black Power Movement, to public art interventions in the Trump era, this session aims to take a broad and reflective approach to this politically urgent topic.

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.

Cauleen Smith, Human_3.0 Reading List: Angela Davis. Women, Race, and Class, 2015 Graphite and acrylic on paper

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.

Chiara Fumai, The Book of Evil Spirits, 2015. Film still. On view at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève through January 3, 2021. Courtesy the Church of Chiara Fumai

September picks by the Committee on Women in the Arts include a range of online and in-person exhibitions and events featuring works of women artists breaking boundaries. This month we focus on practices that explore boundaries, whether material, conceptual or methodological, and which performatively address space. Often, threshold spaces, literal and metaphorical, are interrogated in order to further explore the potential of the arts in creating change and claiming an equal and just society.

• LOSS, A Virtual Exhibition

September 4 – 27, 2020
Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, Illinois

A virtual exhibit with works by 120 artists from the United States, Austria, Canada, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Nigeria, and Turkey and in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, print-making, sculpture, photography, digital works and video, exploring the concept of loss.

• Jo Spence: Photo Therapy 

September 7 – October 15, 2020
Richard Saltoun, online event

An online exhibition featuring a range of photographic works produced by Jo Spence, including her early commercial works as well as activist, feminist and social photography.

• Unbreakable: Women in Glass

September 5, 2020 – January 7, 2021
Fondazione Berengo, Venice, Italy

An exhibition featuring works of art in glass produced by over sixty contemporary female artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America, Iran, and South Korea. Held in the heart of Murano in the Fondazione Berengo Art Space, an old glass furnace, it references and honors the history of the island and its relationship with glass production and its innovation. The works in the exhibition reference potentialities of glass and its transparency as a metaphor for the future healed from the scars from history.

• Chiara Fumai: Poems I will Never Release

November 4, 2020 – January 3, 2021
Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva, Switzerland

The exhibition presents the first retrospective of Chiara Fumai’s works in which the artist developed the language of performance and made a significant contribution to the feminist aesthetics in the 21st century. Producing uncomfortable situations and environments through the use of concepts of boredom, threat, offense, revolt, vandalism and violence, she explored her ideals of anarchist feminism.

• Agnes Scherer: The Teacher

October 2, 2020 – January 3, 2021
Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, Switzerland

The exhibition features the installation to the operetta which has been developed by Agnes Scherer since 2015. The production will be animated by the artist with Tobias Textor, Soya Arakawa and Claudia Barth at the opening on October 2nd, and on December 8th and 10th. Scherer’s operetta draws inspiration from theatre forms and versatile formats of presentation to activate work of art and give it a magical power.

• Cindy Sherman: A Retrospective (1975–2020)

September 23, 2020 – January 3, 2021
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France

After being closed due to the COVID-19 health emergency, the Fondation Louis Vuitton reopens on September 23rd with the exhibition featuring 170 works by Cindy Sherman produced between 1975 and 2020, including very recent and unseen series. To coincide with the retrospective, the Fondation will also present a selection of works from its Collection brought together under the title “Crossing Views.” Chosen together with Cindy Sherman and echoing her work, the artworks focus on the theme of the portrait and its interpretations in different mediums and disciplines.

Participants in the 100 Years | 100 Women initiative, left to right: Paola Prestini (National Sawdust), Lisa Coleman (NYU), Ciaran Escoffery (Juilliard), Ellyn Toscano (NYU), Warrington Hudlin (Museum of the Moving Image), Deborah Willis (NYU), Kemi Ilesanmi (Laundromat Project), Avery Willis Hoffman (Park Avenue Armory), Jonathan McCrory (National Black Theatre), Marie Cisco (The Apollo), Cheri Stokes (Urban Bush Women), Mia Yoo (La MaMa), Amy Rox Surratt (La MaMa), Rebecca Robertson (Park Avenue Armory). Not pictured: Sade Lythcott (National Black Theatre) and Suhaly Bautista-Carolina (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

August picks by the Committee on Women in the Arts include virtual exhibitions and programs, gallery exhibitions, a new podcast series, and a call for papers. This month, we recognize the US suffrage centennial, while acknowledging  the reality of continued voter suppression tactics. The Feminist Art Coalition documents an extensive list of exhibitions worldwide dedicated to women in conjunction with this anniversary. 

