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.

September 2014

Simone Forti, Crescent Roll in an unknown venue in New York, 1979, gelatin silver print, (photograph © Nathaniel Tileston)

Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective in Motion
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg 32, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
July 18–November 9, 2014

Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents the first comprehensive retrospective of the significant work of the “movement artist” Simone Forti (b. 1935, Florence). The program for Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective in Motion includes numerous performances, many of them presented in live enactments, as well as an exhibition of the artist’s sculpture, drawing, work with holograms and sound, and video that demonstrates her strikingly broad creative practice.

A choreographer, dancer, artist, and writer, Forti figured prominently in postmodern dance and Minimal art. She has been engaged with kinesthetic awareness and composition, dedicating herself to experimentation and improvisation. Her artistic projects include collaborations with other artists, such as the musicians Charlemagne Palestine and Peter Van Riper. In the early 1960s, together with dancers including Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer, Forti introduced movements from everyday life, revolutionizing the idea of dance and performance art. When living near the zoo in Rome in the late 1960s, she began to develop performance pieces based on the movements of animals. Forti also explored working with minimalist objects made of simple materials. In her most recent works, the News Animations, she includes spoken words in her dance, evidencing her ongoing interest in incorporating current events into movement. Through these works, the artist states that physicality and the language relationship to thought are pretty basic to us.

During the duration of the exhibition, students at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance will enact Forti’s famous Dance Constructions (1960–61) and other performance pieces in the galleries and in public spaces.

Annette Messager: Motion/Emotion
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
July 24–October 26, 2014

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia celebrates the work of the internationally renowned French artist Annette Messager with the artist’s first retrospective in Australia. Messager’s diverse practice encompass drawing, artist’s books, photography, sculpture, and installation and is characterized by her modest choice of materials (clothing, stuffed toys, yarn, etc.), images culled from pop culture, a multifaceted toying with language, and the underpinning centrality of the body.

As put by the curator of the show, Rachel Kent, “since her debut in the Paris art scene in 1971–72, Messager has created an eccentric menagerie of creatures” whose often hybrid nature captures the “complexity of life as well as the mythologies, superstitions, and vanities that underpin it—the shadowy ‘other’ within us all. From her earliest works exploring concepts of the feminine, to works of the 1980s that explore hybrid beings or ‘chimeras,’ to later works featuring dismembered soft toys, unraveled woolen sweaters, and hand-stitched limbs and organs, the body remains central, while identity is destabilized.”

Featuring works from the early 1970s to the present, including her large kinetic installations, Annette Messager: Motion/Emotion reflects a crucial duality—motion and emotion—that underpins the artist’s practice and infatuation with what she describes as the fantastic in everyday life, rather than in the imagination. While motion is central to Messager’s recent works—whether employing mechanical elements, complex inflating mechanisms, household objects, or the movement of the spectator—it is by “probing the body from outside and within” that Messager’s work reveals “the keen interest in humanity and fragile, emotional core” that this exhibition seeks to highlight.

Ewa Partum: Installations and Provocations
Limerick City Gallery of Art
Carnegie Building, Pery Square, Limerick, Ireland
July 17–September 14, 2014

Limerick City Gallery of Art presents the first exhibition of Ewa Partum’s work in Ireland, examining notions of gestural and symbolic “public place.” Defining the essence of her work through the tautology of “the act of thought” and the “act of art,” Partum (b. 1945, Grodzisk Mazowiecki) belongs to the first generation of the Polish conceptual avant-garde and is a pioneer of feminist art. Embedded in the mail-art tradition, concrete poetry, and performance, and with a language-oriented conceptual spine, her work, since the mid 1960s, has variously and provocatively touched upon such issues as the notion of public space, the situation of women, female subjectivity, and the Polish political context. She was the first woman artist to encroach upon public space in the nude in Poland, publicly making a value statement about being a female artist, basing her art and its vocabulary on her specific experience as a woman, and connecting her artistic gestures with political statements and a visible presence in the public. Her work includes actions, objects, photography, films that she herself calls “tautological cinema,” visual poetry performances, and mail art.

For a long time the reception of Partum’s work was hampered by East–West division, and following the imposition of martial law in Poland she left her country to live in Berlin (since 1983). Her 2006 retrospective in Gdansk and her inclusion in Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007–8) have marked her recent international acknowledgment as one of the leading figures of feminist and conceptual avant-garde in Poland and beyond.

