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.

October 2015

Dress/Shield
Lump Project
505 South Blount Street, Raleigh, NC 27601
October 2–31, 2015

Lump Project celebrates its twentieth anniversary in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Dress/Shield, an exhibition by six female artists whose identity as women underpin the work. Represented in the exhibition are: Leah Bailis, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Lee Delegard, Brooklyn, New York; Lydia Moyer, Covesville, Virginia; Molly Schafer, Chicago, Illinois; Tory Wright, Greenville, South Carolina; and Laura Sharpe Wilson, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Each artist has a history of showing at Lump, and the exhibition will feature diverse processes, including sculpture, textiles, video, photography, and works on paper. “This group show is an opportunity to see how the perception of those voices changes when they are in chorus and to explore the connections between the work of women artists who are disparate in geography and media.”

“Schafer and Wright respond to recent motherhood with drawing, photographs and intricate paper-cut (respectively) while Moyer frames the experience of being female through text-based work that references local and national politics. Bailis does so with quilts that double as full-body masks; Delegard uses painting and sculpture to explore relationships between desire, consumerism, and the body. Sharpe Wilson, whose practice is most often painting, expands on her nature-inspired work with an installation of newly created textiles referencing historical social concerns.”

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s–Now

Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s–Now
Mills College Art Museum
5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, CA 94613
September 16–December 13, 2015

The Mills College Art Museum explores the public practice by women artists from the 1970s to the present. The multimedia exhibition includes audio, documentation, ephemera, photography, prints, and video examining “the inherent politics and social conditions of creating art in public space,” and examining public works beyond monumental artworks.

“Public Works focuses on the often small but powerful temporary artistic interventions found online and in the urban environment. Through various tactics, the exhibition explores themes of public space, public expression, public action, public platforms, and public life through the evolving lens of participatory projects, socially engaged performance, and political action, among other media.”

Featured are the artists Amy Balkin, Tania Bruguera, Candy Chang, Minerva Cuevas, Agnes Denes, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, the Guerrilla Girls, Sharon Hayes, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Suzanne Lacy, Marie Lorenz, Susan O’Malley, Adrian Piper, Laurie Jo Reynolds and Tamms Year Ten, Favianna Rodriguez, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Stephanie Syjuco, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. New commissions include performances by Constance Hockaday and Jenifer K. Wofford, produced in collaboration with Southern Exposure (San Francisco, California). A full-color catalogue with texts by María del Carmen Carrión, Courtney Fink, Christian L. Frock, Leila Grothe, Stephanie Hanor, Meredith Johnson, and Tanya Zimbardo is available.

Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries
Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91103
September 26, 2015–January 3, 2016

The Armory Center for the Arts features the performance artist Faith Wilding’s first retrospective from her studio practice spanning the past forty years. Highlights include works on paper, including drawings, watercolors, collage, and paintings. The exhibition focuses on themes of “becoming,” with Wilding’s work exploring pivotal moments between private and public.

“Viewed together in this exhibition, her work makes a powerful impression about psychological and physical transition and transformation. In the depiction of the chrysalis and the embryo, for example, gestation is suggested, while in imagery of tears, wounds, and ‘recombinant’ bodies, emergence and materialization are pronounced. The sum of these parts provides a unique account of how themes of emergence were central to Wilding’s articulation of feminism, and her own reflections on a childhood growing up in an intentional Christian commune.”
Wilding, a prominent in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program, in Fresno, California, in 1970, and later at California Institute of the Arts, was also a contributor to the famous Womanhouse exhibition housed in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles in 1972, where she performed Waiting.

The traveling exhibition is organized by Threewalls in Chicago, Illinois. Concurrently OxyArts Gallery at Occidental College will present selections from Wilding’s archive that document her work with the collaborative research and performance group subRosa, rare videos of performances made throughout her career, and papers and publications dating from her participation in the feminist art movement in the 1970s.

Women’s Art Society II
MOSTYN
Galleries 2 + 3, 12 Vaughan Street, Llandudno LL30 1AB, Wales, UK
July 18–November 1, 2015

MOSTYN presents the second edition of Women’s Art Society. Curated by Adam Carr, Women’s Art Society II is the fourth in a series of exhibitions that reflects on the rich heritage and history of the gallery building. Each exhibition in the series will examine the history of MOSTYN and its building, and how that history is tied to events beyond its context locally, nationally and internationally. With the aim to update the spirit of the original Ladies’ Art Society, this particular exhibitions discusses the history of MOSTYN and its building, while bridging the divide between past and present.

