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.

May 2014

Regina José Galindo: Estoy Viva
Pac/Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
Via Palestro, 14, Milan, Italy
March 25–June 8, 2014

Curated by Diego Sileo and Eugenio Viola, this is the first survey of the work of the acclaimed Guatemalan performance artist and poet Regina Jose Galindo (b. 1974). Galindo became first known for political performances in Guatemala in the late 1990s, including her bloody walk from the Congress of Guatemala building to the National Palace in protest against the presidential candidacy of Guatemala’s former dictator, Jose Efrain Rios Montt. In 2005 she received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, in the category of “artists under 30,” for her video Himenoplastia, a controversial feminist work featuring the artist undergoing surgical reconstruction of her hymen. Although Galindo has organized performances in which she does not take part, her work is distinguished for the political use of her own body in order to tackle a variety of social issues, including cultural traumas, and to denounce the ethical implications of social and cultural injustices, discriminations of race and sex, and, more in general, all kinds of abuses stemming from power. A postidentarian turning of her body into a symbolic evocation of the “social body differentiates the use of her self as the tool of her critique from the autobiographic one of several of her performance art progenitors.”

The exhibition Estoy Viva is divided in five sections that, conceived as permeable categories, illustrate the focus of her critique and poetics: politics, woman, violence, organic, and death. It is titled after the eponymous performance conceived and performed for the opening of the exhibition and featuring the artist naked in a white chilly room on a sort of tombstone, her life proved only by her invisible breath’s imprint on a mirror held by each visitor in front of her nose. The exhibition is accompanied by a film by Cosimo Alemà, a cinematographic reading of her work produced in collaboration with the artist as an emotional key to her work.

Sara VanDerBeek
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH
March 7–June 8, 2014

The New York–based photographer Sara VanDerBeek (b. Baltimore, 1976) is known for her formally striking employment of photography, sculpture, and performative gestures that contemplate the construction of images, their relation to objects, and the passage of time. For her solo exhibition at MOCA Cleveland, organized by David Norr, VanDerBeek responded to the city of Cleveland in line with her recent work. She began by testing the relation of photograph to object by photographing architectural objects made in her studio that were in turn turned into photographic objects, but her most recent work explores photographically cities central to American history, such as Baltimore, New Orleans, and Detroit, their personal, historical, and political connotations, as well as their distinct urban features. Engaging the city as a physical site and a system undergoing continuous change, the displayed photographs are combined results of VanDerBeek’s experience of Cleveland’s landscape and cultural monuments within a range of material and cultural shifts.

Hito Steyerl: Junktime
Home Workspace Program
Ashkal Alwan, Building 110, First Floor, Jisr al Wati, Street 90, Beirut 2066-8421 Lebanon
April 16–May 31, 2014

Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program 2013–14 presents Hito Steyerl: Junktime, a series of video installations, screenings, and conversations as part of Creating and Dispersing Universes That Work without Working, led by the resident professors Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle. The screening series includes twelve films and video installations developed by Steyerl between 2004 and 2014. Between them is presented How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, launched in the Venice Biennale exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico in 2013.

Born in Munich in 1966, Steyerl has produced a variety of work as a filmmaker and an author in the field of essayist documentary video. With the global circulation of images as her principal topic of interest, she focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire. Departing from the digital image and using humor and charm as political means of expression, her films and essays envision a world in which war, genocide, capital flows, class conflicts, and digital detritus seem to take place only partially within images, thus reminding us we are no longer dealing with the virtual but with a “confusing concreteness.”

Eva Koťátková
Art en Valise
April 3–June 28, 2014


In collaboration with the scrap metal gallery in Dublin and the Unit E in Toronto, Art en Valise presents, as its inaugural project, the first solo exhibition of the multimedia Czech artist Eva Koťátková in Canada. Born in Prague (in 1982), where she lives and works today, Koťátková studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, as well as at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. The youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Jindrich Chalupecky Award for Czech artists, she has widely exhibited internationally, both in solo and group exhibitions, and her work was distinguished as one of the highlights of the exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace in the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale (2013).