Three Person Show: Tamar Ettun, Monika Sziladi, Aimee Burg
Bosi Contemporary
48 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002
September 17–October 18, 2014

Curated by Naomi Lev, this exhibition explores the distinct role of object-human relationship as manifested in the work of three New York–based artists: Tamar Ettun, Monika Sziladi, and Aimee Burg, all 2010 graduates of the Yale MFA program but of diverse cultural origins and practices.

Incorporating repetitive and meditative tasks using metaphoric objects from everyday life, Burg’s installation revolves around the notion of rituals and the suspension of time. Her recycling of mundane objects of everyday rituals renders them archeological artifacts that preserve ancient ceremonial events. The installation’s dynamic presence plays with the relevance of “time” by bringing the past into a science fiction–like future.

In her recent series of works, Ettun explores the concept of “neuron mirroring.” Originally defined as “mirror neuron,” the term refers to a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Her sculptures, video, and onsite installation are a reflection of a longer process, which traces the correspondence between objects and bodies, as well as sculptures and movement. As she often states, in her works the body becomes sculptural and the objects become performative.

Through a photographic process Sziladi creates unique digital collages that are constructed from scenes she shoots at events, conventions, and meet-ups of various subcultures that communicate through social networks. In her most recent series, Prisoners of Our Own Device, she enhances moments of the complex physical and psychological exchange we develop with objects, garments, architecture, devices, or other people with which we surround ourselves.

Reflections on the Aftermath: Lydda Airport
Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
Queen’s Road, Bristol BS8 1RL, United Kingdom
July 26, 2014–January 4, 2015

The Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, in partnership with Arnolfini, presents Lydda Airport by the Palestinian artist Emily Jacir (b. Bethlehem, 1970), as part of the program “Reflections on the Aftermath: Global to Local.” Through a subtle and delicate narrative set in an airport built in Palestine in 1936 by the British Mandate, Jacir considers politics, place, and history. While this haunting film was shown previously in New York (2009) and at the Sharjah Biennial (2010), its screening in the United Kingdom in the context of a program that reflects on the impact of the First World War around the globe becomes particularly meaningful.

Lydda Airport, an important stop along the empire route for the British government, is shown under construction and deserted except for the figure of Jacir and the main character, Hannibal, one of the largest passenger planes in the world at the time, that disappeared in 1940 over the Gulf of Oman on its way to Sharjah. The film also invokes the story of Amelia Earhart, the pioneering pilot who crossed the Atlantic Ocean on her own in 1932 and disappeared over the Pacific in her journey around the world in 1937.

Jacir—an artist known for her historical narratives through photography, film, installation, social intervention, writing, and sound—wrote, directed, performed, and created the soundtrack for this film. The animation was created using archive footage from the Library of Congress as well as original aerial photographs taken by Geoffrey Grierson. The exhibition also includes the artist’s re-creation of the original proposed model of the airport, a solid representation that contrasts with the fragile narrative of a film that exacerbates the experience of absence and disappearance.

Geta Brătescu / MATRIX 254
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
University of California, Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94720
July 25–September 28, 2014

Organized by Apsara DiQuinzio, MATRIX 254 features the first solo exhibition in an American museum of the Romanian artist Geta Brătescu (b. 1926, Ploesti). Brătescu is a central figure in postwar Romanian art. With a practice that spans a wide range of media, such as illustration, graphic design, drawing, video, textiles, performance, installation, photography, and printmaking, the artist defines herself as a natural drawer. In her own words: “For me, the line is the essence. Drawing is the foundation of my language. I draw with a pencil, I draw with scissors … with anything.”

Having maintained a rigorous and mostly secluded studio practice that continues into the present, Brătescu exhibited regularly in Romania throughout her career. She has chosen to remain in Romania during the Communist times, and she feels it was the right choice. However, due primarily to Communist totalitarian regime (1967–89) and the subsequent political isolation of the country, Brătescu’s work was little known to international audiences until fairly recently.