Women’s Art Society II follows an exhibition presented in October 2013 that took as its starting point the gallery’s founding in 1902. Mostyn Art Gallery was commissioned by Lady Augusta Mostyn and the first gallery in the world built specifically as a home for the presentation of artwork by female artists, in this case the work of the Gwynedd Ladies’ Art Society, who were denied membership of male-dominated local art societies on the basis of their gender. Women’s Art Society II continues the spirit of the original Ladies’ Art Society, inviting nine internationally active female artists to introduce work in the gallery space more than one hundred years later. This exhibition is also a survey of the discipline of painting today since the works in display ranges of approaches, styles, and conceptual concerns about the continued relevance of painting.

The exhibition includes works by Cornelia Baltes, Sol Calero, Ditte Gantriis, Lydia Gifford, May Hands, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Shani Rhys James, and Caragh Thuring. Artworks on view are linked to the history of the original society by the way in which they examine the politics of gender, identity, and regulation, and aspects of exclusion and prejudice.

Shahzia Sikander: Parallax
Guggenheim Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2, 48009 Bilbao, Spain
July 16–November 22, 2015

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s film and video room is currently inhabited by Parallax, Shahzia Sikander’s three-channel animation work. The installation, composed of hundreds of digitally animated images, combines abstract, representational, and textual forms that coexist and urge for domination. Along the moving images, human voices recite in Arabic six poems written specifically for the video on subjects that oscillate from regional historic context to reflections on human nature. In fact, that fluctuation reflects Parallax’s inspiration by the idea of conflict and control. Focused on the geostrategic position of the Strait of Hormuz and the area’s historical power tensions, such concepts emerge as the core themes of a perspective stretching from modern history to the postcolonial period. Underpinning the narrative is Sikander’s interest in paradox, societies in flux, and formal and visual disruption as a means to cultivate new associations.

The Pakistani-born American artist Shahzia Sikander (1969) is best known as a pioneer in translating the formal constructs of Indo-Persian miniature painting in a variety of formats and mediums in contemporary art, including video, animation, and mural, as well as for her collaborations with other artists.

Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?
Blaffer Art Museum
University of Houston, 120 Fine Arts Building, Houston, TX 77204
September 26–December 19, 2015

Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is the first solo museum exhibition of the British-Nigerian artist Zina Saro-Wiwa. It will open at Blaffer Art Museum in September 2015 and travel to the Krannert Art Museum in 2016.

Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria, 1976) has left a journalism background to change (and challenge) the way the world saw Africa. This is made evident in the new photographs, video, and a sound installation produced in southeastern Nigeria from 2013 to 2015. The project engages Niger Delta region residents both as subjects and collaborators and reflects the complex and expressive ways in which people live in an area historically fraught with the politics of energy, labor, and land, while making visible the cultural, spiritual, and emotional powers propelling the region, addressing also the global circulation of energy capital.

Being the artist’s current interest focused in mapping emotional landscapes, Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? unfolds a narrative device that renders environmental and emotional ecosystems as inseparable. Through the exploration of highly personal experiences and a carefully recorded choreography, Saro-Wiwa makes tangible the space between internal experience and outward performance. The exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food, and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art’s capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism. The artist reflects on spirit, emotion, and culture at the center of the conversation by titling the exhibition with a phrase from a private conversation between her and her father, the late writer, environmentalist, and human rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa.

For the Blaffer Art Museum, Saro-Wiwa will also stage a feast performance called The Mangrove Banquet: A love letter to the Niger Delta, offering her guests an opportunity to ingest the region’s agricultural bounty, “an experience designed to elicit the triumph of nature, imagination and the feminine over political despair.”

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.

September 2015

Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World
Tate Britain
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, United Kingdom
June 24–October 25, 2015

Tate Britain presents Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World, a retrospective of one of the UK’s most famous artists and leader of a new generation of sculptors. Sculpture for a Modern World, the first major exhibition of Hepworth in London in the last fifty years, traces the extensive practice of the artist, offering novel ways of thinking about her art. The exhibition also evidences her achievements and international recognition, while playing around different spaces in which Hepworth presented her work, such as the reconstruction in the gallery of a modernist structure that was the artist’s “ideal” environment.