Underpinned by her generation’s trauma—the contrast of her freedom to do what she wants as opposed to the suppression that haunted the dreams and desires of her parents generation—Koťátková creates work in various media, including collage, film collage, and “mad” sculptures, that seem to explore the often-failed attempts of people to both conform to and break free of the rules and codes of contemporary societal institutions, including family and school. Kotátková undermines and recontextualizes the values and mechanisms used to regulate our perception of the world, and, in turn, the way we perceive ourselves.

Bringing together drawing, collage, installation, sculpture, and performance, the exhibition investigates Kotátková’s process of deconstructing traditional behavioral systems to produce fragmented models that invite alternative ways of communication, while offering a unique opportunity to explore the idiosyncratic surrealist sensibility that underpins her multimedia practice, signature themes such as the cage, and her use of the body.

Dorothy Iannone: This Sweetness Outside of Time; Paintings, Objects, Books 1959–2014
Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin, Germany
February 20–June 2, 2014

The Berlinische Galerie presents This Sweetness Outside of Time, a major solo exhibition of the Berlin-based American artist Dorothy Iannone. This will be the first extensive retrospective to address the humorous and erotic oeuvre of one of the most unusual women artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. This Sweetness Outside of Time includes paintings, objects, and books created by the self-taught artist between 1959 and 2014. The aim of this retrospective is to illustrate the radical subjectivity of this unique artist to a wider audience.

A pioneering spirit against censorship and for free love and autonomous female sexuality, Iannone (b. Boston, 1933) occupies a distinct place as an artist in the second half of the twentieth century. Her oeuvre spans more than fifty years and includes painting and visual narrative, autobiographical texts and films. Since the 1960s Iannone continues to go her own way without compromise, artistically and conceptually. She is a pioneer of women’s sexual and intellectual emancipation that draws uncompromisingly on her own life.

Iannone’s art frequently depicts the sexual union between man and woman with an unmistakably mystical dimension rooted in the spiritual and physical union of opposites. Through graphic paintings, object, and books, her visual universe portrays partly clothed and naked figures on bright psychedelic backgrounds of flora, mandalas, and biomorphic patterns in which male and female sexuality celebrate the joy of intimate relationships while subverting traditional gender stereotypes of control an dominance. This Sweetness Outside of Time presents a personal narrative of a passionate pursuit of “ecstatic unity” through transcendence and spirituality.

Tauba Auerbach: The New Ambidextrous Universe
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London
SW1Y 5AH, United Kingdom
April 16–June 15, 2014

The Institute of Contemporary Art, London, presents The New Ambidextrous Universe, the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom of Tauba Auerbach (b. San Francisco, 1981), a New York–based artist who works in sculpture, photography, painting, weaving, prints, artist’s books, and performance. In her early career she created graphic sign paintings, producing abstract renderings of calligraphy and typography. In recent work she has developed a signature practice of ironing creases into her canvases and using industrial paint guns or hand-painted Ben Day dots to create the illusion of three-dimensional folded fabric that Auerbach describes as “Fold” paintings that occupy “a liminal state between two and three dimensions.” The artist plays with perceptions of space, taking a highly innovative approach to mechanical processes and color. For The New Ambidextrous Universe, Auerbach presents newly created sculptures and photographs that translate the scientific principles of symmetry and reflection in pallid plywood as a means “to hint at an alternate, mirror universe.”

Open Engagement Conference 2014
Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, NY 11368
May 16–18, 2014

Open Engagement is a free international conference that sets out to explore various perspectives on art and social practice with the aim to expand the dialogue around socially engaged art making. The conference will examine how economic and social conditions connect to life values and philosophies, situating the everyday in relation to a larger political and social issues that includes labor, economics, food production, ways of being, and education.