• Strength in Suffrage: Tracing one hundred years and one hundred stories of women’s history, a live broadcast, August 26th at 7pm (CDT), featuring artists Ginny Sykes on her photography project and Carron Little performing poetry from her Spare Rib Revisited public engagement project. A Q&A follows with both artists. Co-sponsored by the Chicago Women’s History Center, this virtual event addresses individual emancipation of one hundred women through image and one hundred years of lived experience transformed into lyrical poetry. [Link]  
• Meaning of Life: Performance and artist discussion by Out of Site Chicago with Irina Danilova. In collaboration with the Ukrainian Museum of Modern Art, the artist discussion, August 29th, will be moderated by Joanna Matuszak, a scholar in Post-Soviet Performance Art avant-garde practices; performance, August 31st, both available online. [Link]
• 100 Years | 100 Women Project Archive: a collaborative and ongoing collection of work by students, activists, artists, scholars, and community leaders, around the complex legacy of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution. [Link]  
• Between You and Me at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (August 5, 2020 – January 24, 2021): group show of contemporary artists whose work featuring everyday objects engages in acts of connection and care, part of the Center’s On Being Here (and There) series of exhibitions highlighting the roles cultural organizations and artists perform as community members, potentially divided by public discourse or isolation. Exhibition website offers an interactive online zine and printable postcards. [Link]
• The War Outside My Door, virtual film screening, Evanstan Experimental Film Showcase (August 13, 2020): a film by Kristin Anahit Cass, from The New Freedom Fighters: Women And Nonviolent Resistance project, which explores hope and determination in a province of war-torn Tavush to bring about peace during a global pandemic. [Link]
• Barbara London Calling: a new podcast series by the founding and now emeritus video and media curator at Museum of Modern Art New York and author of VIDEO ART: The First Fifty Years (Phaidon Press, 2020), just launched a podcast featuring interviews with twelve artists working with media technology. [Link]
• Margaret Mee: Portraits of Plants, an online exhibit by Dembarton Oaks Library and Collection in Washington, DC, features paintings of Amazonian flora by the artist, explorer, and environmentalist Margaret Mee (1909–1988) from the rare book collection, along with a devoted section, Visualizing Knowledge, around the role of women artists, botanical knowledge and aesthetics from the early 17th through the mid-19th centuries. [Link]
• A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists from the Collection is an online and gallery exhibition by Brigham Young University Museum of Art, featuring 112 works by 60 artists in various styles and types of art, including painting, textiles, prints, photographs, mixed media, and digital work. Available through September 12, 2020. [Link]
• Return to Nature: an exhibition by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) featuring twenty photographs by eleven artists from the collection themed around the outdoors, on view through January 3, 2021. [Link]
• Call for papers: Reclaim: Narratives of African Women Artists, a symposium by AWARE association : Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions in the framework of the Africa2020 Season, April 15-16, 2021, at the École du Louvre, Paris. The event enters into the programs of the pan-African and multidisciplinary project Africa2020 taking place in France from December 2020 to mid-July 2021, at an invitation by N’Goné Fall, General Commissioner, to look at and understand the world from an African perspective. Deadline: October 15, 2020. [Link] 
• Undefeated: Canvas(s)ing the Politics Around Voter Suppression Since Women’s Suffrage by West Virginia University Libraries, online exhibit including artwork and educational content on view now, with a print exhibit forthcoming in the fall. [Link]

Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Native American, b. 1969) Mark, Polar Bear, 2019. Acrylic polymer, polar bear fur, fabric flag, metal brackets, 40 x 65 in. © 2019 Sonya Kelliher-Combs. Courtesy of the artist and Minus Space.