Hepworth (Yorkshire, 1903) has lived in Cornwall since 1939. Being associated with the “art of St Ives,” she began to make sculptures that translated her experience of the landscape. The exhibition features more than one hundred works that unveil her extensive creative practice. The highlights include a quartet of African hardwood pieces from her postwar period; Pelagos, her celebrated elm carving inspired by the Cornish coast, as well as drawings, collages, films, rarely seen textiles, and her fascinating photographs that have never been seen in public before.

From her earliest carvings to the imposing bronze pieces of the sixties, this major retrospective explores the progression of the artist’s abstract style, showcasing many of Hepworth’s iconic sculptures that helped to define modernism in the twentieth century. As the art critic Alastair Sooke stated: “the exhibition benefits from its decision to separate Hepworth’s sculptures from those of her friend and rival Henry Moore, with whom she is all too often compared. In this case, quite refreshingly, Hepworth’s work is allowed to breathe on its own terms.”

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola

Grete Stern. From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
May 17–October 4, 2015

The Museum of Modern Art presents From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola at the Edward Steichen Photography Galleries. This is the first major exhibition to focus on the work of two leading figures of avant-garde Argentinean photography, Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola. The couple met at the Bauhaus in 1932 and begun a creative life together. Among the rising threat of the Nazi powers in 1933, they fled Germany to London, and in 1935 embarked to Buenos Aires. Having been established themselves on both sides of the Atlantic, they played a key role in the arrival of modern photography in Argentina.

The exhibition begins in the late 1920s with each artist’s initial ventures into photography and typographic design, followed by a section focused on the extensive oeuvre of each artist. In 1928, Stern (born in Germany, 1904) met Ellen Auerbach at Walter Peterhans’s studio. Peterhans was Stern’s tutor, about to become head of photography at the Bauhaus.  Grete and Ellen become friends and opened ringl + pit, a pioneering collaborative studio specializing in portraiture and advertising. Named after their childhood nicknames, the duo embraced commercial and avant-garde design to create protofeminist works and advertisements, using photomontage in their imagery to challenge the stereotypical presentations of women in advertising.

The highlights of Stern’s individual practice include the series Sueños (Dreams) that the artist produced between 1949 and early 1950s. This series of photomontages, commissioned as a contribution to the then-popular women’s magazine Idilio, reflects how psychoanalysis had captured the Argentinean imagination and infiltrated in popular culture. However, Stern opted to resist psychoanalyst interpretations, instead using the platform to comment on women’s unfulfilled promises and objectification at the Peronist society of the time.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Bete & Deise
Brazilian Screening Tour
Casa do Povo, São Paulo; Fundaj – Arte Contemporânea Recife; Capacete, Museum of Modern Art and Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro
August 5–September 30, 2015

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution has commissioned the Rotterdam-based artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s film Bete & Deise- Brazilian Tour (2012) to be presented in several venues in São Paulo, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro during August and September. The screenings will be accompanied by conversations with the artist and invited guests, including the protagonists of the film, Bete Mendes and Deise Tigrona, who are special guests at the presentation in MAM Rio.

Van Oldenborgh (born 1962) addresses modern-day social issues in exceptional, authoritative, and multilayered works. She proposes a unique and subtle language to build a dialogue between a precisely selected social or historical theme, a space, and a film or photograph. Bete & Deise stages an encounter between two women in a building under construction in Rio de Janeiro. The actress Mendes and the Baile funk singer Tigrona have—each in their own way—given meaning to the idea of a public voice. Together these women talk about the use of their voice and their positions in the public sphere, allowing for the contradictions they each carry within themselves to surface, the artists confront us with considerations on the relation between cultural production and politics and the potential power that is generated when public issues intersect with the personal.

Shelley Spector: Keep the Home Fires Burning
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Perelman Building, 2525 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19130
March 7–September 24, 2015

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Keep the Home Fires Burning by the Philadelphia-based and community-engaged artist Shelley Spector. Spector (born 1960) was invited by the curator Dilys Blum to explore the museum’s collection of textiles and create an installation of new artwork. Her moving response became Keep the Home Fires Burning, a walk-through presentation of wood- and textile-based sculpture that reflects on the universal quest for hope, home, and connectedness.