Directed and founded by Jen Delos Reyes, the 2014 Open Engagement Conference is copresented by the Queens Museum of Art and A Blade of Grass and takes place in the Hall of Science, the Queens Theater, Immigrant Movement International, and various locations throughout New York. As in previous conferences, Open Engagement will include a partnership with graduate programs featuring art and social engagement. This year this partnership will include a number of New York–based programs led by Social Practice Queens at Queens College, City University of New York. The event also features two keynote presenters, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and J. Morgan Puett, and focuses on the theme of “life/work.” The legacies of these two seminal figures have through their practices defined and redefined how life and work can be the foundation for artistic exploration.

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.

April 2014

Claudia DeMonte: La Forza del Destino
June Kelly Gallery
166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012
April 10–May 13, 2014

Claudia DeMonte: La Forza del Destino presents a new series of paintings and sculptures focused on symbols of good and bad luck from around the world. For decades, Claudia DeMonte has been involved in collaborative research and art production with women artists across the globe. As curator, DeMonte is the artifice of WOMEN OF THE WORLD: A Global Collection of Art. This traveling exhibition, with accompanying comprehensive publication, includes the works and statements of women artists from 177 countries portraying their image of what means being a woman in their cultural environment. In her later project, Real Beauty, DeMonte commissioned handmade fabric dolls from artists and crafters to express local concepts of female beauty, standards that are being lost due to plastic reproductions and globalization.

From Bhutan, Laos, and Saudi Arabia to Senegal and Tibet, DeMonte has traveled the globe observing cultures, customs, and idiosyncrasies from women perspectives and often working collaboratively with local women workshops. In one of the works presented in La Forza del Destino, DeMonte uses a female form sculpted from wood and laden with pictographic configurations suggesting lucky charms of protection. Her new works make evident, once again, her continued interest in women’s multifaceted roles and impact as storytellers, historians, and mythological controllers of destiny. In DeMonte’s own words, La Forza del Destino examines from a women’s perspective the icons that represent luck, superstition, and protection from the evils of the world.

Ane Mette Hol: In the Collection
Trondheim Kunstmuseum
Bispegata 7 B, 7013 Trondheim, Norway
February 8–May 18, 2014

Trondheim Kunstmuseum presents In the Collection, a solo exhibition by the Oslo-based artist Ane Mette Hol (b. Bodø, 1979), who uses drawing as a research method that investigates the relationships between originals and reproductions. The “accurate copies” of objects and phenomena are the result of a painstaking work, questioning the very medium of drawing. By using paper and drawing tools, Hol copies things with precision down to the finest detail. She has made copies of brown paper, rolls of drawing paper, music sheets, drawing pads, and book covers, as well as printouts from the internet and botched photocopies. Through her completed works, she challenges the relationship between original and copy with an almost Borgesian approach. Furthermore, through this relationship, Hol’s works comment on our continuous recycling of what already exists and on our common knowledge about art history and theory. In this, she questions the nature of art; its premises in terms of content, politics, and institution through remarkable technical skill and through innovative frames of reference and conceptual discourse.

In the exhibition at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Hol has based her work on a drawing of a photocopy from Charles Wood’s book How to Draw Portraits (1943). The drawing shows the book’s list of contents, and the exhibition is based on the different sections of the book. As the exhibition title suggested, the show features works from the museum’s collections and from Hol’s drawings, animations, and sound installations.

Maria Lassnig
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
March 9–May 25, 2014

Maria Lassnig (Austrian, b. 1919) is one of the most important contemporary women painters. Through what she called “body awareness,” her paintings mean an exploration of the inner world. She focused on representing the way her body feels to her from the inside, rather than attempting to depict it from outside. Lassnig’s remarkable career has spanned more than seventy years. Throughout the decades she has continued to create work that vulnerably explores the way she comes into contact with the world, emphasizing often the disjunctions between her own self-image, challenging the way she may be seen by others as a woman, as a painter, and as a person who has lived through the dramatic technological and cultural shifts that have marked the century of her lifetime. In her paintings, Lassnig exposes personal traumas, fantasies, and nightmares, offering instruction for courageous living in a time of social interaction.

