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.

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.

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

June 2015

Poster image for Bluestocking Film Series 2015

Bluestocking Film Series 2015
SPACE Gallery
538 Congress Street, Portland, ME 04101
July 17–18, 2015

Founded in 2011 by the director and independent filmmaker Kate Kaminski, the Bluestocking Film Series promotes filmmakers who “place female protagonists front and center.” As explained in their mission statement, they “encourage and promote production of narratives driven by strong, complex female protagonists, characters who are as fully-developed, heroic, complex and flawed as their male counterparts,” all this with a preference for “well-structured, highly visual, cutting edge, provocative films, especially ones that explore the plurality and variety of women’s relationships.”

The series focuses on narrative films more than documentaries, and each accepted film must also pass the Bechdel Test. This year an estimated fourteen to sixteen films will be screening over two nights and one afternoon at the SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine. A special afternoon program, free for low-income girls, was added after Bluestocking received a number of strong films addressing issues of adolescence and coming of age, Kaminiski said. The Irish filmmaker Maureen O’Connell will also join the festival in Maine for the US premiere of her film, Girls.

The Bluestocking Film Series issued a call to filmmakers this year in their Blue Collar Heroine Challenge, seeking films that spotlight the lives of working-class women. “Truly diverse representations of women wage earners who are competent, quick-witted, and enterprising are practically taboo,” Kaminski explained. The challenge was delivered to help fill this void while portraying women who work in skilled manual-labor jobs, including “pink collar” jobs, and in many ways “an ordinary heroine.” Unfortunately, Kaminiski said, they received no films that met the criteria 100 percent. “The fact is, these films may not yet exist,” she said, “and this is the reason why we do.”

Reductress
Online Satirical Women’s Magazine

“The mission of Reductress is to take on the outdated perspectives and condescending tone of popular women’s media, through the eyes of the funniest women in comedy today,” begins the about page on the Reductress website. “Also, we want people to think we’re pretty.” Begun in 2013 by the comedians Beth Newell and Sarah Pappalardo, the online “news” magazine takes aim at all subjects, from news to entertainment, love, sex, and a category called “womanspiration.”

Headlines subtly and not-so-subtly jab at a breadth of issues. Perform a quick search for art, museum, or films and their titles and one will find the art and film industry is not immune to their satire. Titles include: “New Movie Has Women In It,” “Secret Colony of Female Directors Found in a Remote Cave,” “Slave To The Night: Dafna Remembers Art Basel,” “MPAA Gives Film NC-17 Rating for Actress’s Graphic Enjoyment of Dessert,” and (but not limited to) “Date Night Ideas That Will Lead to an Explosive Argument,” which includes the helpful paragraph titled “A Scream-Fight at a Museum.”

Only a short two years into online publication, the authors are adjusting to the increasing talk of feminism in mainstream media. In an interview with the Daily Beast from May 3, 2015, Pappalardo is quoted, “all of a sudden the magazines that we were parodying are talking about feminism and taking it seriously.” But, she says, these are attempts “to be relevant in feminism and co-opt the movement, while still propagating the same messages that make us feel inadequate.”

Milcah Bassel: Father Tongue
Kniznick Gallery
Brandeis University, Women’s Studies Research Center, Epstein Building, 515 South Street, Waltham, MA 02453
April 13–July 16, 2015

The Kniznick Gallery in the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University features the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute artist-in-residence Milcah Bassel and her work, Father Tongue. The large-scale wall drawings produced at the gallery are based on five letters of the Hebrew alphabet, exploring the “patriarchal roots of this ancient square alphabet through a personal, feminist, and abstract lens.” Bassel, who was raised in Israel, describes her multidisciplinary work as “an experiential investigation of body-space relations incorporating installation, hand-made objects, drawing, photography, video and performance.”

In Father Tongue, Basel explains in an interview with the Brandeis University student newspaper, the Justice, she chose to revisit five specific letters because they are all constructed of right angles and often used frequently as building blocks in Hebrew. As a child, Basel said, her earliest experiences with the alphabet were watching her father, a Jewish scribe, copy letters. This dominantly visual experience, coupled with her career as an artist and transition from an Orthodox family into a secular background, has allowed her, as Basel expressed, to “reclaim the alphabet for myself.”

Basel’s installation treats the space as if the audience is reading Hebrew, from right to left, compiling the five letters in a repetitive, but recognizable pattern. For audiences that read Hebrew this arrangement maintains the relationship to the language, while for others it remains purely within the visual realm.

A video of the installation is available on the WSRC Facebook page.

Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft, and Design, Midcentury and Today
Museum of Art and Design
2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
April 28–September 27, 2015

The Museum of Art and Design (MAD) presents Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft, and Design, Midcentury and Today, an exhibition that position women at the center of the midcentury narrative unveiling their meaningful contributions to modernism in postwar visual culture. As the exhibition curator Jennifer Scanlan states, “Through Pathmakers, MAD aims to expand the historical view of the postwar period, to showcase important artists and designers, and to introduce names that have been overlooked.”

In the 1950s and 1960s women had a significant impact in the use of alternative materials such as textiles, ceramics, and metals, making of craft and design media an important professional pathway. Pioneering women achieved success and international recognition, establishing a model of professional identity for future generations of women.