In response to COVID-19, artists, institutions, and organizations have initiated virtual exhibitions, presentations, screenings, and curated newsletters, among other innovative approaches, welcoming the public to online platforms and opening dialogues on a range of topics. May and June 2020 CWA Picks presented a number of initiatives that demonstrated ways in which social media channels and websites can be repurposed in light of social distancing measures currently in place; these Picks emphasized the social role of the arts as a healing positive force during these challenging times. As protests about systemic racism and structural injustices raged globally, museums and institutions were inclined to acknowledge their fundamental accountability and engagement in the misrepresentation or excision of Black and Indigenous histories from white imperialist and colonial narratives, including the prevalent or implicit use of racist language and practices. As the world witnesses and participates in “good trouble” and social unrest, our July Picks cover a range of online and in-person exhibitions and events and strike a balance between feminist ecologies of care and political activism. At this unprecedented historical juncture, some art spaces have opened their doors to audiences and slowly resumed activities, enforcing precautions and timed visits:  

• ecofeminism(s) curated by Monika Fabijanska at Thomas Erben Gallery (7.19.20-7.24.20) takes us on a visual journey of the pioneering environmental art works of the 1970s and 80s through the present. Countering patriarchal and corporate structures and philosophies, many artists engage scientific and analytic approaches to experimental practices, utilizing photographic documentation, archives, time-based media, and ritual performances. Advancing principles of spiritual feminism, feminist metaphors of the Great Goddess and Cosmic Mother, and anti-nuclear activism, among other social and technological positions, the early eco–feminists underscore earth’s fragility and vulnerability—thinly veiling our fears and prophetically imagining our current global crises and pandemic—yet glimmers of care, community, and agency strikingly emerge.  As an intergenerational show presenting contemporary women artists making ecological art, Fabijanska proposes, “What makes today’s female environmental artists ‘ecofeminists’?” Artists include Andrea Bowers, Helène Aylon, Eliza Evans, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hanae Utamura, Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, Jessica Segall, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Bilge Friedlaender, Carla Maldonado, Mary Mattingly, Cecilia Vicuña, Barbara Kruger, and Agnes Denes. Public programming with Zoom conversations between artists, art historians, and critics: July 8, July 15, and July 22.  

• Earthkeeping, Earthshaking – art, feminisms and ecology (Earthkeeping/Earthshaking – arte, feminismos e ecologia), curated by Giulia Lamoni and Vanessa Badagliacca at Galerias Municipais (Galeria Quadrum) in Lisbon (7.25.20-10.4.20) takes its title from the thirteenth issue of the pioneering US feminist art magazine called Heresies (1981) published by the feminist collective. Lucy Lippard, Ana Mendieta, and Faith Wilding, among other contributors to this issue, raised complex points around the following question: ‘What can women do about the disastrous direction the world is taking?’ Curators Lamoni and Badagliacca return to this pressing question in a global 21st-century context by reframing ideas of capitalism, colonialism, and current environmental pressures, further exploring a Portuguese perspective. Earthkeeping, Earthshaking presents radical feminist artists from the 1970s through the present day:  Alexandra do Carmo, Alicia Barney, Ana Mendieta, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Cecilia Vicuña, Clara Menéres, Emilia Nadal, Faith Wilding, Gabriela Albergaria, Gioconda Belli, Graça Pereira Coutinho, Irene Buarque, Laura Grisi, Lourdes Castro. Maren Hassinger, Maria José Oliveira, Mónica de Miranda, Rui Horta Pereira, Teresinha Soares, Uriel Orlow. 

• AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research & Exhibitions) has launched the podcast Woman House in response to the pandemic. Each episode invites a female narrator to read stories and texts by women writers on the broad theme of confinement. For example, hear Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse read by Julie Wolkenstein; Céleste Albaret’s Monsieur Proust read by Jeanne Balibar; and Marguerite Dumas’s Writing read by Camille Morineau.  

• Virtual Views: Faith Ringgold at MoMA explores Ringgold’s extraordinary position in the sixties as an African-American woman painter and offers personal commentary about cultural identity and documentation during the civil rights movement. Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die, a masterpiece from the museum collection, visualizes the realities of race, police brutality, and violence, and makes direct references to Picasso’s Guernica.  