The initial inspiration for the exhibition is a lively hand-stitched embroidered work decorated with images of a home, birds, tulips, trees, and couples designed by the folk art historian Frances Lichten and sewn by her mother in 1943. The piece was later donated to the museum by the artist Katherine Milhous, who was Lichten’s companion for four decades. Spector has re-created it in the exhibition by suspending large sculptures amid freestanding works, made from discarded second-hand clothing and furniture, with the help of her mother, Anita, who has—like did Lichten’s—carefully cleaned, deconstructed, and organized the material to be transformed into sculpture by the artist. Works in Keep the Home Fires Burning—a phrase that Spector found in a letter from Milhous to Lichten—spans from large, flowerlike structures and a birdcage to tomato-shaped pincushions and wood-and-fabric lions. The display also includes works dedicated to the couple: The Egg Tree (a nod to an award-winning children’s book by Milhous) and Frances Loves Katherine, which features two figures in front of a house inscribed with the words “give sunshine to others.”

Ana Mendieta, Untitled: Silueta Series, 1978, Super 8 film, color, silent (artwork © Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection)

Ana Mendieta: Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta
Katherine E. Nash Gallery
Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota, 401 21st Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN
September 15–December 12, 2015
Program: September 19, 2015, 7:00 PM, followed by a reception from 8:00 to 10:00 PM

The unique exhibition at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery on Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-born artist who was sent to the United States as a child in 1961 as part of Operation Peter Pan, features twenty-one films by Mendieta, as well as a selection of her photographic work and a documentary short on the artist by the producer Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, the artist’s niece.

“Ana Mendieta was influenced by and interested in the artistic movements of her time, including Minimalism, earth art, performance art, and feminist art as well as the historical and spiritual legacies of many cultures, ancient and modern,” the exhibition statement says. Mendieta’s films touch on subjects from sexual assault in Moffitt Building Piece and Sweating Blood, which were made in response to the sexual assault and murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, a student at the University of Iowa, where Mendieta also matriculated, to films made in Mexico, such as Silueta del Laberinto and Burial Pyramid, developing her “earth-body” esthetic, as she termed the melding of sculpture, earth art, and performance.

“Mendieta’s artwork speaks powerfully to a wide diversity of audiences across the generations because a sustained and unflinching investigation of what it means to be human can be found at the core of her work.”

The program begins on September 19 with comments on Mendieta’s artistic legacy by her sister Raquelín Mendieta, her niece Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Mary Sabbatino of Galerie Lelong. Other programs and discussions on the role of the artist’s prolific career follow through the exhibition.

Judy Chicago: Star Cunts & Other Attractions
Riflemaker Gallery
79 Beak Street, London
September 14–December 31, 2015

The pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago will have concurrent exhibitions in London this fall. Included is a series of never-before-seen works in Star Cunts & Other Attractions at Riflemaker. The solo show of Chicago’s archival work from the 1960s and 1970s “celebrates the visual language and core imagery of Judy Chicago’s minimalist and early feminist work.” Included are a suite of paintings and early sculpture work. Featured will be the Star Cunts series from 1969. The series, a set of prismacolor geometric shapes, suggests a sphincter. Also on exhibit will be test plates from The Dinner Party, which permanently lives at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The test plates attest to the time Chicago invested in her work through practice of ceramic decoration.

While the exhibition at Riflemaker is open, Chicago will also have work in the Tate Modern exhibition The World Goes Pop, opening on September 17, 2015. On view together for the first time will be her Car Hood series from the mid-1960s, which is constructed of car hoods spray-painted in bold colors and depicting male and female forms—a reflection on the Los Angeles car scene of the time.

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.

August 2015

Beverly Semmes: Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP)
Weatherspoon Art Museum
Bob and Lissa Shelley McDowell Gallery, University of North Carolina, 500 Tate Street, Greensboro, NC 27413
May 24–September 6, 2015

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro presents the Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP) by the New York artist Beverly Semmes. The exhibition features drawings, ceramics, suspended and illuminated glass sculpture, and video work.