In this context, MATRIX 254 presents a focused selection of the artists’ key works made between 1974 and 2000, in which the space of Brătescu’s studio assumes an essential position within the artist’s oeuvre. In her early video The Studio (1978), we can see the artist creating inside this intimate room surrounded by her artworks, an environment that captures the playful, experimental, and feminine (as she defines it) approach that characterizes her practice, making also evident her frequent use of role playing and self-portraiture.

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.

August 2014

Carolee Schneemann: History Works
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León
Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24, 24008, León, Spain
July 19–December 7, 2014

Carolee Schneemann is one of the most important artists to have emerged from the experimental avant-garde scene of New York in the early 1960s. Though finally acknowledged as a pioneer of feminist and performance art—an acknowledgement that had been for years unduly marred by her controversial, for many, use of her beautiful nude body—it is fair to say that the breadth and depth of her multiform contributions to the radical advancement of postwar art, including painting, film, performance, and multimedia installation, remains unstudied and unfathomed.

Redressing the uneven visibility of Schneemann’s work throughout her career by illuminating the diversity of its content, politics, and practices, Carolee Schneemann: History Works focuses on the constant engagement of her work with contemporary history while illuminating both the pacifist politics that complement her feminism and the critical ways in which Schneemann’s diverse and intricate engagement of print and TV images of death and crisis from the 1960s to today resists apathetic image consumption by seeking the active participation of the viewer. Mediated actuality offered a counterfoil for the sensate awakening proposed by Schneemann’s use of the body in art, already in 1963, with her kinetic theater group performance Newspaper Event in New York’s Judson Theater. It was her participation in the antiwar movement, however, that triggered her first use of media images (of war and death) in the mid-sixties, something that continues to characterize her collage aesthetic and multimedia practice. In 1965, for instance, Schneemann made a stunning “visual and sonic threnody,” the film-collage Viet Flakes in which appropriated images of the war in Vietnam were zoomed in and out under a collaged soundtrack composed by James Tenney. Two years later, in New York, the film was at the heart of her “kinetic theater” yet multimedia performance Snows (1967)—its scene of death and abandonment abstractly mimed by the performers—presented during Angry Arts Week: Artists against the Vietnam War. Performances of Snows and Night Crawlers, on the fringe of Expo 67 in Montreal, marked a high point in her political experiments in Kinetic Theatre and Expanded Cinema, during which film was extended beyond the screen to include collage and other forms of art.

Carolee Schneemann: History Works retraces the artist’s creations from the early performance Meat Joy to works contesting military interventions in Vietnam and the 1980s conflicts in Lebanon, concluding with recent pieces, several of which are being shown for the first time in Europe, including multimedia collages that variously echo the visual labyrinth of catastrophe in which we are plunged. Among them is the poignant photomontage Terminal Velocity, a monumental photographic montage that stands out as representative of a new form of historical painting, while also breaking another corporal taboo, that of the dead body, as put by Annable Teneze. With this work Schneemann records a real event while infusing a hard note of humanity across five columns of close-ups showing bodies falling from the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. A hard-hitting creation based on a key moment in our current world, Terminal Velocity questions the effectiveness and the distortions of the media coverage of such tragic events, a question raised in such subsequent video installation works as More Wrong Things (2001) or Precarious (2009), in which spectators are submerged in a torrent of projected images and reflections.

Curated by Anabelle Teneze and begun last year at the Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, which in 2012 bought Terminal Velocity, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with fresh views on the intersection of her art with history, feminism, and the empire of image, called Then and Now. Carolee Schneemann. Oeuvres d’Histoire, edited by Teneze and copublished with Analogues Éditions.

Carol Rama
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NG1 2GB, United Kingdom
July 19–September 28, 2014

Nottingham Contemporary presents a solo exhibition by Carol Rama, curated by Irene Aristizabal. Rama is an Italian self-taught artist born in 1918 in Turin, where she still lives. The expressiveness of Rama’s work means a direct result of the personal tragedies in her life. At age fifteen, Rama began her “vulgar” drawings as a form of healing when her mother was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. These psychosexual images based on her witnessing of female patients wandering the wards half naked were presented in her first exhibition in Turin in 1945. The exhibition was shut down, as her work was considered too radical for the Fascist-dominated Italy she grew up in. She didn’t receive international attention until the end of the 1990s, and her extensive career was recognized with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2003.

