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.

April 2012

Kate Gilmore: Rock, Hard, Place
David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW Second Avenue, Miami, FL 33127
April 14–May 31, 2012

Kate Gilmore’s work has drawn comparisons with numerous pioneers of performance art, such as Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono. Captured in video, photography, and sculpture, Gilmore’s actions are visually compelling statements in which the artist play-acts different female stereotypes, while also referencing the materials and processes of manual labor and art-making. In Rock, Hard, Place (2012), hot-pink paint is wedged into a gridded structure of bowls, overflowing and leaving a unique mark, as a rock is smashed into each unit. For her show at David Castillo Gallery, the artist debuts two new videos, Pot Kettle Black and Break of Day. Each depicts Gilmore as an actor engaged in Sisyphean tasks that call into question the role of women in society; the works also forward the idea of the artist as a free-willed magician.

Sturtevant: Image over Image
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
March 17–August 26 2012

Elaine Sturtevant, an American-born artist based in Paris, creates masterful handmade replicas of artwork by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Beuys that challenge narratives of authenticity and originality, while also speaking to the artistic possibilities that arise from cloning and cybernetics. More recently she has made “cover versions” of noted works by Paul McCarthy, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and Robert Gober. Sturtevant: Image over Image showcases thirty works of art, including four recent video installations, and new pieces that were produced specifically with the Moderna Museet’s collection in mind, such as a copy of Marcel Duchamp’s freestanding sculpture Fresh Widow (1920/1964). Sturtevant’s mode of production, bemusing to audiences and critics when it first appeared in the mid-1960s, has now assumed the mantel of a postmodern feminist critique, albeit one that still leaves room for analysis, debate, and pleasure.

Zoe Leonard: Observation Point
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London, NW3 6DG, United Kingdom
March 31–June 24, 2012

Zoe Leonard has transformed one gallery of the Camden Arts Centre into a room-sized camera obscura, creating a live, inhabitable photographic image that is time based and always changing. In two other rooms, she exhibits a series of photographs taken with the lens pointed directly at the sun and presents a wall installation of found postcards of Niagara Falls. All three installations stretch the limits of photography and ask, what exactly constitutes a “photograph”? The exhibition also considers how we experience and shape the world through accumulation and manipulation of photographs.

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Landscapes of an American Modernist
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501
January 27–April 29, 2012

An exhibition of oil paintings and works on paper by Juane Quick-To-See Smith, a New Mexico–based artist and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, evokes the Southwestern landscape and recalls certain modernist masters, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley, who joined symbolism to abstraction. Quick-To-See Smith’s work also deals with political and ecological themes in the Petroglyph Park Series (1985) and in a group of paintings from the late 1980s created in honor of Chief Seattle, a nineteenth-century Native American leader who prophesized the environmental damage of the twentieth century.

Dara Friedman: Dancer
CAM Raleigh
409 West Martin Street, Raleigh, NC 27603
January 28–May 14, 2012

CAM Raleigh is screening Dancer, the latest film by the German-born artist Dara Friedman, which she created in Miami in 2011. Originally filmed in 16mm and transferred to high-definition digital video, Dancer captures sixty-six performers in forty separate segments representing all forms of movement and dance, from hip-hop to modern, flamenco to skateboarding, and classical ballet to skipping down the street. Dancer is the third installment in an unofficial trilogy that includes Musical (2007–8) and Frankfurt Song (2010). All three films explore spontaneous actions and synchronized performances in international urban settings.

Sarah Braman: These Days
International Art Objects Galleries
6086 Comey Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90034
March 31–May 5, 2012

Sarah Braman works in painting and sculpture, frequently creating mash-ups of the two media. These Days presents playful and wide-ranging work in oil and spray paint on wood boards, shipping crates, and cardboard. Freestanding Plexiglas chambers, resembling sci-fi coffins of pleasure, are paired with the occasional found object (like a 1980s boombox) in works such as Time Machine, TV in bed, andDawn Dog. Braman’s art is without a predetermined conceptual underpinning; instead it is “engineered entirely to fulfill the dream of desire,” according to Rupert Winkelsnap, the author of the gallery’s press release.

Jacqueline Humphries
Greene Naftali Gallery
508 West 26 Street, Eighth Floor, New York, NY 10001
March 28–April 28, 2012

The New York–based painter Jacqueline Humphries is known for her large-scale canvases and expressionistic mark-making, as well as the frequent use of metallic silver paint evocative of industrial coloring, gelatin-silver photographs, and the cinema’s fanciful silver screen. The new paintings from her seventh solo show at the Greene Naftali Gallery continue these formal investigations while introducing an exploration of the push–pull between abstract flatness and pictorial space, framing within the picture plane, and the immense variety found in the repetition of painterly motifs.

Yayoi Kusama
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, United Kingdom
February 9–June 5, 2012

In New York in the early 1960s, the Japanese-born Yayoi Kusama often performed her art in public as a staged “happening,” exploring a newfound territory between theater and visual art that Claes Oldenburg was charting at the same time. Yet she stood out against the male-dominated Pop and Fluxus scenes. Active as an artist for over four decades, and a voluntarily inmate in a mental institution since 1977, Kusama has created work that remains as arrestingly obsessive, spontaneous, and unabashedly colorful as ever. The Tate Modern retrospective includes a cinema series, Kusama on Film, which runs from April 15 to May 27, 2012. Screenings include landmark records of the artist’s rarely seen performances, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration and Love-In Festival (both 1968), which provide a window onto this artist’s unique, hybrid art practice.