• Not Yet Written Stories is an online archival repository of avant-garde women artist practices (documentation, exhibitions, conferences, publications), supported by workshops and conferences.  Managed by the SCCA-Ljubljana Center for Contemporary Arts, Arton Foundation, Warsaw, and Latvian Center for Contemporary Art (Riga), Office for Photography, Zagreb.  

• Whitechapel Gallery offers an instructional list of audio resources (podcasts and audiobooks) on Black Lives Matter. 

• Carla Repice: The White Problem Redux, an online exhibition at Equity Gallery, highlights the “optics of whiteness and the ways in which white supremacy virally replicates itself in visual culture,” according to the accompanying online essay by Ronika McClain.  Repice’s intimate, gestural figurative paintings unveil quick glimpses into childhood, focused sharply on youth and education as primary source material for the formulation of implicit racism, symbols, and narratives. Public programming includes a series of poetry readings by Black writers, organized by poet Maya Pindyck.

From the series Cutbacks by Maria Kapajeva, 2017. Courtesy the artist and the Gallery of Photography Ireland.

In response to COVID-19, artists, curators, institutions and organizations have initiated virtual exhibitions, presentations, screenings, and curated newsletters, among other innovative approaches, welcoming the public to online platforms and opening dialogues on a range of topics. May and June 2020 CWA Picks present a number of initiatives that not only demonstrate ways in which social media channels and websites can be repurposed in light of social distancing measures currently in place; but most importantly emphasize the social role of the arts being a healing positive force in these unprecedented challenging times. June Picks focus on the continued presence and significance of feminist art both independently and in conversation with each other, in the context of our current virtual living circumstance.  

• Dream is Wonderful, Yet Unclear: an online exhibit of Maria Kapajeva considers the history of a community surrounding a textile mill in Narva, Estonia, now closed, where members of the artist’s family once worked. On view online May through June 2020, by Gallery of Photography Ireland.
• Artist video features by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Suzanne Lacy: Women Fight Back; Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here; Close Looking: The Artist Initiative with Vija Celmins; Vija Celmins: Saying the Unsayable; and Veja Celmins on her life in (and out of) the studio. 
• White Chapel Gallery Artists’ Film International, since 2008, has premiered world-class artists from modern artists featuring Rosa Barba, Mwangi Hutter, Theresa Traore Dahlberg; Dominika Olszowy, Lisa Tan, Ailbhe Ní Bhriain; or Rhea Storr, Vika Kirchenbauer, Yu Gou and more on their YouTube channel. 
• Michelle Handelman – BloodSisters: Leather Dykes and Sadomasochism: films and discussions in celebration of the 25 year anniversary of Michelle Handelman’s ground-breaking documentary, by the London BFI Flare 2020 Festival programmer Jay Bernard. The post-screening panel called BODILY AUTONOMY on the significance of Bloodsisters 25 years on–and current consent laws that restrict queer sexualities and subcultures also on view. 
• Feminism is A Browser, a new film by Charlotte Eifler, was previewed online at the 58th Annual Ann Arbour Film Festival. The trailer can be viewed on vimeo here. 
• Professional Organization for Women in the Arts is hosting ongoing online conversations around the arts during the COVID-19 crisis. 
• Toward Freedom: A Progressive Perspective released a “Feminist emergency plan in the face of the Coronavirus crisis” in Chile by the Coordinadora Feminista 8M, a central force over the last five months of popular uprisings of millions of women. 
• Johanna Unzueta: Tools for Life, a virtual exhibition by Modern Art Oxford. 
• Google Art and Culture Online Feminist Exhibits: From large collections to smaller virtual exhibits, Google Art and Culture has several feminist and women-centered online offerings. 
• Women Being Talks: the COVID-19 experience, a series of interviews by journalist Natalia Bonilla and WomenBeing Magazine Founder Monica Martins, through June. 
• AIR Gallery’s Intimacy without Proximity, the collective of women-identified artists regularly shares resources, readings and prompts for communal making and thinking. 
• Creative Mornings, a worldwide creative community, hosts free virtual zoom gatherings daily from locations across the globe. 
• I Like Your Work podcast, hosted by artist and curator Erika b Hess, provides opportunities and resources centered around the weekly podcast interviews with creative people from painters and artists to collectors and curators. 

