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 2013

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and sociopolitical exploration and transformation.

Organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University by Trevor Schoonmaker, chief curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art and coordinated by Saisha Grayson, assistant curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, for its Brooklyn Museum version, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist. Spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, the exhibition unites more than fifty pieces, including Mutu’s signature large-scale collages as well as video works, never-before-seen sketchbook drawings, a site-specific wall drawing, and sculptural installations.

Sarah Lucas
SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX England
October 2–December 15, 2013

The photographer, installation artist, and sculptor Sarah Lucas is one of the most important figures of the YBA generation that emerged in London in 1988 through Freeze and gained prominence in the early 1990s with her first two solo shows, The Whole Joke and Penis Nailed to a Board. Uniting works that span two decades, Situation Absolute Beach Man Rubble surveys Lucas’s multifaceted and multimedia take on the body—“the bawdy euphemisms, repressed truths, erotic delights, and sculptural possibilities of the sexual body” that lie at the heart of her work’s exploration of the erotic and abject, mediated and repressed body—and ranges from the angry sensationalism that underpins the gendered and classed criticality of her installations from the early 1990s to the masterful pseudomaturity of the hybrid sex contours of her latest, soft, or metal sculptures.

The show takes the viewer from Lucas’s early forays “into the salacious perversities of British tabloid journalism to the London premiere of her sinuous, light-reflecting bronze where intertwined limbs, breasts, and phalli transform the abject into a dazzling celebration of polymorphous sexuality,” while reviewers agree that it pays fair attention to the intellectual rigor, visual strikingness, and complex art-historical references of Lucas’s work, without compromising the uneasy thrill of its revelations. Deemed “not recommended for children” for its sexually explicit material, Lucas’s uncanny and humorous defamiliarization of the body perhaps pose more problems for adults than for children, as wittingly put in a review of the show in the Guardian.

Lucas’s early iconic works, in which cloths, furniture, food, and language are used as stand-ins for the body, and her found objects, such as the ubiquitous toilet, echo the Duchampian readymade in their Rabelaisian sourcing of urban experience are featured in the lower galleries of the Whitechapel Gallery. The upper galleries present two environments: a color-saturated chamber featuring acephalous male nudes against a red backdrop, where masculinity is mocked through a sequence of edible phallic stand-in, despite its totemic scale; and a sculptural landscape of shiny bronze or polymorphous conglomerations of soft limbs or breasts and genitalia. Also running through this exhibition is a new series of “plinths” made from crushed cars; as well as screens and benches made from breeze blocks framed within. The artist’s face reappears throughout the exhibition “as an all-seeing presence, frankly returning the viewer’s stare, or lost in existential reflection.” The space behind Gallery 1 presents monochrome portraits of Lucas by the artist Julian Simmons, taken from the couple’s recent publication TITTIPUSSIDAD, and portraits of Lucas at her base in Suffolk taken by the artist Juergen Teller.

Anita Steckel
Anita of New York
Suzanne Geiss Company
6 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013
November 2–December 7, 2013

Anita of New York celebrates the work of the recently deceased and largely understudied feminist New York artist Anita Steckel (1930–2012). Bringing together a selection of works from two series, The Giant Woman (1970–73) and New York Landscape (1970–80), the exhibition not only illustrates the changing montage principles of her feminist art practice but also captures the centrality of New York in her feminist critique of patriarchy. Allowing Steckel to idiosyncratically juxtapose references to art and politics “with a mix of sexuality, violence, and humor”—to paraphrase the curator of the show Rachel Middleman from a recent article on Steckel in Woman’s Art Journal—montage became Steckel’s key means “to push the boundaries of acceptable imagery and decorum in art” and to speak radically about art, race, gender, and sexuality.

