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 2013

Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
February 16–May 26, 2013

This major touring retrospective of Hilma af Klint’s work is a tribute to her unacknowledged contribution to abstract art. The exhibition traces its development and highlights the spiritual underpinnings of the symbolism and ornamentation that characterize her geometric idiom, in light of her interest in spiritism, theosophy, and anthroposophy. Also including Klint’s diaries and notebooks, A Pioneer of Abstraction proposes that she be considered a pioneer of abstract art, along with the genre’s main protagonists: Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich. Klint, who believed that when painting she was expressing a higher consciousness, exhibited just her early representational paintings during her lifetime, stipulating in her will that her abstract works, which today amount to more than one thousand paintings and studies, could be shown only twenty years after her death. Not coincidentally, this exhibition comprises largely previously unseen works.

Dorothy Iannone: Innocent and Aware
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London NW3 6DG England
March 8–May 5, 2013

Bringing together many works from the 1970s to the present, such as paintings, cut outs, illustrated books, and video installations, Dorothy Iannone: Innocent and Aware offers a great opportunity to study the radically combined celebration of sexual pleasure and quest for spirituality that underpin the work of this Berlin-based American artist, including the feminist politics of its pornographic aspects, its distinctive autobiographic mode, and its dialogue with both high and low culture, whether Western or non-Western.

Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows
The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011
April 12–May 11, 2013

Curated by Tim Griffin and Lumi Tan, Maniac Shadows is a mesmerizing installation featuring recent work by the great feminist Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Images from multiscreen projections of recent video, shot during her residencies in various countries, interweave interior and outdoor views of the urban and natural environments, populated by figures or shadows, immersing the viewer in a shifting scenery of presence and absence. The exhibition also includes still photographs derived from the projections and a haunting video apparition of the artist in profil perdu reading My Mother Laughs, an autobiographic text about her aging mother. Evoking her film News from Home (1976), which interweaves shots of New York, where the artist had recently moved, with the reading of the letters of her mother from Brussels, Maniac Shadows unfolds as a city-specific installation, an autobiographic postscript that brings full circle the signature themes that have preoccupied Akerman throughout her career.

Cristina Iglesias: Metonymy
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Calle de Santa Isabel, 52, 28012, Madrid, Spain
February 6–May 13, 2013

Curated by Lynne Cooke, this major retrospective of Cristina Iglesias’s work combines signature sculptural installations from the beginning of her career to the present, including videos and serigraphs, and sums up the major preoccupations of her polymaterial art practice while showcasing her multifarious expansion of sculpture, her exploration of its relation with space and architecture, and the centrality of the idea of the refuge.

Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento
Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
April 5–June 2, 2013

Curated by Claire Gilman, this exhibition is a unique opportunity to marvel at the early work of Giosetta Fioroni, an important Italian painter whose signature combination of silver enamel paint and drawing on canvas makes her ideal subject for an institution devoted to drawing. The daughter of artists, Fioroni was born in Rome in 1932 and studied theater design with Toti Scialoja. She began as an abstract painter under his influence, as well as that of Cy Twombly, whom she befriended in Rome, but by the sixties had shifted toward an idiosyncratic figurative idiom firmly associated with Italian Pop’s history in Rome. Though the show brings together over eighty works in drawing, painting, film, theater design, and illustration, dating from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, it consists primarily of her signature figurative works of the 1960s, whose iconography (whether based on family or anonymous photos, iconic Italian paintings, news images from the Fascist Era, and above all glamour shots of women’s faces taken from women’s magazines) and chromatic reference to photography and cinema (by her use of silver as a “non-color”) manifest her distinct contribution to international Pop art. Along with two other current shows in New York that feature contemporaneous female artists—Idelle Weber: The Pop Years at Hollis Taggart Galleries and The Pop Object: The Still Life Tradition in Pop Art at Acquavella Gallery, which includes works by Vija Celmins, Marjorie Strider, Marisol, and Jann Haworth—the Drawing Center’s introduction of Fioroni to the United States belatedly acknowledges the female contributors to Pop, a pleasant aftereffect of the 2010 touring exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists.

Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt
New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Print and Stokes Galleries, Third Floor, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018
March 8–June 23, 2013

Drawn from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs Collection, this exhibition documents Mary Cassatt’s first tentative steps in printmaking—begun a year before her first participation in the Impressionist group exhibitions in 1878—and culminates with her highly accomplished, technically dazzling color prints. Spanning twenty years of her career, the arrangement unfolds chronologically, allowing the viewer to follow how the artist dealt with subjects, compositions, and an array of printing methods. It is also meant to convey the artist’s audacious experimentation with printmaking media and techniques.

Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD, Scotland
March 2–May 26, 2013

Drawn largely from the photographer’s archive of negatives, donated to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2004, In the Shadow of Tyranny surveys the life and extraordinary political work of the Austrian photographer Edith Tudor-Hart. The exhibition is a long-overdue acknowledgment of the influential role of her socialist-realist aesthetics in transforming British photography of the interwar period. Born Edith Suschitzky in 1908, Tudor-Hart grew up in radical Jewish circles in Vienna after World War I. She studied photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, and pursued a career as a photojournalist, though trained as a Montessori teacher. In May 1933 she was arrested for working as an agent for the Communist Party of Austria. She escaped imprisonment by marrying an English doctor and was exiled to London. Tudor-Hart continued to combine her practice as a photographer with low-level espionage for the Soviet Union and was pursued by the security services until her death in 1973. Dealing with social issues throughout her career—beginning with a focus on poverty, unemployment, and slum housing that captures the sociopolitical turmoil of the interwar period in Vienna and Britain and turning to child-welfare issues after World War II—Tudor-Hart used her camera as a political weapon in the service of working-class struggles and the workers’ movement in a manner that has left an indelible imprint on British photography. The exhibition presents over eighty photographs, many of which have never been shown, and includes film footage, Tudor-Hart’s scrapbook, and a selection of her published stories in books and magazines.