 

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In response to COVID-19, artists, curators, institutions and organizations have initiated virtual exhibitions, presentations, screenings, and curated newsletters, among other innovative approaches, welcoming the public to online platforms and opening dialogues on a range of topics. May 2020 CWA Picks present a number of initiatives that not only demonstrate ways in which social media channels and websites can be repurposed in light of social distancing measures currently in place; but most importantly emphasize the social role of the arts being a healing positive force in these unprecedented challenging times. May Picks focus on the power of the collective and mutual support in the context of questioning our being in the world. 

• Nottingham Contemporary, UK: 3D Online exhibition ‘Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance’, exploring a global history of resistance movement through a gendered perspective: https://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/whats-on/still-i-rise/  

• AutoZine ‘Friendship as a Form of Life’ on the importance of friendship: ‘We face each other without terms or convenient words, with nothing to assure us about the meaning of the movement that carries us toward each other. We have to invent, from A to Z, a relationship that is still formless, which is friendship…’: https://resonanceaudiodistro.org/2016/06/11/friendship-as-a-form-of-life-audiozine/  (Listen / Read / Print)

• Jackie Wang’s text ‘Oceanic Feeling & Communist Affect’, exploring the concept of oceanic feeling as a radical reorientation towards the world: https://friendship-as-a-form-of-life.tumblr.com/post/162453258727/friendship-as-a-form-of-life-friendship-as-a (Read / Print)

• Gasworks, a non-profit contemporary visual art organization working at the intersection between UK and international practices and debates, organizes online screenings. From May 11-17, 2020, Maryam Jafri, ‘Mouthfeel’, a short film investigating the politics of food production in the context of overconsumption: https://www.gasworks.org.uk/events/maryam-jafri-mouthfeel-online-screening/   

• Hauser & Wirth, founded in Zurich, an international modern and contemporary art gallery presents an online exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 1947 – 2007, exploring Bourgeois’s rich emotional terrain: https://vip-hauserwirth.com/louise-bourgeois-works-on-paper/ 

• An Instagram exhibition #ARTISTSINQUARANTINE created by @giadapellicari involving artists living in ‘confined red areas’ in Italy due to coronavirus pandemic: https://www.instagram.com/artistsinquarantine/?hl=en 

• Online platform How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?,  co-curated by Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, invites artists to exchange ideas at the time of current pandemic crisis: https://artatatimelikethis.com 

• Micol Hebron, Los Angeles based artist, organises ‘Feminist Friday – USA’. Now run via Zoom, this community event provides a platform for discussion of contemporary feminist issues: https://www.facebook.com/Feminist-Friday-USA-1722541601351749 

• The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), the only major museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women through the arts, makes available online resources celebrating women artists who are changing the world: https://nmwa.org/nmwa–at-home 

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for March below.

Lygia Clark, The Violoncellist (O Violoncelista), 1951
Oil on canvas, 105.5 x 81 cm
Private Collection
© Courtesy of “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association

Lygia Clark: Painting as an Experimental Field, 1948–1958

Guggenheim Bilbao
March 6 – May 24, 2020

This important exhibition examines the formative investigations of Lygia Clark (b. 1920, Belo Horizonte–d. 1988, Rio de Janeiro), the pioneering Brazilian artist and founding member of the avant-garde Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro, and places significant chronological emphasis on her primary transition from figuration to abstraction and major series of geometric and concrete abstractions between 1948-1958.  The exhibition traces the artist’s evolution in three organized sections: “The Early Years, 1948-1952”; “Geometric Abstraction, 1953-56”; and “Variation of Form: Modulating Space, 1957-58”.  In 1956, Clark delivered a keynote lecture and spoke of painting as an “experimental field.”  In her early experiments, she liberated the painting’s frame and explored space as an “organic and spatial line.”  Clark envisioned spatial divisions as elastic and indeterminate and reinvigorated the pure grid of Neo-Plasticism through bodily and “vital” surfaces, a process of restructuring the plane of the canvas as a locus of exchange with the viewer.  While much scholarly attention has been granted to her later therapeutic practices, Painting as an Experimental Field traces her formal painterly principles and early constructivist influences, ideas that will develop and mature in her profound contribution to Brazilian Neo-Concretism.