Steckel first became known for her photomontage series Mom art, which mocked Pop art by comprising historic photographs and reproductions of famous works of art on which painted additions turned the found images into social critiques of racism, war, and sexual inequality. In the early 1970s she joined the feminist movement and in 1973, in response to an attempted censorship of her solo exhibition The Feminist Art of Sexual Politics at Rockland Community College’s art gallery, she founded (along with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Hannah Wilke) the Fight Censorship Group, which protested censorship and advocated the acceptance of women’s erotic art into museums. “We believe sexual subject matter should be removed from the ‘closet’ of the fine arts,” Steckel wrote when the members of the Group came first together. “We believe sexual subject matter includes many things: political statements, humor, erotica, sociological and psychological, statements—as well as purely sensual or esthetic art concerns—and of course—the primitive, mysterious reasons none of us know.” In fact, the exhibition at Suzanne Geiss Company includes many of the “obscene” objects that a Rockland County legislator had attempted to censor, fueling Steckel’s defense of women’s right to represent the sexual body, both for critical and pleasurable ends, further shaping her work and leading to the founding of the Fight Censorship Group.

As described in the press release: Steckel’s large-scale series New York Landscape consist[s] of collage paintings that fuse imagery inspired by the human, art-historical, and urban bodies. Supine female figures, erect phalluses, dollar bills, the Mona Lisa, and other massive cultural symbols are inserted into the skyline. They sit on skyscrapers, make love, even battle in a humorous take on the city’s fraught, psychosexual sense of identity.” Superimposing her own face onto gigantic female nudes that subversively colonize New York, The Giant Woman series makes more palpable how Steckel raised the personal into political and its quasi-Surrealist empowering poetics.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz / Her Noise Archive
Patriarchal Poetry / Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
September 27–November 24, 2013

Curated by Anja Casser and Nadjia Quante and titled after a Gertrude Stein quote that highlights the association of revolutionizing queer politics and aesthetics, Patriarchal Poetry is the first institutional solo exhibition of Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz in Germany. Combining the debut of their film To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (2013) with the film installations Toxic (2012) and Salomania (2009), the show explores how the two artists investigate the emergence of photography and film against the backdrop of colonial history and the invention of body norms, the diverse ways in which their work challenge filmic illusion, and how their new film pushes boundaries, asking “whether and how changing structures engenders queer relations, whether musical and filmic forms can become revolutionary?” For Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe is based on the eponymous 1970 score of the avant-garde composer Pauline Oliveros, which itself influenced by Solanas’s radical feminist SCUM Manifesto affords the musicians an equal role, rejecting the hierarchical structures of traditional music.

Patriarchal Poetry is accompanied by a concurrent exhibition, Slow Runner: Her Noise Archive II, that brings together new and existing content from the Her Noise Archive and interlaces references to Boudry and Renate’s Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe and the pioneering composer Pauline Oliveros’s eponymous 1970 score. During the 1970s Oliveros’s feminist philosophies of music not only radically challenged the patriarchal Western musical canon, but also paralleled “women’s music” of the feminist movement by interrogating the notion of “performer,” “audience,” and the very meanings and forms of music itself. These rich tensions are explored through a series of contemporaneous works on display from Barbara Hammer, Lis Rhodes, Robert Ashley, and others, while a new series of posters by the New York–based artist Emma Hedditch creates a spatial manifestation of fragments from these histories and the wider archive.

This display of works is accompanied by a selection from the Her Noise Archive, a multiannual research project and study collection initially founded in 2001 by Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hilde Neset, which includes records, CDs, tapes, moving image, books, catalogues, magazines, fanzines, and exclusive interview material by artists who work with sound and experimental music such as Kim Gordon, Christina Kubisch, and Kevin Blechdom. The archive—accessible for the public at CRiSAP, London College of Communication—is a physical manifestation of the desire to draw lines of affinity between different moments of the avant-garde, from the radical contemporary composition of Oliveros to No Wave, Riot Grrrl, and other more contemporary experimentations in sound and feminism.

The museum will host an artist’s talk with Boudry and Lorenz on Saturday, November 23, at 7:00 PM, followed by performances by Antonia Baehr and William Wheeler (Scores for Laughter and Without You I’m Nothing) at 8:30 PM.