“The metaphors and imagery of Beverly Semmes’s art typically flow in this direction: from the female body and out into the landscape,” Ingrid Schaffner wrote in the 2011 exhibition catalogue from Rowan University Art Gallery. This is noticeably experienced through the large fabric sculpture, Buried Treasure, on view at the Weatherspoon. Buried Treasure, made of black crushed velvet, has one arm of the dress snaking its way off the wall and across the floor of the gallery, enveloping the active space. Continuing to connect mediums in space, her video, Kick, depicts Semmes kicking a reddish-pink potato across icy terrain, the color reflective of the pot sculptures dotting the gallery landscape.

“Her totemic and abstract works create alternative lenses from which to see the body in relationship to domestic or natural landscapes,” says the Weatherspoon exhibition description. In her works on paper, Semmes manipulates photographs in vintage “gentlemen” magazines, as she calls them, covering various parts of the depicted female bodies in ink to perform “a personal act of feminist censorship, blotting out the literal to leave behind abstract, nuanced images that speak in a different voice.”

Semmes will be at the Weatherspoon on Thursday, September 3, 2015, at 6:00 PM for an artist’s talk.

Linda Nochlin: Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader
Edited by Maura Reilly
Recent book release

In addition to two new essays in this recently released volume, Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, readers are treated to twenty-nine of Nochlin’s essays over her career, including “Women Artists after the French Revolution” and “Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History.”

The new anthology includes the provocative essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”—a continuing relevant question. In May of this year, ARTnews revisited Nochlin’s groundbreaking 1971 essay (originally published in ARTnews), exploring women in the arts today, and including eight contemporary artists replies to Nochlin’s essay. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the journalist Chris Kraus acclaims, “Nochlin writes with a dazzling mix of erudition and candor, but what’s most remarkable about her work is that it’s driven by an exhaustive investigation as to why and how certain artworks have been meaningful to her.”

Presenting artist monographs alongside the essays, the volume collects Nochlin’s writings on artists such as Mary Cassatt, Louise Bourgeois, Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Miwa Yanagi, and Sophie Calle, written in a voice that feels as contemporary as when they first appeared. Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader is published by Thames and Hudson and edited by Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

A. L. Steiner: Come & Go
Blum and Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034
July 2–August 22, 2015

The press release from Blum and Poe presents the new exhibition Come & Go by the artist A. L. Steiner in dramatic fashion: “Between the interlude of state-sanctioned exploitation and violence, the Amerikkkin project of mass incarceration and slavery, the uncertain future of California’s viability, and planetary implosion, A. L. Steiner presents an overview of her photo archive from 1995–2015.”

Despite the chance of planetary implosion, the exhibition by Steiner is a constructed “relaxing space” dedicated to the viewing of print work. Sparsely covered white walls are adorned only with a limited number of photographs and collages, while attention in the gallery is focused on a wooden desk and file system. Through the installation, and with an archivist on hand daily, the audience is encouraged to explore twenty years of Steiner’s work.

“A. L. Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer eco-feminist androgyne,” her website bio states.

In addition to the exhibition, Steiner has collaborated with a “revolving cast of subversives and interlocutors,” including a collaboration with Shinichiro Okuda/WAKA WAKA and additional live performances by Brave Accepter, Jibade-Khalil Huffman on August 15, and YACHT on August 22; and an archivist to guide viewers daily, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM and 2:00–6:00 PM.

Women Make Movies: 2015 Catalogue
Online and Print Resource

This thirty-two-page special-edition catalogue is the first in ten years released by Women Make Movies. Focused on their collection, the catalogue includes briefs and data on classics that focus on feminism and gender studies as well as films from diverse regions from across the globe. Highlighted are Academy Award winners such as Saving Face, “a harshly realistic view of violence against women in South Asia,” and new releases, Regarding Susan Sontag and Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth—illuminating portraits of the literary giants.

The catalogue is meant to facilitate rental or purchasing access to the Women Make Movies holdings. Established in 1972, Women Make Movies is a “multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization, which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.” They provide distribution services and production assistance programs, while facilitating feminist media, including a special emphasis to support work by women of color.