Gendering Protest: Deborah Castillo and Érika Ordosgoitti

Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Rutgers University – Mabel Smith Douglass Library,New Brunswick, New Jersey
January 21 – April 3, 2020

The exhibition features the work of two exiled Venezuelan artists, Deborah Castillo and Érika Ordosgoitti, who respond to the increasingly repressive government of Venezuela and question the rising nationalism, economic inequality, and worsening social problems. It is part of the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series and hosted by the Mabel Smith Douglass Library, the oldest continuous running exhibition space in the United States showcasing the work of emerging and established contemporary women artists. Castillo’s and Ordosgoitti’s artistic practice could be described as performance of protest. The female body featured in their work is imbued with agency and is able to effect social change. Their performative acts of disobedience and feminist social protests activate the body to challenge Venezuelan political regime and the country’s heteronormative patriarchal culture and canonical aesthetics.

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for December below.

…for Gloria Kisch

Gloria Kisch, …for Gloria, 2019, installation view. Courtesy: dieFirma, New York and Farzad Owrang

dieFirma, New York, New York
October 13, 2019 – January 5, 2020

The inaugural exhibition at dieFirma, a new gallery and arts space nestled in the bustling Bowery at 32A Cooper Square, New York, celebrates the life of multidisciplinary artist Gloria Kisch (1941-2014).  An impressive presentation reveals the range and significance of Kisch’s abstract sculptures and highlights her late series of metalwork constructions called Bells (2000-2003) and Flowers (2007-13); functional furniture and objects (benches and chairs); and early hard-edge paintings from the 1960s. Also displayed are ephemera from the artist’s extensive personal archive. A large body of drawings by British artist Jane Gifford accompanies the installation. Gifford turned to Kisch’s sculptures for inspiration and produced a collection of smaller watercolors that offer a fascinating interplay and homage; the gentle conversion of three-dimensional volumetric space through line and gesture encourages a subdued reciprocity between the two artists. Kisch’s metalwork equally invites multiple readings and comparisons to likeminded artists who crossed media and arbitrarily ignored traditional fine art, craft and design hierarchies. Utilizing hand-forged stainless steel, Kisch’s statuesque Bells take on a corporeal presence—linked geometric elements vertically hang, some extenuated and stretched, others widely berthed. But it is through their mythic presence that the viewer makes connections to sculptors who gloriously filled and emptied space, recalling the mobiles of Alexander Calder and totems of David Smith, the quasi-furniture of Isamu Noguchi, the calibrated wire constructions of Ruth Asawa or the scaled modular systems of Gego. Kisch’s series of wall-mounted Flowers bring a playful pop of color with their reflective metal petals and flexible use of materials. Kisch’s own history is equally as colorful.

For Neither Love Nor Money: Women’s Invisible Labor

San Marco Gallery in Archbishop Alemany Library, Dominican University, San Rafael, California
November 12, 2019 – January 17, 2020

Using real-life work data and personal narratives, artist Sawyer Rose highlights the pervasive inequalities working women face via visualization sculpture. Rose collects data herself from female-identifying workers from across the US, and translates it into large-scale installations that visualize the number of hours women log at paid and unpaid jobs, demonstrating the physical, emotional, and practical effects of disproportionate labor loads. With the installation, she photographs the women lifting and carrying her sculpture, visually bearing the real and physical burdens. Dawline, a teaching artist, teaches elementary school and balances multiple volunteer art tutoring positions. Rose’s installation for Dawline is dozens of gold and silver leafed objects hanging from the ceiling, made of linen, cotton, rope, gold and silver leaf, metal clasps and rings, wood, stones, acrylic, and enamel. Dawline is depicted in a photo next to the installation with the stones on her lap, representing the weight of both her paid and unpaid jobs. The accompanying text includes statistics around volunteerism, disproportionately falling on women. The multi-layered, educational, and visually driven exhibit, says the artist, “may not represent your life or your particular situation, but…definitely depicts the lives of many women you know and love, women who work with you or for you…The good news, though, is that everyone can reap the benefits of a gender-equitable workforce: increased Gross Domestic Product (GDP), more profitable businesses, and healthier, happier partners and children.”

