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.

March 2014

Anna Maria Maiolino: MATRIX 252
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
University of California, Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2625 Durant Avenue, No. 2250, Berkeley, CA 94720
January 17–March 30, 2014

MATRIX 252 offers a selection of videos by the São Paulo–based artist Anna Maria Maiolino. For over five decades, Maiolino’s multidisciplinary practice comprised drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, installation, and Super 8 films that led to the use of audio and video in her work. Through fragmentation and abstraction she has explored the “viscerality of embodied experience.” MATRIX 252 features a group of four videos, originally shot on Super 8 between 1973 and 1982.

Born in Italy in 1942, Maiolino emigrated with her family to Venezuela in 1954 before moving to Brazil in 1960. Previous to settling in São Paulo, she lived in Rio de Janeiro, where she took part of the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (New Brazilian Objectivity) alongside Lygia Clark, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape. The brutality of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85) became a subject for Maiolino’s work. Based on Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (“Cannibal Manifesto”) of 1928, In-Out (Antropofagia) (1973) shows a close-up of a male and a female mouth attempting to communicate while obstructed by various objects, such as a tape, an egg, and a string. Further close-up shots of faces appear in two works, X and Y (both 1974): eyes are imperiled by snapping scissors in X, while in Y they are blindfolded while the mouth emits a cry. Through these videos, the artist exposes a human body that struggles to find a mode of expression as a metaphor for living under political repression and censorship.

Dear Nemesis: Nicole Eisenman, 1993–2013
Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis
3750 Washington Boulevard, Saint Louis, MO 63108
January 24–April 13, 2014

Dear Nemesis, the largest midcareer survey of the work of the American artist Nicole Eisenman (b. France, 1965) to date, includes more than 120 paintings, prints, and drawings created between 1993 to 2013. The work of Eisenman bridges the absurd and abject with the introspective and irreverent, drawing on sources as varied as the iconography of classical myths and popular culture in general. Over the past two decades, she has developed a creative and versatile vision that combines high and low culture with virtuosic skill. Being her core concerns the depictions of community, identity, and sexuality, Eisenman demonstrates an uncanny capacity for capturing the joy, pain, embarrassment, and ecstasy of being human. Fusing images that fluctuate between the depiction of a world rooted in the visual language of art history and a critical and comedic meditation on contemporary life, she depicts settings and themes as varied as bar scenes, motherhood, and the dilemma of the artist. Through a recurrent representation of women, both as “butch” and “femme,” and female love, Eisenman infuses the practice of figurative painting with an audaciously queer bent that also re-presents art history in a feminist light. Through her wit and the uneasiness caused by her playful images, she is able to communicate with a critical—and yet visually breathtaking—absurdity the multifaceted depth of the human condition.

Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
January 26–April 20, 2014

Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating
Art, Design, and Architecture Museum
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
January 26–April 20, 2014

Including over one hundred works, Some Stories Are Worth Repeating is the first comprehensive exploration of Alice Aycock’s creative process. For this major retrospective, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
partnered the Art, Design, and Architecture (AD&A) Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to present an exhibition that traces the artist’s career from 1971 to date. The display at the AD&A Museum focuses on Aycock’s work from 1971 to 1984 and includes detailed architectural drawings, sculptural maquettes, and photo documentation for both realized and imagined architectural projects. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art covers Aycock’s work from 1984 to present, a period in which she developed an increasingly elaborate visual vocabulary, drawing upon a multitude of sources that were partially informed by the use of computer programs.

