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.

June–July 2012

Fullmoon Night with Yoko Ono
Djurgården, Stockholm
Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
June 4–5, 2012

On the night of June 4 turning into June 5, art lovers had the chance to experience two early Yoko Ono pieces, Evening till Dawn (1964) and Secret Piece (1953), on the lush island of Djurgården in Stockholm. The event will take place in conjunction with Yoko Ono: Grapefruit at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, a retrospective that showcases early experimental films and a selection of “instructions” published in Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964). The exhibition provides a welcome opportunity to view Ono’s art in the context of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, in which she was a key player, and to see her wide-ranging influence on today’s art scene. Specifically for the Moderna Museet, Ono has created a new instruction, “Search for the Fountain,” that has been interpreted in a variety of mediums by a group of international artists.

Klonaris/Thomadaki: The Angel Ablaze
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 9, 2012

The Angel Ablaze offers a thorough introduction to the work of two avant-garde filmmakers and multimedia pioneers, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, whose holistic approach to filmmaking is called Cinema of the Body. At the Benaki Museum, Klonaris and Thomadaki will teach a master class after a screening of The Angel Cycle, a work inspired by a photograph of a hermaphrodite found in the archives of Klonaris’s gynecologist father in 1985. The film explores the idea of the intersexual body as partially angelic and further explicates this figure as the ideal metaphor for a bodily approach to the cinema.

“How Women Work”
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NGI 2GB, United Kingdom
June 14–19, 2012

In conjunction with Mika Rottenberg’s eponymous exhibition (May 5–July 1, 2012), Nottingham Contemporary is hosting “How Women Work,” a three-part symposium that addresses the relationship of women to labor in postindustrial economies and how feminist thought on the role of women in the workplace has evolved since the 1960s. The first event, on June 14, is a screening of María Ruido’s documentary film, Amphibious Fictions (2005), about the lives of female factory workers in two Spanish cities in the industrial belt surrounding Barcelona. The next day, a symposium titled “Art, Gendered Labor, and Resistance” will engage artists and theorists from the United Kingdom and Europe to explore the issue of art as gendered labor, the relationship between resistance and oppression, and the generational shifts that have affected the feminist dialogue on labor. The featured speakers are Jo Applin, professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of York; Angela Dimitrakaki, professor of modern and contemporary art the University of Edinburgh; Julia Morandeira, professor of Spanish contemporary art at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; Nina Power, a philosophy professor at Roehampton University in London; Maria Ruido, an artist and filmmaker; and Marina Vishmidt, a London-based art writer. The last event, on June 19, is a screening of African director, Ousmene Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966). The fictional film takes place in postcolonial Senegal and tells the story of a young woman from Dakar who faces many trials and tribulations as a live-in nanny working for a family in the French Riviera.

Sigalit Landau: Soil Nursing
Kamel Mennour
47 rue Saint-André des arts, Paris, France 75006
June 2–July 25, 2012

With Soil Nursing, Sigalit Landau brings together a potent combination of sculptures, photographs, and videos that evokes the body in space and its changing relationship to nature. Madonna and Child (2012), a series of twisted marble forms resting on exquisitely carved wooden bases, suggests a larvalike, maternal body crossed with the streamlined effervescence of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1923). The abstract sculptures are complemented by lush, color photographs and videos depicting the dreamy environment of an olive grove in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, the artist’s native country.

Chantal Joffe
Cheim and Read
547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2012

For her second solo show at Cheim and Read, the British painter Chantal Joffe continues her investigation of portrayals of woman in art with a selection of large and small paintings. Joffe’s influences extend from fashion photography and personal snapshots to works by contemporary artists such as Alex Katz and Elizabeth Peyton, who similarly address society and subjectivity through portraiture. In this exhibition Joffe also pays explicit homage to Alice Neel with a striking self-portrait of herself, naked on a bed with stripped covers—an image reminiscent of Neel’s 1980 portrait of herself, sitting nude in a stripped armchair.