Her autobiographical, explicitly female approach mirrors that of other artists of her time, such as Louise Bourgeois. In the 1960s, Rama began to use psychologically charged objects in her work, including doll’s eyes and animal claws, which led to her celebrated works with bicycle tires in the 1970s. Rama mentioned that rubber stimulated her more than all the other materials. She was attracted to the sensual, fleshlike quality of rubber and was interested in its character and temperament that suggest a feeling of unease. But her working with rubber refers once again to personal memories: Rama’s father owned a bicycle factory that failed. He committed suicide when he was declared bankrupt in 1942. The artist states that these works express the sadness she feels at his loss, a sadness that will never pass.

The exhibition features over fifty works and a contextual program that includes presentations of Shut Up, Actually Talk, a radical feminist freak-show by the Italian performance artist Chiara Fumai, and Inside Carol Rama, a selection from a series of ninety photographs taken by Bepi Ghiotti over the last two years in Rama’s legendary studio-home.

Annette Wehrmann: We’re Watching TV Because We Can’t Afford a Revolution
Badischer Kunstverein
Waldstraße 3, 76133, Karlsruhe, Germany
July 11–September 7, 2014

Badischer Kunstverein presents an extensive solo exhibition dedicated to Annette Wehrmann (1961–2010), curated by Ort des Gegen e.V. and Anja Casser. Ort des Gegen e.V. was founded in Hamburg in 2011 to preserve the artistic estate of the late artist. Wehrmann lived and worked in Hamburg. Throughout her diverse practice, she has developed a unique artistic position. Somewhere between sculpture and intervention, Werhmann fused conceptual and performance art methods with the language of the Situationist International, feminism, and science fiction. Her oeuvre, a distinctive mix of anarchic prose, dry humor, and intellectual discourse, reflects the political development, the daily life, and the art scene of the 1990s. Wehrmann had an important position in her generation and what became the art scene of post-Wall Berlin.

Werhmann’s drawings, sculptures, installations, performances, videos, and texts speak to the reader about the life of an artist for whom every observation becomes material for her work. Voicing her unease about the world, Wehrmann underlined an independent creative position that not only inscribed in her art, but also in her life.

Under the title We’re Watching TV Because We Can’t Afford a Revolution, this exhibition brings together a range of the artist’s individual pieces and series of works, including the sculptural works Fußbälle/Kugeln (1991) and her photographic series Blumensprengungen (1991–95), in which the artist literally exploded a number of flowerbeds arranged in urban locations, and UFO architectures. These assemblages of cheap materials, influenced by feminist science-fiction literature, are given a central role in the exhibition. They were described by the artist as a “retreat into oneself” and a “desire for a better, different life.”

Roni Horn: Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake
Fundació Joan Miró
Parc de Montjuïc, 08038, Barcelona, Spain
June 20–September 28, 2014

Fundació Joan Miró and Obra Social “la Caixa” present Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake, a solo exhibition by Roni Horn (b. 1955, New York) conceived by the artist herself. Borrowing the title from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, the exhibition explores the different media, major themes, formats, and approaches that Horn has used over the past twenty years. Through this huge installation comprised of sculptural works, photographic series, working drawings, and a floor piece, Horn intends to offer an overall experience. The works selected represent a compendium of the elements that underpin the creative process of the American sculptor, installation artist, draughtsman, photographer and writer: people, the landscape, light, words, water, presence, glass, faces, change, forms, series, spaces, the appearance of the self, and time.

The show includes text-oriented sculptural installation from the White Dickinson series; the photographic series You are the Weather, Part 2, which explores the essence of water as well as questions of human identity and appearance; Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) and Dead Owl; as well as a series of self-portraits a.k.a. and Her, Her, Her and Her, a voyeuristic mosaic composed with individual photographs taken in a women’s locker rooms at a 1928 Icelandic indoor swimming-pool complex. Here, Horn uses repetition to examine the relationship between individual and collective identity and to create an endless labyrinth of gazes and disenchanted desire.

The exhibition also includes Horn’s recent work Untitled as the centerpiece of the overall installation, four videos about her work, and a floor piece entitled Rings of Lispector (Água Viva) that combines drawing and literary quotes. Since drawing has been an essential aspect of Horn’s creative practice over the last thirty years, the exhibition includes a room set aside for working drawings.