This double-venue exhibition highlights the major themes that have governed Aycock’s artistic practice. While she is best known for her large-scale installations and outdoor sculptures, her drawings capture the full range of her ideas and sources, mirroring her conceptual clarity and formal depth. Her drawings and built projects achieved new complexity with the advent of computer-graphics programs in the 1990s. New technologies have enable Aycock to develop a digitally informed visual language that includes the generation of forms from multiple perspectives, mathematically perfect curve, and a precise construction drawings, while imagining points of view that are extraordinarily accurate.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue, published by the Parrish Art Museum and distributed by Yale University Press, features an interpretive essay by Jonathan Fineberg and an introduction by Terrie Sultan, director of the Parrish Art Museum. This book is the first scholarly exploration of the pivotal, enormously productive role that drawing has played in Aycock’s career over the course of her forty years as professional artist.

Kati Horna
Museo Amparo
2 Sur 708, Centro Histórico, Puebla, Pue., Mexico
December 7, 2013–April 28, 2014

Museo Amparo, in collaboration with Jeu de Paume in Paris (where the show will travel later this spring), presents the first major survey of the work of the photographer Kati Horna (Szilas-Balhas, Hungary, 1912–Mexico City, 2000). Horna turned to photography in the early 1930s in Hungary and, though still understudied, became one of the greatest documentary and surrealist photographers of Mexico. Seeking to define her contribution to photojournalism—and the photo-essay in particular—the exhibition brings together over 150 mostly unpublished or rarely seen works and contextualizes Horna’s career with personal photos and the European and Mexican journals with which she collaborated. It is chronologically organized along three axes that distinguish the changing geographic, cultural, and political contexts of her production.

The first part focuses on early work, conducted in Hungary, Berlin (where she relocated at age eighteen), and Paris, her early collages and photomontages illuminating the formation of her aesthetics in the context of the European avant-gardes of the 1930s (Bauhaus, Surrealism, and Neue Sachlichkeit). The second part focuses on Horna’s documentation of the Spanish Civil War, characterized by her compassionate look at civilians, an approach that radically complemented the perspective of her then partner, the war photographer Robert Capa, whom she followed to Spain. The last part of the exhibition examines her work as a chronicler of life in Mexico. Horna moved there on the eve of the Second World War with her husband Jose Jorna, joining various circles of the local intelligentsia, such as the movimiento pánico (Alejandro Jodorowsky) and the artistic, literary, and architectural avant-garde in Mexico (Mathias Goeritz, Germán Cueto, Pedro Friedeberg, Salvador Elizondo, Alfonso Reyes, and Ricardo Legorreta), while forming a close relationship with Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. The last twenty years of Horna’s life were dedicated—in addition to her creative work—to teaching photography at the Universidad Iberoamericana and the Academia de San Carlos (Univesidad Nacional Autónoma de México), where she influenced a new generation of contemporary photographers.

Alien She
Vox Populi
319 North 11th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
March 7–April 27, 2014

Organized by two former Riot Grrrls, Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss, Alien She is the first exhibition to examine the lasting impact of the highly influential feminist punk movement from the 1990s on contemporary artists and cultural producers. Formed in reaction to the pervasive and violent sexism, racism, and homophobia in the punk-music scene and in culture at large, Riot Grrrl fomented a new generation of active feminists, inspiring them to create their own culture and communities in defiance of mainstream conventions. The movement also popularized the academic discourse of identity politics. Emphasizing female and youth empowerment, collaborative organization, creative resistance, and DIY ethics, Riot Grrrl had a pivotal influence, inspiring many around the world to pursue socially and politically progressive careers as artists, activists, authors, and educators.

Alien She focuses on seven artists—Ginger Brooks Takahashi (Pittsburgh), Tammy Rae Carland (Oakland), Miranda July (Los Angeles), Faythe Levine (Milwaukee), Allyson Mitchell (Toronto), L. J. Roberts (Brooklyn), and Stephanie Syjuco (San Francisco)—working in different media whose practices reflect the impact of Riot Grrrl; the exhibition also includes an open-ended historical section that reflects the multiplicity that was integral part of the original movement and its continuity, in the spirit of the Riot Grrrl’s principles. Each artist is represented by several projects from the last twenty years, including new and rarely seen works, providing an insight into the development of their creative practices and individual trajectories. The movement’s vast creative output is captured by hundreds of self-published zines and hand-designed posters (solicited from institutional and personal archives through open calls, word-of-mouth, and invitations, similar to the way Riot Grrrl expanded), different music playlists from Riot Grrrl scenes across the United States, Canada, South America, and Europe, while interviews and an ongoing, online Riot Grrrl Census provide an expanded oral history.