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019-5497
May 17–September 7, 2015

The Museum of Modern Art presents the first One Woman exhibition dedicated to the work of Yoko Ono. This retrospective is a survey of the decisive decade that led up to Ono’s unauthorized exhibition (One Woman Show, Museum of Modern [F] art, 1971), revalorizing one of the most misunderstood artists of the last sixty years.

Featuring Ono’s most celebrated pieces between 1960 and 1971, the exhibition brings together approximately 125 of Ono’s early objects, works on paper, installations, performances, audio recordings, and films, alongside rarely seen archival materials. During these years, Ono (born in Tokyo, 1933) moved between New York, Tokyo, and London. A pioneer in the international development of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art, Ono was then creating artworks that could exist as mere instructions, meant to be executed once, multiple times, or none. Since her early projects are often based on verbal or written instructions, the exhibited pieces focus in the participation on viewers, where the artist generously opens up to their diverse responses to “complete” her pieces, or perhaps towards a sense beyond a One-Woman proposal, but rather an invitation to a collaborative creativity.

Among the exhibited pieces to be highlighted are Grapefruit (1964), Ono’s influential book of instructions; the typescript for which is displayed here page by page—consisted of nothing but terse, open-ended instructions for readers to follow—and Half-A-Room (1967), an installation of bisected, incomplete, white-painted domestic objects. The film Cut Piece (1964), documentation of one of Ono’s seminal performances, is also on view. Here, Ono confronted issues of gender, class, and cultural identity by asking viewers to cut away pieces of her clothing as she sat quietly on stage. Cut Piece remains one of the most disturbing works of performance art of the 1960s, that stands as a foundation of feminist and body-centered art.

A Feminist Fiber Art Exhibition
Traveling Exhibition and Call for participation
First venue opens August 14, 2015

Organized by Iris Nectar Studio, this DIY feminist art exhibition will feature female artists from around the world whose practice focus on fiber art. The project will take the form of an art crawl throughout the Boston area, with an opening on August 14. The project was inspired by the “Guerrilla Girls’ statistics” of women underrepresented in the art world. Originally envisioned as a little exhibit to take place in a single venue for a few weeks, the initiative was transformed into a traveling exhibition using alternative art spaces all across the greater Boston area because of overwhelming response and support. The exhibition will evolve slightly, with a different lineup of artists in each new space.

The Feminist Fiber Art Exhibition will feature artwork created by artists that identify as female. The constantly growing collection include the witty—knitting from the Icelandic artist Ýrúrarí, the historic and esoterically influenced—as well as work with strong female characters embroided by Alaina Varrone (New Haven, Connecticut), “pubism” pieces by Sally Hewitt (England), and “retex” (recycled textile) sculptures from the London-based German artist Jess de Wahls. The project online also features a zine, a blog, and a call for participation.

Michelle Stuart: Topographies: Drawings & Photographic Works 1968–2015
Marc Selwyn Fine Art
9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA 90212
July 18–September 5, 2015

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Topographies: Drawings & Photographic Works 1968–2015, an exhibition by the New York–based artist Michelle Stuart. Stuart (b. Los Angeles, 1933) is a multidisciplinary artist best known for a rich and diverse practice, including site-specific earth works, intimate drawings, multimedia installations, paintings, sculpture, and photographs, all centered on a lifelong interest in the natural world and the cosmos. Her work questions conventional notions of drawing as it merges performative rubbing and frottage gestures with elements of the landscape itself. Stuart brings forth imagery by both adding natural materials and revealing the texture of the earth, combining the fundamentals of both drawing and photography.

Each work is a unique meditation on the nature of memory, digitally printed on sheets of archival paper. The individual panels feature untouched and altered elements, including appropriated vintage images and her own photographs, combined in a filmic manner. These dreamlike recollections of her past not only continue her life-long artistic engagement with specific locations, but also affirm the significance of place as a unique source of memory.

The exhibition highlights include #9 Zen, an iconic scroll that will be accompanied by a selection of works on paper, ranging from early collages such as Traces to more recent indexical works in which earth and seeds are pressed and merged onto her paper supports. The second gallery features a selection of her cinematic photographs, including the walk-about narratives of The Beginning, Islas Encantadas,and Past Shadows, Orkney.

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.