From all creative periods of her career, spanning her early involvement with graphic abstraction in Paris and Art Informel, to her later shift to figural representation, Lassnig’s exhibition at PS1 is the most significant survey of the artists’ work ever presented in the United States. The show, focusing in her self-portraits, features approximately fifty paintings drawn from public and private holdings and from the artist’s own collection. A selection of watercolors and filmic works, many of which have never been previously seen in the United States, also make an appearance in the exhibition.

Mimi Smith: Constructing Art about Life
Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery
New Jersey City University Galleries, Hepburn Hall, 2039 Kennedy Boulevard, Room 323, Jersey City, NJ 07305
March 20–April 24, 2014

Mimi Smith: Constructing Art about Life is a concise survey of Mimi Smith’s work over the past five decades, curated by Midori Yoshimoto. A New York–based artist and a graduate of Rutgers University, Smith is best known for the clothing sculptures she begun in the mid-1960s, the most prominent being Steel Wool Peignoir (1966), a see-through dressing gown embellished with lace and steel wool that has become an icon of early feminist art. Combining banal consumer or domestic objects—such as the wrapping plastics of various consumer goods in Recycle Coat (1965), the bath mats in Girdle (1966), or the pieced-together plastics in Maternity Dress (1966)—Smith radically intervened in Pop art, producing feminist sartorial sculptures that addressed the role of fashion in women’s individual and social identities, while unmasking the complicated relationship of the public and the private in women’s lives.

In the early 1970s Smith challenged the Conceptual art of her time from the homebound perspective of a female artist and a mother, then raising her children in Ohio, with a series of works that merit further evaluation for their contribution to postwar art and their diverse politics. These include series of large-scale drawings done with measuring tape and knotted thread that replicates the rooms and furniture of her home, as well as multimedia installations that allude to the pervasiveness of new technologies and the increasing invasiveness of the news media, and also to the environment and nuclear threats.

Sculptural cloth making and clothing itself continue to play a great role in Smith’s contemporary investigation of gendered identity and politics, as seen in her recent ruminations on women’s aging through drawn representations of underwear.

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds
Menil Collection
1533 Sul Ross Street, Houston, TX 77006
January 31–May 11, 2014

Curated by Michelle White under the auspices of the Menil Drawing Institute, Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds is the first museum survey to focus on Lee Bontecou’s works on paper. It brings together over seventy works from various collections, including that of the Menil, that sample her drawing practice from 1958 to 2012. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by White, Dore Ashton, and Joan Banach.

Advancing the understanding of the work of this incredible artist, Drawn Worlds explores Bontecou’s experimentation in materials and techniques, such as her early use of a welding torch to deposit velvet layers of black soot on paper, muslin, and canvas. The exhibition also contextualizes the artist’s distinctive iconography, especially her penchant for circles and voids, within the political and environmental concerns of the time of their making. Above all it provides a unique opportunity to witness the “unsettling realms of human folly and the frailty of the natural world” in which Bontecou’s “drawn words” take the viewer, while studying the forms that characterize them, whether as origins of her sculptures or independent transmutations of her haunting vocabulary.

Betye Saar: Redtime Est
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
100 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
March 15–May 3, 2014

Betye Saar is widely known for multimedia collages, box assemblages, altars, and installations consisting of found materials that, as put by the artist, “reach across the barriers of art and life to bridge cultural diversity and forge new understandings,” in effect voicing various political, racial, spiritual and gender concerns. Redtime Est (2011), a variation of the eponymous installation for Pacific Standard Time in Los Angeles three years ago, offers a unique opportunity to indulge the affective sensibility of her highly political objects.