Sophie Calle: Last Seen
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115
October 24, 2013–March 3, 2014

Sophie Calle: Last Seen brings together fourteen photographic and text-based works from the series Last Seen (1991) and its recent pendant What Do You See? (2012). The exhibition is a potent contemplation on absence, memory, and the effect of art, typical of Calle’s scripto-visual outsourcing of it, inspired by the famous theft of thirteen works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

In 1990, during an exhibition of Calle’s work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the artist was interviewed for a Parkett magazine article in front of Jan Vermeer’s The Concert (1658–60), one of her favorite paintings. Later that March, the painting became one of the thirteen works stolen from the museum. The half-joking suggestion that Calle might have been responsible for the theft inspired her to create Last Seen. Standing in front of the empty spaces on the museum walls on which works were once hung, Calle asked curators, guards, conservators, and other museum staff members what they remembered of the missing pieces. With the text from the interviews and the photographic images she eventually created a visual meditation on absence and memory, as well as a reflection on the emotional power works of art hold over their viewers.

In 2012, Calle revisited Last Seen on the museum’s invitation. In What Do You See? Calle once again questioned people in the museum’s Dutch room, yet in front of the empty frames that once held the absent works that had been reinstalled in the galleries, literally framing the emptiness. But this time she did not mention the missing paintings but asked each viewer to respond to what they saw before them.

Ana Mendieta: Traces
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, England, United Kingdom
September 24–December 15, 2013

Ana Mendieta: Traces is the first retrospective survey in the United Kingdom of the work of a Cuban American artist best known for her intimate, ephemeral, performance-based Siluetas, in which her body merges with the natural world, often engaging elemental materials such as earth, water, fire, and blood, evoking goddess archetypes and exploring a mythic relationship with nature while performing cathartic rituals that evoking both Afro-Cuban and Catholic traditions helped her perform a reliving exorcism of the trauma of her early exile from Cuba. Chronologically arranged films, sculptures, photographs, drawings, personal writings, and notebooks that span Mendieta’s entire career reveal different, often neglected, facets of her practice while highlighting her work’s radical contribution to feminist and Land art. An extensive research room with hundreds of photographic slides that were not developed during Mendieta’s short life provides unique access to her signature “earth-body” actions, her Siluetas, while archival material sheds new light on the way the artist worked and documented her artistic practice.

Amy Sillman: one lump or two
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
100 Northern Avenue, Boston, MA 02210
October 3, 2013–January 5, 2014

Featuring more than ninety works, including drawings, paintings, zines, and recent forays into animated film, one lump or two is the first museum retrospective of work by Amy Sillman, a painter whose self-proclaimed “skeptical” devotion to painting and whose fine interlacing of abstraction and figuration has contributed to painting’s renewed vitality in the New York scene since the 1990s. The exhibition unites early works that, characterized by cartoon lines and pastel or acid hues, “move effortlessly from figure to landscape, playfully and often humorously exploring problems of physical and emotional scale with observations that are both wry and revealing,” with her mid-2000s series couples—which were drawn from life in pencil, ink, and gouache and translated into paintings from memory with bold brushstrokes and abstract blocks of color—that have been claimed as reinvigorating forms of twenty-first-century Abstract Expressionism, as put in the press release. Also included are works that seem to question the role of painting in the age of reproduction and mass media quite idiosyncratically, whether employing the diagram or resorting to iPhone drawing, then turned into movies that “bring back the neurotic figures of her early images while delving further into the current roles of abstraction, color, and the diagram.”

Dayanita Singh: Go Away Closer
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX, England, United Kingdom
October 8–December 15, 2013

Go Away Closer is the first major retrospective in the United Kingdom of work by Dayanita Singh, one of today’s foremost photographers who nonetheless uses photography as a starting point rather than an end. The exhibition presents examples from the past twenty-five years as well as her portable museums, a major new body of work that has developed from her experiments in book making. These large wooden structures, which the artist calls “photo-architectures,” can be placed and opened in various configurations, each holding 70 to 140 photographs. Allowing images to be endlessly displayed, sequenced, edited, and archived within the structures, as well as stories to be fashioned in different ways, these objects expand photography into the realm of not only sculpture and architecture but also of fiction and poetry. The show also includes a recent video titled Mona and Myself, Singh’s first “moving still.”