Pathmakers features more than one hundred works from a group that had a significant impact as innovative designers, artists, and educators, and that came to maturity along with the Museum of Arts and Design itself, which was founded in 1956 as the center of the emerging American modern craft movement. The exhibition includes contributions of European émigrés, such as Anni Albers and Maija Grotell, and highlights Ruth Asawa’s singular installation of hanging sculptures, Marianne Strengell’s Forecast Rug (a commissioned piece by the Aluminum Company of America that aimed to bring this industrial material into the home market), a wide selection of Eva Zeisel’s designs, Margaret Tafoya’s “bear paw vessels” (which merge traditional Pueblo ceramic techniques with contemporary form), and Gabriel A. Maher’s DE___SIGN, in which the artist looks at stereotypically male and female posture and clothing.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue for Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG United Kingdom
April 15–August 9, 2015

Tate Modern presents the first retrospective of the pioneer of abstraction Sonia Delaunay in the United Kingdom. The exhibition explores the breath of Delaunay’s seventy-year career, providing a unique opportunity to discover one the most versatile and inspiring artist of her time.

Through painting, sketches, graphic, textile, fashion, and even furniture designs, dynamic forms and vibrant colors capture the spirit of modernity, while celebrating urban life, technology, and travel. Perhaps the most modern aspect of her creative process lies in the artist’s willingness to go beyond the traditional confines of fine art. Delaunay embraced fashion, textile, costume and set design, interior decoration, architecture, and advertising, developed and launched her own fashion house, and established her name as a brand.

The artist, born in Odessa as Sara Stern in 1885, developed a unique creative partnership along with her husband, the artist Robert Delaunay, since 1910, and together they approached abstraction distinctively through “simultaneism.” After Robert’s early death in 1941, Sonia continue exploring a variety of media and producing experimental and innovative art until the late 1970s.

The exhibition’s installation allows viewers to navigate her creative path in chronological order throughout twelve sections: Early Years, in which is made evident the influence of Paul Gauguin and the German Expressionists in her early paintings; Towards Abstraction, which introduces the collaborations with Robert Delaunay; Modern Life; Portugal and Spain, which focuses on her work in advertising and design while the couple refuged in these countries during the outbreak of WWI; and Flamenco and Ballet, which displays the opening of Casa Sonia and her first commissions in clothing and custom designs that blossomed in the early 1920s, when the Delaunays returned to Paris. This is made further evident in the section Fashion and Textile through an overwhelming collection of sketches, textiles, and designs, along with a series of fashion shoots displayed as photographs and videos.Through the remaining sections—Poetry and Theatre, Rhythm and Abstraction, Paris, Abstraction and Everyday Life, Gouaches, and Reinventions—viewers can follow Delaunay’s inspirational path, a creative journey that never ceased until her death in Paris in 1979. She was 94.

Yvonne Rainer: The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?
Museum of Modern Art
Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Lobby Gallery, Fourth Floor, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
June 9–14, 2015

The Museum of Modern Art presents the East Coast premiere of Yvonne Rainer’s The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move? (Moving On), an ongoing work-in-progress that intertwines formal dance with an intimate approach of aging and mortality, as well as humor, through language, music, and movement, which when combined creates a somewhat melancholy ambiance. The performers of this piece have been given the freedom to initiate and/or abort the movement phrases as they wish, making spontaneous decisions throughout the forty-five-minute duration of the piece. Rainer, a founding member of New York’s pioneering Judson Dance Theater, has developed a form known as “performance demonstrations” or “composites,” which combine fragments of choreography with spoken monologues, projections, films, and sounds.

Steffani Jemison: Promise Machine
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
June 25–27, 2015
1:00 PM and 4:00 PM

The Museum of Modern Art presents Promise Machine, a multipart commission of the Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison, in conjunction with the exhibition One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North. Jemison (American, b. 1981) works across media and explores ideas of improvisation, repetition, and the fugitive in black history and vernacular culture inspired by the Utopia Neighborhood Club, a Harlem-based women’s social-service organization that directly supported Jacob Lawrence.

Promise Machine comprises a reading group and performance inspired by the notion of utopia that Jemison will premier as a new musical performance with original libretto by the artist and a score composed collaboratively with Courtney Bryan.

Guerrilla Girls: #ProvokeProtestPrevail’s
FUG
Bruce High Quality Foundation University, 431 East 6th Street, New York, NY 10009
June 13, 2015
6:00 PM

FUG is a new project space of New York’s freest art school, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU). Through merging exhibitions, public programs, classes, and workshops, the project will host BHQFU’s visiting artist residency program, which supports artists and collaborative projects from around the globe through three- to six-week residencies.

As the culmination of #ProvokeProtestPrevail’s, the Guerrilla Girls BroadBand exhibition (May 1–June 14, 20154), and as part of its community outreach, BHQFU invites participation in a group action and live “guerrilla” performance that pays an homage to the Russian feminist punk protest group Pussy Riot. Supporting the reproductive rights through the power of music, participants will collaborate on a performance of a Pussy Riot song and edit it into a music video to be shared. For this, instruments, performers, and voices welcome. A closing party will follow.