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.

November 2011

Patti Smith: Camera Solo
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street, Hartford, CT 06103
October 21, 2011–February 19, 2012

With seventy photographs, one multimedia installation, and a video, Patti Smith: Camera Solo is the largest presentation of this artist, poet, and performer’s visual work in the United States in nearly ten years. The exhibition highlights the connection between Smith’s photography and her interest in poetry and literature. Actual objects that appear in the many black-and-white Polaroids will also be on view.

Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
Hunter College, City University of New York, East 68th Street at Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10065
September 8–December 3, 2011

Mounted in conjunction with the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue comprises twenty-six works on paper created between 2001 and 2002 as a response to the tragic event in New York. Organized by Michelle Yun, curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries, the exhibition is the first presentation of the entire series.

Second Annual Feminist Art History Conference
Katzen Arts Center
American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016
November 4–6, 2011

Following the success of last year’s inaugural event, the Art History Program in the Department of Art at American University has organized the second annual Feminist Art History Conference. Speakers in twelve sessions will deliver fifty-one papers that span a broad range of topics and time periods, from the medieval era to contemporary art. The presentations will also demonstrate the ways in which feminist research and interpretation have spread across the spectrum of art-historical analysis and scholarship. In her keynote address, Mary D. Sheriff, a distinguished professor of art history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century French art and culture, will speak on “The Future of Feminist Art History: Where Have We Come From, Where Are We Going?” The conference is free and open to the public; online registration (by October 28) is recommended.

Francesca Woodman
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
November 5, 2011–February 20, 2012

This survey of works by the photographer Francesca Woodman, known for her black-and-white self-portraits from the late 1970s, is the first in more than two decades and comes thirty years after her death at age twenty-two. Organized by Corey Keller, associate curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition includes prints, artist’s books, and videos.

Sherrie Levine: Mayhem
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021
November 10, 2011–January 29, 2012

Sherrie Levine has been the subject of much critical discourse for the past thirty years. This exhibition, developed as a project by the artist, includes works ranging from her well-known 1981 photograph, After Walker Evans: 1-22, to recently created objects, such as Crystal Skull: 1-12, from 2010. Levine and the curators—Johanna Burton, Elisabeth Sussman, and Carrie Springer—will juxtapose old and new works in order to provoke fresh associations and responses.