Dear Art
Calvert 22 Gallery
22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP, England, United Kingdom
September 29–December 8, 2013

Calvert 22 presents Dear Art, a new project by What, How & for Whom (WHW) that is titled after Mladen Stilinovic’s 1999 letter to art, provocatively questions the standing of art in the contemporary world, its reception and distribution value. WHW is a critically acclaimed yet radical all-women curatorial collective from Zagreb, Croatia, with a decade of international curatorial practice behind them, including the curatorship of the 2009 Istanbul Biennial. Dear Art is the group’s first exhibition in the United Kingdom.

Dorothea Rockburne
Drawing Which Makes Itself
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
September 21, 2013–January 20, 2014

Drawing Which Makes Itself is a great opportunity to familiarize oneself with Dorothea Rockburne’s drawing practice—her mathematical and structural precision as well as the material sensibility of her process—and a sad reminder that this female survivor of the Black Mountain College remains unduly understudied and invisible, while still in life. Focusing on the artist’s groundbreaking project Drawing Which Makes Itself (1972–73), the exhibition foregrounds the question that shapes her practice (How drawing could be of itself and not about something else?) and highlights the ideas that Rockburne has pursued throughout her career.

This includes the “terrific importance” of paper for her as a metaphysical object, as an active material whose inherent qualities determine the form of the artwork, as manifested with Scalar (1971)—with its planed chipboard and paper stained with crude oil—and in various carbon-paper drawings, some of which are exhibited for the first time. Her Golden Section Paintings and the works on paper that followed refer to the mathematical ratio used by artists and architects since antiquity to produce shapes of harmonious proportions, while echoing the teachings of the mathematician Max Dehn, whose decipherment of the underlying geometries in nature and art affected her profoundly. The exhibition includes examples of Rockburne’s later work, including recent watercolors, that continue her exploration of these principles in nature and specifically in the motion of planets.

Margaret Murphy
Toile News Project
Gallery Aferro
73 Market Street, Newark, NJ 07102
November 16–December 14, 2013

Gallery Aferro presents new work by Margaret Murphy that includes individual paintings, a wallpaper installation, and a dress. Murphy is known for figurative paintings whose protagonists are painted after figurines against decorative backgrounds that often interlace the opacity of enamel with the transparency of watercolor in colorful and sentimental compositions that cast timely commentaries on feminine experience and consumerism. In her new paintings, Murphy departs from her resort to figurines, turning instead on the inevitable and often violent news-image blitz of Facebook and Google, substituting sections of toile fabric designs with found images of violent or silly actualities drawn with acrylic or silkscreen. While her new work makes a comment about the latest forms of digital-image colonization of our private lives and imaginary, reminiscent of historic Pop’s commentaries, a continuity of material and thematic concerns is witnessed in Murphy’s reinvented practice that often juxtaposes historic sentimentalized views of life with current images of local or global issues, such as women’s rights protests from around the world or the Boston Marathon bombing event, as well as decorative abstraction and figuration.

Mary Beth Edelson
Collaborative 1971–1993
Accola Griefen Gallery
547 West 27th Street, No. 634, New York NY 10001
October 19–November 23, 2013

This exhibition is the first to address the more than twenty-five collaborative performance rituals and community-based workshops produced by Mary Beth Edelson starting as early as 1969. These pioneering participatory works were presented at the Corcoran Gallery, A.I.R. Gallery, the Albright-Knox Gallery, the Malmö Konstmuseum, and Franklin Furnace, as well as at universities across the United States and abroad. In planning and presenting these programs Edelson collaborated with organizations such as A.I.R Gallery, with the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, and with artists from the Women’s Building in Los Angeles.

The collaborations are represented by drawings and a chronology of photo documentation as well as a study area with scriptbooks, texts by and about the artist, and other documents. Collaborative also includes two Story Gathering Boxes, works that Edelson has created since 1972 and constitute an archive of participants’ personal thoughts. The box Gender Parity asks “What did your mother teach you about women?” and “What did your mother teachyou about men?” Participants may view previous handwritten responses and respond to new questions posed by the artist.