Redtime Est consists of red, or chameleonlike red, works that are curated by the artist in and around a room whose walls are painted red, “the color of anger, danger, violence, heat, passion, blood and fire.” A caged mannequin with a crow as head and dressed with shackles guards the entrance to Redtime Est, setting its tone, while Red Ascension, a painted red ladder, hangs diagonally across the wall that faces the viewer upon his or her entrance, cinematically commemorates the slaves’ trip from Africa to America with various symbolic objects featured in each frame, ranging from an African mask to handcrafted ships to red-painted chains and padlocks.

Unlike the miniretrospective character of the Redtime Est, this one is a mega-assemblage of recent works, the earliest dating from the early 1990s, whose subject matter, as in Justice (2011) features Aunt Jemima, is manifested with signature tropes of the feminist and antiracist underpinnings of the artist’s assemblage practice since the 1960s. Focusing on the most political aspects of her work, the artist brings together objects for Redtime Est that, while sampling the various modes of her practice from painting to assemblage and the sheer repurposing of found objects, illustrate the way in which she used “derogatory” stereotypes of blackness and recycled objects of poignant history and function, such as washboards, to make powerful and empowering critical statements about race and gender with an idiosyncratic marriage of past and present, her homage to her ancestors and her radical legacy to future.

Alexandra Bachzetzis and Claire Hooper
Bonner Kunstverein
Hochstadenring 22,
D-53119 Bonn, Germany
February 22–May 25, 2014

Bonner Kunstverein juxtaposes the deconstructive and seductive ways in which pop culture is respectively employed in the work of the performer and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis and the filmmaker Claire Hooper, putting in dialogue the exploration of the distinct significance given by social media in the staging of personality and life today as well as the ways in which their practice challenges the exhibition format. While Bachzetsis performed with Anne Pajunen for A Piece Danced Alone (2011) during the opening, her work is mostly represented through video documentations of her choreographies. Hooper’s videos are exhibited as part of structures that function as projection surfaces and architectural ornamentation, creating links between the exhibition space, the illusionistic space of the film, and its documentary function in a manner typical of Hooper, as, for instance, by recreating a Berlin subway environment.

Bachzetsis’s works depict the controlled movements of bodies following a clear sequence in evocative situations that condense reflections of the contemporary media culture into studies of motion by means of mirroring and repetition. By isolating gestures and body language from the flow of the familiar as signs of cultural codes she deconstructs the sequence of events, while also variously analyzing the mechanics of TV soaps and hip hop video clips, classical ballet, modern dance, and performance art.

Hooper’s films, in which the British tradition of documentaries encounters Greek mythology, focus on figures in precarious social circumstances and their entanglement in restrictive systems that are converted into collective social areas through parablelike, mythological enhancement. Interchangeable elements from everyday life in documentary fashion oscillate kaleidoscopically with theatrically charged passages. While pop culture plays an equally important part in the staging of her figures, Hooper depicts the body in seemingly surreal dance performances that enable her to portray the irrational and also the compulsive forces that continue to drive our society. A dialogue about the body and its representation in the media, as well as its physical and social limitations, develops between their works. Both artists depict the body and the figure as shimmering, constantly changing projection surfaces.

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.

March 2014

Anna Maria Maiolino, still from Y, 1974, 8mm film transferred to DVD, black and white with sound, 2:28 mins. (artwork © Anna Maria Maiolino; photograph by Max Nauenberg)

Anna Maria Maiolino: MATRIX 252
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
University of California, Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2625 Durant Avenue, No. 2250, Berkeley, CA 94720
January 17–March 30, 2014

MATRIX 252 offers a selection of videos by the São Paulo–based artist Anna Maria Maiolino. For over five decades, Maiolino’s multidisciplinary practice comprised drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, installation, and Super 8 films that led to the use of audio and video in her work. Through fragmentation and abstraction she has explored the “viscerality of embodied experience.” MATRIX 252 features a group of four videos, originally shot on Super 8 between 1973 and 1982.