July 2015

Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell: I’m Not Myself At All
Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Queen’s University, 36 University Avenue, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6
May 2–August 9, 2015

In I’m Not Myself At All, the artists Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell present an “exuberant revision of sexual identity and domesticity.” The multimedia body of work on exhibit at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University contains a multitude of forms and mediums, such as soft-sculpture dolls, wallpaper, crochet spider webs, needlepoint drawings, and papier–mâché.

Referring to the dolls in the exhibition catalogue, the theorist Heather Love writes, “the female body will not be cleaned up in this queer future—it will arrive trailing its effluvia: bodily fluids, odours, patches of fur, cellulite, granny panties, shag, that sucking sound.”

The artists present an oversized self-representation through amplification of the dolls genitalia, blown-up needlepoint patterned wallpaper, and a gigantic papier–mâché pink highlighter against a backdrop of feminist texts, “raising what curator Sarah E. K. Smith identifies as ‘potentiality, belonging and representation,’” via discarded feminist pasts.

Mitchell and Logue run the Feminist Art Gallery (FAG) in Toronto, which Mitchell describes on her website as “a response, a process, a site, a protest, an outcry, an exhibition, a performance, an economy, a conceptual framework, a place and an opportunity.”

Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, TX 77006
April 18–August 2, 2015

Marilyn Minter’s exhibition Pretty/Dirty at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston “vividly manifest[s] our culture’s complex and contradictory emotions around the feminine body and beauty.” The exhibition spans Minter’s career from earlier works such as Coral Ridge Towers, of her “drug-addled mother,” to her 2014 video Smash, with “large female feet in bejeweled high-heeled shoes … dancing, sliding across the floor and smashing glass—all in Minter’s signature silver liquid.”

As a painter, photographer, and video artist, Minter offers a counterdialogue to the fashion industry, whose hypersearch for perfection and beauty are revealed in the artist’s own search for the all too human physical imperfections. “It is way too easy to criticize the fashion industry,” Minter said in her artist talk.

“Minter offers a smart woman’s critical look at issues that are otherwise presented by men for female consumption,” states the exhibition press release. “Minter shows the dual nature and slight imperfections of herself and her fellow woman, finding that true allure comes from the sensuality of imperfections.” But while Minter’s work sometimes calls attention to imperfection, there is a “pleasure rubric” in the exhibition, as Bill Arning calls his discussion with Minter. “I know pleasure exists,” Minter says, “I have it too when I look at these images.”

On view through August 2, 2015, are over twenty-five paintings from 1976 through 2013, three video works, and photographs exploring her development as an artist. The exhibition was organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. An artist’s talk with Minter, along with Arning, Elissa Auther, and Linda Yablonsky, is available online.

Installation view of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition Verses After Dusk at the Serpentine Gallery (June 2–September 13, 2015) in London (artwork © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; photograph © readsreads.info)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk
Serpentine Galleries
Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
June 2–September 13, 2015

The Serpentine Galleries present Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk, the first major solo exhibition by the London-born artist. Yiadom-Boakye, born in 1977 from Ghanaian parents, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013. Her paintings explore figures that appear to exist outside a specific time and place. These subjects are all fictitious and drawn from memory or scrapbooks. The artist presents her “suggestions of people,” as she once put it, absent of background, or landscapes, or objects, freeing them from the restrictions of definite time, location, age, and even gender. Her characters may be presented in absence of context, but they are accompanied with enigmatic titles that encourages viewers to construct their own narratives and search a dialogue with the artist’s “poetic secrecy.”

Verses After Dusk is a survey of the artist’ recent work, presenting a comprehensive range of painterly techniques in a series that raises timeless questions of identity as well as representation in art, bringing awareness to the failings of such matters throughout art history. While the artist plays with the influence and references to eighteenth and nineteenth century masters such as Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, and Éduoard Manet, she deconstructs them and reconstructs the meaning, challenging the representation of black portraiture in the canon of art history. The display features exclusively black figures, pointing out the absence of references in the representation of black history in the canon of Western art.

Between the works on display, Yes Officer, No Officer (2008) unravels Manet’s famous avant-garde painting Olympia (1863). But in this case, Yiadom-Boakye substitutes the reclining nude female prostitute with a black man and completely deletes the black female servant from the background. Along an impressive collection of expressive paintings, the exhibition includes ten new etchings and introduces the artist’s less-known writings, published in occasion of the exhibition.

Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo / Evidence
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Fourth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
May 1–November 1, 2015

Hosted at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum presents Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo / Evidence. The exhibition is the most comprehensive museum presentation by the artist to date, in which the artist interlocks photography, video, and installation with human-rights activism.

Isibonelo/Evidence features several of the artist’s ongoing projects about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) communities, both in her home country of South Africa and abroad. The display includes eighty-seven works created between 2006 and 2014, including Muholi’s celebrated Faces and Phases portrait series, which uses firsthand accounts to speak to the experience of living in a country that constitutionally protects the rights of LGBTI people but often fails to defend them from targeted violence. In this series, and in an attempt to archive an “invisible” community, Muholi photographed around three hundred South African lesbians against plain or patterned backgrounds. Her compelling and undeniably powerful black-and-white portraits have infinite depth that allows the translation of haunting stories through a single look. The exhibition also includes the new series Weddings and the video Being Scene, which focus on love, intimacy, and daily life within the artist’s own community.

Muholi, born in 1972 in Durban at the height of apartheid, has developed for more than a decade a visual record of black lesbians in her home country, bringing visibility to communities who, although same-sex marriage has been legalized in 2006, continue to undergo hate crimes, stigma, and remain victims of “curative rape.” Through a work that claims her full citizenship as a South African female photographer who identifies as black, and also as a lesbian, the artist express her search of the deserved recognition, respect, and validation that mark and trace our existence.

Cover the issue 8 of Shotgun Seamstress

Osa Atoe: Shotgun Seamstress
Online and Print Zine

“I’m a punk and a feminist,” Osa Atoe declares on Shotgun Seamstress, her blog and fanzine the tagline describes as “old maximum rocknroll columns + new black punk rock thoughts.” In her blog post of March 24, 2015, “I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism” (which was also the name of a panel Atoe was invited to speak on at the Elizabeth A. Sackler for Feminist Art on March 12, 2015), she explains her roots in feminism and punk as well as the birth of Shotgun Seamstress in 2006. “I had a head full of feminist theory that I had acquired on my own, through my community and from school—including the very useful concept of intersecting identities … and I felt that any art I made should also be political.”

“The intersection of punk and radical politics felt natural to me,” Atoe says. Inspired by Riot Grrrl, Cometbus, and especially the zine Evolution of a Race Riot, Atoe says she set out to celebrate black punk identity within a predominantly white punk scene “that was constantly, but awkwardly attempting to address its own racism.” Atoe’s zine is not about critique, however. As she explains of her first issue, “I didn’t really talk about feminism so much, it just was feminist in its approach” (emphasis by Atoe).

You can see the full panel discussion “I Will Resist With Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism” with Atoe and other panelists online. Printed copies of Shotgun Seamstress are available from Mend My Dress Press.

Agnes Gund: Fame, Fortune, and the Female Artist
Five Points Gallery, 33 Main Street, Torrington, CT
July 10 at 7:00 PM

Five Points Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming lecture by Agnes Gund, a renowned philanthropist, civic leader, and devoted supporter of women’s issues. Gund, a president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art and chair of its International Council, will speak on “Fame, Fortune, and the Female Artist.” The talk will be free and open to the public on a first-come first-served basis. Five Points Gallery is a nonprofit fine art gallery showcasing professional regional and national visual artists in order to foster an understanding and appreciation of contemporary art in the community.

House, Work, Artwork: Feminism and Art History’s New Domesticities
University of Birmingham, UK
July 3–4, 2015

This conference is motivated by the premise that it is appropriate for feminist art history to revisit and newly configure theoretical, methodological, and political debate around modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary artistic practice in relation to the domestic. The debate is particularly timely in the light of art and art history’s “new” domesticities. These include queer art history’s turn toward the domestic as a site for imagining, making, and inhabiting space within or without the heteronormative, and recent art-historical and curatorial projects focusing on modern and contemporary art practice and the home—but in which the question of feminism is downplayed in favor of more generalized concepts of subversion, labor, and belonging. The keynote speakers are: Mignon Nixon from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and Julia Bryan-Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley. For further information, contact Francesca Berry, Department of Art History, Film, and Visual Studies, University of Birmingham; and Jo Applin, Department of History of Art, University of York.