The exhibition’s title, Alien She, refers to a Bikini Kill song of the same name. The lyrics are about the negotiation of normalized gender roles, the uneasy line between feminist critique and collectivity, and the process of coming to a feminist consciousness, with the repeated refrain, “She is me, I am her.”

Leonor Fini: Pourquoi pas?
Bildmuseet
Umeå University, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
January 31–May 11, 2014

Leonor Fini: Pourquoi pas? is the first survey of the work of the Buenos Aires–born, Italian-French artist Leonor Fini (1907–1996) in the Nordic countries. Fini’s work challenged conventional ideas through questioning the frontiers between female and male, myth, and reality, the conscious and unconscious; it also expressed female desire, interfering in Surrealism from a transgressive female point of view. Though posthumously reduced to a footnote of art history, including feminist art history, Fini became a “queen of the Paris art world,” where she moved circa 1931 to become an artist, constantly featured in the news and celebrated for her paintings, illustrations, and theater designs, and above all for her flamboyant bohemian lifestyle, marked by her masquerades and ménages à trois. Fini was largely self-taught, having nurtured her prodigious talent and passion for portraiture by studying Flemish masters and Italian Mannerists; she also claimed dreams as the source of the irrational of her imagery. She was featured in major Surrealist exhibitions, including the 1936 International Exhibition of Surrealism in London, where she scandalized the critics with her erotic females. She also participated in Parisian Surrealist circles yet distanced herself from André Breton’s misogynistic circle.

The exhibition, which includes paintings, drawings, book illustrations, objects, text, film, and costume sketches for theater and opera, is accompanied by a richly illustrated bilingual catalogue (in English and Swedish) with previously unpublished texts by the artist alongside new essays by the poet and author Lasse Söderberg, the art historian Anna Rådström, and the curators Cecilia Andersson and Brita Täljedal.

Ulrike Grossarth: Were I made of matter, I would color
Generali Foundation
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15, 1040 Vienna, Austria
January 24–June 29, 2014

Ulrike Grossarth (b. 1952) is a Berlin-based multimedia conceptual artist and professor of expanded concepts of art and mixed media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden since 1998. She is the founder of the Essen branch of Free International University initiated by Joseph Beuys and the recipient of the 2009 Kathe Kollwitz Prize. Though Grossarth began her career as a dancer, she became known since the late 1980s for sculptural milieus that variously manifest her interest in the corporeality of matter and create “radical and vivid spaces for thinking, spaces people can actually experience and use,” rather than artworks, as the artist puts it.

Curated by Sabine Folie and Ilse Lafer, Were I made of matter, I would color is a comprehensive retrospective that traces the evolution of Grossarth’s art, drawing connections from her early years as a dancer in the 1970s and 1980s, her sculptural settings and actions, and her most recent work, which interlaces an interest in history with the history of ideas.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, BAU I (1989–2000), is an experimental ensemble comprised of the “unmoved object-bodies” that Grossarth created over a decade and presented in a wide variety of constellations. Visualizing changed spaces of thought and action, the show bridges Grossarth’s early work, which is informed by Fluxus and punk and the attempt to come to terms with the postwar era, and her later art, with its focus on Eastern Europe. More recent works in the exhibition, such as the so-called Lublin projects (since 2006) and SYMBOL gotowe/Subject Aggregates, showcase the ways in which Grossarth seeks to reanimate lost cultural traditions, and her challenging of Occidental thought with her engagement with Jewish mysticism and the motif of the Shekhinah.