Born in Italy in 1942, Maiolino emigrated with her family to Venezuela in 1954 before moving to Brazil in 1960. Previous to settling in São Paulo, she lived in Rio de Janeiro, where she took part of the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity) alongside Lygia Clark, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape. The brutality of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85) became a subject for Maiolino’s work. Based on Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (“Cannibal Manifesto”) of 1928, In-Out (Antropofagia) (1973) shows a close-up of a male and a female mouth attempting to communicate while obstructed by various objects, such as a tape, an egg, and a string. Further close-up shots of faces appear in two works, X and Y (both 1974): eyes are imperiled by snapping scissors in X, while in Y they are blindfolded while the mouth emits a cry. Through these videos, the artist exposes a human body that struggles to find a mode of expression as a metaphor for living under political repression and censorship.

Nicole Eisenman, Sloppy Bar Room Kiss, 2011, oil on canvas, 39 x 48 in. (artwork © Nicole Eisenman)

Dear Nemesis: Nicole Eisenman, 1993–2013
Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis
3750 Washington Boulevard, Saint Louis, MO 63108
January 24–April 13, 2014

Dear Nemesis, the largest midcareer survey of the work of the American artist Nicole Eisenman (b. France, 1965) to date, includes more than 120 paintings, prints, and drawings created between 1993 to 2013. The work of Eisenman bridges the absurd and abject with the introspective and irreverent, drawing on sources as varied as the iconography of classical myths and popular culture in general. Over the past two decades, she has developed a creative and versatile vision that combines high and low culture with virtuosic skill. Being her core concerns the depictions of community, identity, and sexuality, Eisenman demonstrates an uncanny capacity for capturing the joy, pain, embarrassment, and ecstasy of being human. Fusing images that fluctuate between the depiction of a world rooted in the visual language of art history and a critical and comedic meditation on contemporary life, she depicts settings and themes as varied as bar scenes, motherhood, and the dilemma of the artist. Through a recurrent representation of women, both as “butch” and “femme,” and female love, Eisenman infuses the practice of figurative painting with an audaciously queer bent that also re-presents art history in a feminist light. Through her wit and the uneasiness caused by her playful images, she is able to communicate with a critical—and yet visually breathtaking—absurdity the multifaceted depth of the human condition.

Alice Aycock, Hoodo (Laura) from the Series “How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts” Vertical & Horizontal Cross-section of the Ether Wind (1981), 1990/2012, watercolor and ink on paper, 27½ x 39¼ in. Collection of the artist (artwork © Alice Aycock)

Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
January 26–April 20, 2014

Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating
Art, Design, and Architecture Museum
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
January 26–April 20, 2014

Including over one hundred works, Some Stories Are Worth Repeating is the first comprehensive exploration of Alice Aycock’s creative process. For this major retrospective, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
partnered the Art, Design, and Architecture (AD&A) Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to present an exhibition that traces the artist’s career from 1971 to date. The display at the AD&A Museum focuses on Aycock’s work from 1971 to 1984 and includes detailed architectural drawings, sculptural maquettes, and photo documentation for both realized and imagined architectural projects. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art covers Aycock’s work from 1984 to present, a period in which she developed an increasingly elaborate visual vocabulary, drawing upon a multitude of sources that were partially informed by the use of computer programs.

This double-venue exhibition highlights the major themes that have governed Aycock’s artistic practice. While she is best known for her large-scale installations and outdoor sculptures, her drawings capture the full range of her ideas and sources, mirroring her conceptual clarity and formal depth. Her drawings and built projects achieved new complexity with the advent of computer-graphics programs in the 1990s. New technologies have enable Aycock to develop a digitally informed visual language that includes the generation of forms from multiple perspectives, mathematically perfect curve, and a precise construction drawings, while imagining points of view that are extraordinarily accurate.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, published by the Parrish Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, features an interpretive essay by Jonathan Fineberg and an introduction by Terrie Sultan, director of the Parrish Art Museum. This book is the first scholarly exploration of the pivotal, enormously productive role that drawing has played in Aycock’s career over the course of her forty years as professional artist.