Feminine Futures: Avant-Garde Female Artists in the Fields of Performance and Dance
Le Consortium
37 rue de Longvic, 21000, Dijon, France
June 21–September 28, 2014

The Consortium Art Center presents the exhibition Feminine Futures, an illuminating survey of radical experimentation with dance and performance by female avant-garde artists from 1870 to 1970—itself a potent and understudied prelude of feminist and performance art. Curated by the artist and curator Andrien Sina and first staged in the context of 2009 Performa in New York, Feminine Futures, in its latest iteration in France, comprises more than six hundred items—an incredible collection of photographs, letters, drawings, manifestos, programs, and first editions that sheds light on the unexplored gendered margins of twentieth-century avant-gardes in which overlooked origins of body art and interdisciplinary vanguard art practices seem to lie. “The history of the early-twentieth-century female avant-gardes, concerned with the body, dance, or performance, was forged independently of dominant artistic movements,” says the curator of the exhibition, as “the female figure, sublimated and idealized through the literary fantasies of Symbolists or hysterical due to the earliest ‘psychopathological’ investigations, gave way to an unequalled degree of expressiveness and freedom.” “The appropriation by women of their own modernity and the invention of multiple hypotheses as regards the Future Woman,” he continues, “open up new perspectives, suggesting a radical transcendence of the fine arts disciplines via actions where the body was seen in itself as a fully fledged work of art.”

Unveiling hidden “minor practices” in the margins of the most well-known artistic movements, or overlooked signs of dissidence lurking into known works of art, including manifestos within manifestos and singular heterotopias within larger isotopias, the exhibition illuminates the “multiple origins of modernity in unexplored areas of ephemeral action” as well as the affinities amidst a great assortment of female artists who “lived their avant-garde experiments as a response to deep forces rooted in the psychology of desire and the reconstruction of a myth of the feminine” that subverted its previous subservience and sought their political empowerment. A great example of the many brought to light in this exhibition is “the manifesto of lust” by Valentine de Saint Poine—the first and only woman to be part of the executive board of the Futurist movement—whose promulgation of “feminine action” barely fit the traditional art categories (poetry, painting, sculpture, and music) of the male protagonists of Futurism. Advocating that “we must turn lust into a work of art” since “the flesh creates as the spirit creates,” Feminine Futures stands for an artistic and political attitude of greater impact than the production of objects, distinguishing itself from the feminism of the times by “introducing an emancipated equivalent in the artistic arena where highly visible strategies of provocation and paradigm shifts are required.”

Artists in the exhibition include: Loïe Fuller (1862–1928), Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), Anna Duncan (Anna Dentzler, 1894–1980), Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), Ruth St. Denis (1878–1968), Gertrude Hoffman (1871–1966), Anna Pavlova (1881–1931), Vera Petrovna Fokina (1886–1958), Ida Rubinstein (1888–1960), Désirée Lubowska, Milada Mladova (b. 1921), Roshanara (Olive Craddock) 1894–1926), Jia Ruskaja (Evgenija Borisenko) (1902–1970), Giannina Censi (1913–1995), Evan Burrows Fontaine (1898–1984), Mary Wigman (1886–1973), Gret Palucca (1902–1993), Grete Wiesenthal (1885–1970), Hedwig Hagemann (Valeska Gert) (1892–1978), Vera Skoronel (1906–1932), Clotilde von Derp (1892–1974), Niddy Impekoven (1904–2002), Gisa Geert (1900–1991), Sent M’Ahesa (Else von Carlberg) 1883–1970), Katherine Cornell (1893–1974), Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003), Tashamira (Vera Milcinovic) (1904–1995), Tilly Losch (1903–1975), Margaret Morris (1891–1980), Nini Theilade (b. 1915), Yvonne Georgi (1903–1975), Maja Lex (1906–1986),
Martha Graham (1894–1991), Doris Humphrey (1895–1958), Hanya Holm (1893–1992), Ruth Page (1899–1991), Myra Kinch (1904–1981), Gertrude Lippincott (1913–1996), and others.

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.