Wangechi Mutu: blackthrones
Gladstone Gallery
12 Rue de Grand Cerf, Brussels, Belgium 1000
May 15–July 7, 2012

In blackthrones, Wangechi Mutu’s first solo exhibition in Brussels, the artist fills the elegant rooms of Gladstone Gallery with chairs wrapped in black garbage bags, metallic tinsels, and colorful debris and supported by spindly, insectlike legs. Despite this decoration, the wooden chairs are recognizable as being representative of English colonial design, hinting at a critique of Western hegemony while having fun with the transformative possibilities of sculpture.

Jo Spence: Work (Part I)
SPACE
129–131 Mare Street, London, E8 3RH, United Kingdom
June 1–July 15, 2012

Jo Spence: Work (Part II)
Studio Voltaire
1a Nelson’s Row, London, SW4 7JR, United Kingdom
June 12–August 11, 2012

A two-part retrospective of the photographic work of Jo Spence (1934–1992) offers a unique opportunity for the critical reassessment of an often misunderstood and certainly understudied “amateur” photographer. Spence emerged as a pivotal figure in the mid-1970s from the British photographic left, bridging her commitment to feminism, socialism, and education with a hungry, documentary impulse that took in every aspect of her life and those around her. The first part of the exhibition, on view at SPACE, focuses on the 1960s to the 1980s, years in which Spence founded the Hackney Flashers, a collective of women photographers, and organized photography co-ops and workshops. The exhibition continues at Studio Voltaire with her move toward methods of therapy through photography and patient empowerment and through her own struggles with breast cancer.

Edy Ferguson: Selected Works 1993 to the Present
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 1–July 29, 2012

Edy Ferguson’s survey exhibition at the Benaki Museum familiarizes Greek audiences with the multifaceted work of this American artist who now lives and works in Athens and London. Ferguson fuses a Pop art sensibility (her slick painting style is reminiscent of James Rosenquist) into her work that address a host of contemporary issues, such as the recent economic upheavals in Greece. The museum installation does not indicate boundaries in Ferguson’s various practices, opting instead to showcase her drawing, painting, videos, and performances as a “single and articulated Gesamtkunstwerk.”

Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda
MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Via Guido Reni 4A, Rome, Italy 00196
March 15–June 24, 2012

Doris Salcedo’s installation Plegaria Muda (translated as Mute Prayer) is an antimonumental memorial to victims of war and urban violence. Composed of over one hundred pairs of rectangular wooden tables whose tops sandwich a mound of earth that enables clumps of grass to grow through the crevices, the installation is keenly evocative of a graveyard or war memorial. Salcedo researched two specific atrocities when creating the memorial: the brutality of life in the ghettoes of southeast Los Angeles and the murder of numerous impoverished Colombians by factions of the Colombian army from 2003 to 2009. According to the artist, “Plegaria Muda is an attempt to live out this grief, a space demarcated by the radical limit imposed by death. A space that is outside of life, a place apart, that reminds us of our dead.”

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 2012

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–80, chromogenic print, 3⅜ x 3½ in. (photograph © George and Betty Woodman)

Francesca Woodman
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 16–June 13, 2012

Francesca Woodman, only twenty-two years old when she committed suicide in 1981, was already an accomplished young artist breaking new ground with her stunning black-and-white photographs, primarily of herself, in dreamlike interior spaces. Her images are a palimpsest of Surrealism, fashion photography, literature, and daily ritual. This Guggenheim retrospective features 120 photographs that cover her teenage years in Boulder, Colorado, her time as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, a meaningful year spent in Rome on a study-abroad program, and her last work, produced in New York.The exhibition also features two artist’s journals and recently unearthed videos made while Woodman was a student.