Kati Horna, Bottle, 1962, gelatin-silver print, 9 5/16 x 6½ in. (artwork © Kati Horna)

Kati Horna
Museo Amparo
2 Sur 708, Centro Histórico, Puebla, Pue., Mexico
December 7, 2013–April 28, 2014

Museo Amparo, in collaboration with Jeu de Paume in Paris (where the show will travel later this spring), presents the first major survey of the work of the photographer Kati Horna (Szilas-Balhas, Hungary, 1912–Mexico City, 2000). Horna turned to photography in the early 1930s in Hungary and, though still understudied, became one of the greatest documentary and surrealist photographers of Mexico. Seeking to define her contribution to photojournalism—and the photo-essay in particular—the exhibition brings together over 150 mostly unpublished or rarely seen works and contextualizes Horna’s career with personal photos and the European and Mexican journals with which she collaborated. It is chronologically organized along three axes that distinguish the changing geographic, cultural, and political contexts of her production.

The first part focuses on early work, conducted in Hungary, Berlin (where she relocated at age eighteen), and Paris, her early collages and photomontages illuminating the formation of her aesthetics in the context of the European avant-gardes of the 1930s (Bauhaus, Surrealism, and Neue Sachlichkeit). The second part focuses on Horna’s documentation of the Spanish Civil War, characterized by her compassionate look at civilians, an approach that radically complemented the perspective of her then partner, the war photographer Robert Capa, whom she followed to Spain. The last part of the exhibition examines her work as a chronicler of life in Mexico. Horna moved there on the eve of the Second World War with her husband Jose Jorna, joining various circles of the local intelligentsia, such as the movimiento pánico (Alejandro Jodorowsky) and the artistic, literary, and architectural avant-garde in Mexico (Mathias Goeritz, Germán Cueto, Pedro Friedeberg, Salvador Elizondo, Alfonso Reyes, and Ricardo Legorreta), while forming a close relationship with Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. The last twenty years of Horna’s life were dedicated—in addition to her creative work—to teaching photography at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Academia de San Carlos (Univesidad Nacional Autónoma de México), where she influenced a new generation of contemporary photographers.

Posters (ca. 1991–present) from Riot Grrrl–related shows, conventions, and meetings internationally, solicited from institutional and personal archives through open calls, word of mouth, and invitations

Alien She
Vox Populi
319 North 11th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
March 7–April 27, 2014

Organized by two former Riot Grrrls, Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss, Alien She is the first exhibition to examine the lasting impact of the highly influential feminist punk movement from the 1990s on contemporary artists and cultural producers. Formed in reaction to the pervasive and violent sexism, racism, and homophobia in the punk-music scene and in culture at large, Riot Grrrl fomented a new generation of active feminists, inspiring them to create their own culture and communities in defiance of mainstream conventions. The movement also popularized the academic discourse of identity politics. Emphasizing female and youth empowerment, collaborative organization, creative resistance, and DIY ethics, Riot Grrrl had a pivotal influence, inspiring many around the world to pursue socially and politically progressive careers as artists, activists, authors, and educators.

Alien She focuses on seven artists—Ginger Brooks Takahashi (Pittsburgh), Tammy Rae Carland (Oakland), Miranda July (Los Angeles), Faythe Levine (Milwaukee), Allyson Mitchell (Toronto), L. J. Roberts (Brooklyn), and Stephanie Syjuco (San Francisco)—working in different media whose practices reflect the impact of Riot Grrrl; the exhibition also includes an open-ended historical section that reflects the multiplicity that was integral part of the original movement and its continuity, in the spirit of the Riot Grrrl’s principles. Each artist is represented by several projects from the last twenty years, including new and rarely seen works, providing an insight into the development of their creative practices and individual trajectories. The movement’s vast creative output is captured by hundreds of self-published zines and hand-designed posters (solicited from institutional and personal archives through open calls, word-of-mouth, and invitations, similar to the way Riot Grrrl expanded), different music playlists from Riot Grrrl scenes across the United States, Canada, South America, and Europe, while interviews and an ongoing, online Riot Grrrl Census provide an expanded oral history.