July 2014

Vlasta Delimar: This Is I
Museum of Contemporary Art
Avenija Dubrovnik 17,
10 000, Zagreb, Croatia
May 15–August 24, 2014



The Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb presents the first retrospective exhibition of Vlasta Delimar, one of the most significant multimedia and performance Croatian artists to have emerged from the postconceptualist scene in former Yugoslavia and Croatia in the 1970s. Controversial for her nudity—the excessiveness of the female body in a patriarchal society like Croatia rather than the shock of her nakedness in and of itself—Delimar has systematically and consistently used her body since the 1970s, along with artists such as Tomislav Gotovac and Antonio Lauer, as a radical means to extend the limits of visual art and freedom, and to express herself. “The complexity of a personality cannot be expressed without the physical, nor without the spiritual. Giving oneself means that there is no holding back,” says the artist, who denies that her work is underpinned by femaleness or feminist politics, part and parcel with her polemic disassociation from any ideology. Delimar, however, has used her body in performances to examine the status of woman as a social and creative being, often in her multiple roles as housewife, mother, artist, lover, and aging woman, while in performances with other artists, including her ex-partner Zelijko Herman, she has examined the relationship between male and female.

Along with works that span the past thirty-five years of her career, the artist is taking part in the exhibition with two performances: Invitation to Socialize and My Temporary Home. The latter originates from a 1980s series of works called “communications,” in which the artist turned her attention to her audience and its emotions. As a continuation of this practice and presented on a mobile stage, and on a different location each day, Invitation to Socialize has the artist, accompanied by her guests, talking about her art and the development of the artist-audience relationship over the last thirty years. Evoking the diaristic aspect of her work, My Temporary Home is a work in progress, the construction of the artist’s temporary working and living space within the museum for the duration of the exhibition as a personal space exposed and shared with the audience.

Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
1934 Poplar Avenue, Memphis, TN 38104
June 14–September 7, 2014

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art presents a much-awaited survey of the life and work of Marisol, one of the rare female stars of the sixties art scene in New York—the first girl with glamor, as once called by Andy Warhol, whose 1964 exhibition at Stable Gallery drew more than two thousand visitors per day. Best known for her stints of silence, or silent masquerades at the Club with which, as Carolee Schneemann remembers, she castigated the masculinism of the Abstract Expressionist world, and for her obsessive use of casts of her face and other body parts in sculptures that articulate feminist masquerades of femininity, Marisol is indeed one of the most important yet still understudied sculptors to emerge in late 1950s New York as much for the innovativeness of her multimedia assemblage sculptures (that combined painting, drawing, collage, traditional sculpting techniques, and found objects) as for the broad spectrum of her personal and political concerns that underpin her thematography, including its humor.

Born Maria Sol Escobar to Venezuelan parents in Paris, Marisol took her first art lessons in Los Angeles, where she had moved with her father when she was sixteen years old, upon the death of her mother in 1941. In 1949 she moved to Paris to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts. Disappointed by the institution’s conservatism, Marisol moved to New York in 1950 to study painting at the Art Students League, becoming a student of Hans Hoffmann and a member of the Abstract Expressionist and Beat circles before she decidedly turned to sculpture, or better yet its idiosyncratic reinvention that she begun in 1953.

Inspired by Marisol’s mixed-media sculpture The Family, which was commissioned by the Brooks Museum in 1969, and in hopes of reestablishing Marisol as a major figure in postwar American art, the exhibition brings together diverse works that range in date from 1955 to 1998 and elucidate Marisol’s artistic evolution, both in terms of subject matter and materials by including examples of the various media Marisol used (bronze casting, wood carving, assemblage, plaster casts, terracotta, drawing, and printmaking) as well as the many themes and subjects she considered. Among the themes explored in the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue are Marisol’s diverse influences (Neo-Dada, Surrealism, American and Latin American folk art, Precolumbian art, etc.); her relationship to postwar art and cultural movements (Pop, Minimalism, and feminism); her experimentation with materials; her extensive use of portraiture; her politically charged sculptures; and her identity as a female artist who was born in Paris of Venezuelan parents and lived most of her life in New York City.