Natalia LL: I Record Common Events

lokal_30, Warsaw, Poland
November 29, 2019 – January 24, 2020

The widely recognized 1969 essay by Carol Hanisch, an American feminist activist, entitled “The Personal Is Political,” was not known in communist Poland in 1970s. And yet, many women artists, including Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, known as Natalia LL, were using their bodies and most intimate surroundings to explore what it meant to be and become a woman. In her 1972 manifesto “Transformative Attitude,” Natalia LL wrote that “Art is in the process of becoming in every instant of reality,” and that she “records common events.” Since her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Poland, and in her artistic career spanning almost 50 years, Natalia LL has been using photography and film to investigate everyday bodily activities such as sleeping, eating, or speaking. Her works engage with issues concerning the rise of consumer culture and the fetishization of objects and bodies. She is known as a pioneer of feminist avant-garde in Poland and has become one of the first Polish women artists to be influential in the international feminist art movement of 1970s. The exhibition in lokal_30 features some of the key works of the artist alongside photographs which Natalia LL sent for an exhibition in Paramedia gallery in Berlin in 1974 and which have never been displayed in Poland.

16th International Triennial of Tapestry: Breaching Borders

Central Museum of Textiles, Łódź, Poland
October 5, 2019 – March 15, 2020

Łódź, a city in central Poland, has been cultivating its textile industry traditions since the 19th century. The International Trennial of Tapestry is the oldest and most important presentation of phenomena connected to the medium of textiles. For the first time in its history, the formula of the Triennial has been opened and artists themselves could apply to participate. It has also been enriched by the introduction of the role of the curator, Marta Kowalewska, and focus on an overarching key theme, which for the 16^th edition is “Breaching Borders.” The understanding of borders is multi-layered. Artists from 21 countries in 55 selected works explore the threats and fears marking our contemporary condition, historical references, and personal stories that question the concept of borders as sources of conflict and trauma. The theme also references textiles and their place as one of liberated arts on one hand, and their structure enabling interlacing and layering of meanings and perspectives. The exhibition includes works of many significant women artists, such as Dorte Jensen, Ola Kozioł, Lucy Brown, Lisa Palm, Caroline Achaintre, Agata Borowa, Dobrosława Kowalewska, Anne Wilson or Joanna Malinowska, among others. It also features the unique work titled Your Things, a 20-meter fabric created in the Center for Foreigners in Łuków, Poland by Chechen refugees Zaira Avtaeva, Zalina Tavgereeva, Liana Borczaszvilli, Makka Visengereeva, Khava Bashanova, and Alina Malcagova, who await international protection. The work was created as part of a mini-grant of the Feminist Fund implemented in cooperation with the For the Earth Association according to a concept developed by Pamela Bożek.

Margaret Jacobs: Steel Medicine

Boise Art Museum, Idaho
June 8, 2019 – April 26, 2020

Artist Margaret Jacobs couples her steel sculptures celebrating Indigenous culture with early twentieth century ironworking tools, exploring the tension and harmony between forces of nature and humans. Jacobs’ sculptures, such as Steel Medicine, depict medicinal plants with a strong aesthetic via the dark color and heavy materiality of the metal, complemented by the softness of the sinewy shadows of the sculpture on the wall, emphasizing too the resilience and fragility of nature. Jacobs, a member of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, created two new series, Steel Medicine and Survival Medicine, on view, especially for this exhibit. “My culture inspires me to create pieces charged with power, strength, and beauty,” writes the artist in her statement, and in turn, “I believe my work celebrates indigenous culture with a bold, powerful aesthetic.”