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 2013

Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu
Oakland Museum of California
1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA 94607
March 16–June 30, 2013

Curated by René de Guzman, Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu is the first comprehensive survey of one of the most prominent Chinese painters working in the United States. It features approximately eighty paintings as well as personal ephemera, such as photographs, sketchbooks, and informal painting studies from private and public collections around the world. Bringing together examples of her socialist-realist drawings from the 1970s, made at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China, with paintings realized since her immigration to the United States in 1984, Summoning Ghosts offers an illuminating exploration of Liu’s development and technical experimentation and captures the expressive bending of her training as social realist and muralist in Maoist China and the sophisticated ways in which she interlaces portraiture and documentation for her exploration of memory and history, among other themes.

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27705
March 21–July 21, 2013

Bringing together about fifty works from the mid-1990s to the present, including previously unseen sketchbooks, this first comprehensive survey of the internationally renowned artist Wangechi Mutu thoroughly investigates her work and its contribution to transnational feminism, Afrofuturism, and globalization. It also presents the artist’s first-ever animated video, made with the pop producer and singer Santigold, commissioned for the Nasher Museum, as well as site-specific installations that enliven her collages. Organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, A Fantastic Journey is accompanied by a major catalogue that contains essays by the artist and the curator, as well as texts by dream hampton, Kristine Stiles, and Greg Tate.

Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas and Gina Pane
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, TX 77006
March 22–June 30, 2013

Presented in the Brown Foundation Gallery, Parallel Practices celebrates two major female contributors to early performance art working on both sides of the Atlantic—Joan Jonas and Gina Pane—and captures the complementary and disparate natures of their contemporaneous practices. To illuminate the multidisciplinary apects of their work as an essential element of their performative poetics, the exhibition brings together a great selection of early and later sculpture, photography, video, drawing, installations, and performances. Importantly, Parallel Practices is the first major presentation of Pane’s work in the United States and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that explores the intersections of the two artists through texts by the art historians Barbara Clausen, Élisabeth Lebovici, and Anne Tronche, as well as an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Dean Daderko.

Les Immémoriales
49 Nord 6 Est – Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Lorraine
1 bis, rue des Trinitaires
F-57000 Metz, France
March 2–June 23, 2013

A rare meeting of Agnes Denes (b. 1931, Hungary), Monica Grzymala (b. 1970, Poland), and Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Chile) at Frac Lorraine by means of three installations that poetically interweave past and future through references to the rituals, languages, and material culture of Andean, Native American, and Australian Aboriginal people, Les Immémoriales offers an evocative contemplation on “the vital connection of human and Earth” with timely political resonance. The exhibition also ruminates on timeless questions regarding our passing from Earth and addresses a variety of political issues that hint at its modern abuses.

Gillian Wearing
Pinakothek der Moderne
Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35, 80333 Munich, Germany
March 21–July 7, 2013

Gillian Wearing’s first major retrospective in Germany showcases photographic works and film installations, providing an overview of her entire oeuvre and illuminating the sophisticated ways in which this British artist uses portraiture to make social relationships visible. Organized by Bernhart Schwenk and meant to travel to London and Düsseldorf, Gillian Wearing is distinguished by the evocative framing of Wearing’s works through several pieces by Andy Warhol from the museum’s collection.

Marie Laurencin
Musée Marmottan Monet
2 Rue Louis Boilly 75016 Paris, France
February 21–June 30, 2013

The first French museum exhibition to celebrate the work of Marie Laurencin (1883–1956), one of the most successful female artists of the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, features more than ninety paintings.

Kara Walker: Rise Up Ye Mighty Race!
Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603
February 21–August 11, 2013

Kara Walker returns to the cut-paper medium in monumental form for a new commissioned installation that includes five large framed graphite drawings and forty small framed mixed-media pieces, along with cut-paper silhouettes. The exhibition’s title refers to comments made by Barack Obama in his 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, about the challenges of community organizing in Chicago, in which he quotes the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey. Merging handwritten text with images, the work revolves around The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce; it also investigates the notion of “race war” as it exists in the contemporary imagination. Walker has referred to the work as “a kind of paranoid panorama wall work—with supplemental drawings large and small, to chronicle what can be called a diary of my ever-present, never-ending war with race.”

As it were … So to speak: A Museum Collection in Dialogue
with Barbara Bloom
Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 15–August 4, 2013

Inspired partly by Talmudic discourse unfolding across time and space and capitalizing on the use of objects as “placeholders for thoughts,” the artist Barbara Bloom interestingly weaves artworks and objects from the Jewish Museum’s permanent collection with her own texts, creating polysemous narratives and unpredictable encounters that pressure and energize the museum experience.

Someday Is Now: The Art of Corita Kent
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery
Skidmore College, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
January19–July 28, 2013

The well-deserved attention that Sister Corita (1918–1986) has been receiving internationally during the past couple years is topped with this major survey of her work, organized by Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, that brings together more than two hundreds items spanning her entire career. Someday Is Now offers serigraphs, paintings, ephemera, and videos of protests and performances with her students that illustrate the complexities of Sister Corita’s visual language as a printmaker and capture the diversity of her political agenda as an activist, teacher, and Catholic nun. An extensive catalogue that sheds further light on the complexities of her life and work accompanies the exhibition.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
March 22–August 11, 2013

With about forty photographs of the artist’s family and their hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania—a formerly prosperous steel-mill town that became a “distressed municipality” of fewer than 2,500 residents—LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital showcases the way the artist uses social documentary and portraiture to metaphorize an industrial town’s decline, comment on the effects of deindustrialization on individuals and communities, and critique recent forms of Braddock’s corporate exploitation that continue to threaten and distort the dire realities of the working-class community to which her family belongs.