Malia Jensen: Stuff and Things
Cristin Tierney
546 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001
April 19–June 2, 2012

Malia Jensen’s first solo show in New York, Stuff and Things, features sculptures of animals and other natural phenomena made from an often-deceiving variety of materials, such as bronze, wood, glass, porcelain, and salt. A dark, lyrical humor runs through Jensen’s work, and her animals are a study in opposites, simultaneously sensuous and funny, grotesque and formally beautiful. Each object has a punchy joke that gives way to pathos and contemplation. In the exhibition essay, John S. Weber describes the world that Jensen evokes as one in which “Everything is beautiful, puzzling, and inconclusive.”

FRAMEWORK: Activism, Memory, and the Social Landscape
A Proposition by LaToya Ruby Frazier
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 17 and 19, 2012

Each month the New Museum’s public-seminar series, titled Propositions, focuses on a new artist and set of issues. For May, LaToya Ruby Frazier, a photographer and participant in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, will lead a two-day seminar based on her ongoing documentation of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the struggling steel-mill town where she was born. Frazier’s work makes the political deeply personal: she is concerned with salvaging the stories of her family and neighbors while archly exposing media exploitation, such as an ad campaign for Levi’s jeans that packaged the complex social reality of her hometown into a hip destination.

Evelyne Axell: The Great Journey into Space
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
April 30–August 25, 2012

Evelyne Axell (1935–1972), a prominent Belgian actress and television personality in the 1950s, changed her course to become a visual artist with the encouragement of a family friend, René Magritte. Axell’s paintings are bold pictorial statements, often featuring nude female figures, assemblages with found objects à la Robert Rauschenberg, and the graphic, hallucinatory colors of Pop art and advertising. Like other artists from the 1960s who worked with figurative motifs—John Wesley and Rosalyn Drexler come to mind—Axell plays with the political implications of “erotic art,” feminism, and consumer culture. The Great Journey into Space, her second solo appearance at Broadway 1602, features paintings, drawings, sculpture, exhibition archives, and documentation of a wild Happening that the artist organized in 1969 at the Foncke Gallery in Ghent, Belgium.

Mona Hatoum: You Are Still Here
Arter, Vehbi Koç Foundation
Istiklal Cad. No 211, Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey, 34433
March 17–May 27, 2012

You Are Still Here, Mona Hatoum’s first solo show in Turkey, showcases work made since the 1990s. Hatoum’s art exists between the poetic and the political, exile and homecoming, exquisite craftsmanship and everyday objects. She works in a wide range of materials and forms, from singular sculptural objects to room-sized installations, as well as video, photograph, and work on paper. A 2012 installation comprising human-sized steel cages containing delicate hand-blown glass, titled Kapan (translated as “trap” in Turkish), was created specifically for the exhibition. Another new work, Shift (2012), is a wool carpet map of the world divided into danger zones by drawn-on yellow seismic waves.

Ellen Altfest: Head and Plant
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 6–June 24, 2012

Ellen Alfest is a New York–based artist who makes precisely detailed oil paintings of humans and vegetation on a one-to-one scale. Her subjects are often men in states of unaware repose, sometimes rendered completely abstract as a zoomed-in landscape of hair, veins, and flesh. Altfest’s vision of the living human body as painted matter has its precedent in the work of Philip Pearlstein and Lucian Freud. Head and Plant is her first solo museum exhibition.

Maro Michalakakos: I Would Prefer Not To
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Arts Centre
48 Armatolon-Klephton Street, Athens, Greece, 114 71
March 29–May 26, 2012

Literary references abound in the work of the Greek artist Maro Michalakakos. She takes the title of her exhibition, I Would Prefer Not To, from a line favored by the protagonist of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” Happy Days, a heaping pile of red velvet fluff that hugs the gallery’s columns, nods to a Samuel Beckett play with the same name. A second installation using seductive velvet, Red Carpet, consists of a carpet unfurled from floor to ceiling, bearing the imprints of animal claw marks. The glamour of the “red-carpet” event here becomes a gateway to a predatory world of abuse, power, and victimization.