The exhibition’s title, Alien She, refers to a Bikini Kill song of the same name. The lyrics are about the negotiation of normalized gender roles, the uneasy line between feminist critique and collectivity, and the process of coming to a feminist consciousness, with the repeated refrain, “She is me, I am her.”

Installation view of Leonor Fini: Pourquoi pas? (artworks © Leonor Fini; photograph by Polly Yassin/Bildmuseet)

Leonor Fini: Pourquoi pas?
Bildmuseet
Umeå University, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
January 31–May 11, 2014

Leonor Fini: Pourquoi pas? is the first survey of the work of the Buenos Aires–born, Italian-French artist Leonor Fini (1907–1996) in the Nordic countries. Fini’s work challenged conventional ideas through questioning the frontiers between female and male, myth, and reality, the conscious and unconscious; it also expressed female desire, interfering in Surrealism from a transgressive female point of view. Though posthumously reduced to a footnote of art history, including feminist art history, Fini became a “queen of the Paris art world,” where she moved circa 1931 to become an artist, constantly featured in the news and celebrated for her paintings, illustrations, and theater designs, and above all for her flamboyant bohemian lifestyle, marked by her masquerades and ménages à trois. Fini was largely self-taught, having nurtured her prodigious talent and passion for portraiture by studying Flemish masters and Italian Mannerists; she also claimed dreams as the source of the irrational of her imagery. She was featured in major Surrealist exhibitions, including the 1936 International Exhibition of Surrealism in London, where she scandalized the critics with her erotic females. She also participated in Parisian Surrealist circles yet distanced herself from André Breton’s misogynistic circle.

The exhibition, which includes paintings, drawings, book illustrations, objects, text, film, and costume sketches for theater and opera, is accompanied by a richly illustrated bilingual catalogue (in English and Swedish) with previously unpublished texts by the artist alongside new essays by the poet and author Lasse Söderberg, the art historian Anna Rådström, and the curators Cecilia Andersson and Brita Täljedal.

Installation view of Were I made of matter, I would color (photograph by Stephan Wyckoff)

Ulrike Grossarth: Were I made of matter, I would color
Generali Foundation
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15, 1040 Vienna, Austria
January 24–June 29, 2014

Ulrike Grossarth (b. 1952) is a Berlin-based multimedia conceptual artist and professor of expanded concepts of art and mixed media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden since 1998. She is the founder of the Essen branch of Free International University initiated by Joseph Beuys and the recipient of the 2009 Kathe Kollwitz Prize. Though Grossarth began her career as a dancer, she became known since the late 1980s for sculptural milieus that variously manifest her interest in the corporeality of matter and create “radical and vivid spaces for thinking, spaces people can actually experience and use,” rather than artworks, as the artist puts it.

Curated by Sabine Folie and Ilse Lafer, Were I made of matter, I would color is a comprehensive retrospective that traces the evolution of Grossarth’s art, drawing connections from her early years as a dancer in the 1970s and 1980s, her sculptural settings and actions, and her most recent work, which interlaces an interest in history with the history of ideas.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, BAU I (1989–2000), is an experimental ensemble comprised of the “unmoved object-bodies” that Grossarth created over a decade and presented in a wide variety of constellations. Visualizing changed spaces of thought and action, the show bridges Grossarth’s early work, which is informed by Fluxus and punk and the attempt to come to terms with the postwar era, and her later art, with its focus on Eastern Europe. More recent works in the exhibition, such as the so-called Lublin projects (since 2006) and SYMBOL gotowe/Subject Aggregates, showcase the ways in which Grossarth seeks to reanimate lost cultural traditions, and her challenging of Occidental thought with her engagement with Jewish mysticism and the motif of the Shekhinah.