After Our Bodies Meet: From Resistance to Potentiality
Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art
26 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
June 5–August 3, 2014

Part of the All Out Arts Fresh Fruit Festival and curated by Alexis Heller, the exhibition After Our Bodies Meet: From Resistance to Potentiality surveys the legacy of feminist art on the diverse ways contemporary transcultural queer artists represent the body to challenge past and present forms of oppression and envision a queer future. Bridging these historic and contemporary endeavors the exhibition honors the pioneers of gender-conscious art and highlights the evolution and plurality of feminist art in light of representations of queer bodies that subvert any binary understanding of gender. Featuring works that unsettle the mythologies and ideals surrounding lesbian and transgender bodies and foreground queer bodies obscured by invisibility by Laura Aguilar, Cathy Cade, Heather Cassils, Tee A. Corinne, Chitra Ganesh, Allyson Mitchell, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Sophia Wallace, and Chris E. Vargas, After Our Bodies Meet demonstrates how feminist artists have repositioned the political potential of activism into art, allowing critiques of the past to provide space for imagining new queer possibilities, while showcasing a diversity of practices and concerns.

Seeking to document and empower the burgeoning lesbian feminist community, for instance, works by Corinne and Cade emphasize the female body’s capacity for love, agency, and pleasure outside the heterosexual imagination. The South African artist and “visual activist” Muholi also preserves marginalized histories, bringing attention to underrepresented populations of black lesbian and transgender individuals, as well as the targeted violence that threatens their existence. For her ongoing series Faces and Phases, Muholi’s photographic portraits archive the diversity and resilience of her black queer community in South Africa and abroad, while Isilumo siyaluma (2006–11), a series of kaleidoscopic digital collages of menstrual blood stains, memorializes the rape and murder of black lesbians in South Africa. Cassils’s performance Becoming an Image (2012) also evokes the brutalization of queer bodies, as the artist’s mixed-martial-arts blows are imprinted onto a 1,500-pound block of clay. Wallace’s ongoing mixed-media project CLITERACY exposes the irony of society’s obsession with and ignorance of female sexuality. Inspired by Indian comic books, Hindu mythology, and American science fiction, Ganesh makes digital collages that draw from disparate materials and cultural sources to offer alternate narratives of female sexuality and power.

Teresa Margolles: La búsqueda
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270, CH-8005, Zürich, Switzerland
May 24–August 17, 2014


The Migros Museum of Zurich presents La Busqueda, a display of work by the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. This exhibition is the first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland by the 2012 Prince Claus Laureate. Dealing with themes such as social exclusion, violence, and death, Margolles (b. 1963, Culiacán) addresses Ciudad Juárez as a place of crime. The artist examines the extreme violence in this northern Mexican border city where a mysterious series of female homicides has been ongoing since the early 1990s. Through a minimalist approach, Margolles’s works focus on how traces of these brutal crimes shape people’s everyday lives.

Since the early 1990s, Margolles has worked in the forensic medicine department of an autopsy facility in Mexico City, to which anonymous victims of violent crime are brought on a daily basis. By translating such vestiges into an exhibition space, the artist develops interplay between charged architectural fragments and displaced sounds within a grim realism. The mostly sculptural exhibition, curated by Rafael Gygax, includes two powerful installations/interventions—La busqueda (The Search) from 2014 and Mesa y dos bancos (Table and Two Benches) from 2013—that bring into this exhibition space sound, materials, and tragic remains from the Mexican border of Ciudad Juarez. Through her works, Margolles investigate how current events affect individual lives, evidencing the impermanence of things, humans and their relationships, while also suggests the urgency to develop new paths toward a concrete form of solidarity.

Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74
Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Herstory Gallery, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
April 4–September 28, 2014

Surrounding Judy Chicago’s iconic installation The Dinner Party at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is the exhibition Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74, a comprehensive survey of the artist’s innovative explorations of painting, sculpture, and environmental performance that make up a less-familiar but highly significant body of early works.

When living in Los Angeles, Chicago was a participant in Finish Fetish. The growing industrialization of the West Coast influenced many artists to produce objects that were completely handcrafted and yet, with bright colors and high-gloss form of Minimalism, seemed to be machine-made. Chicago in L.A. includes approximately sixty paintings and sculptures made with sprayed acrylic lacquer, objects, drawings, prints, photographs, videos, and documentation of performances that span from 1963 to 1974, affirming the artist’s importance as a pioneer in the Californian art scene.

A series called The Rejection Quintet may serve as a meaningful introduction to The Dinner Party. In this series, Chicago exposes explicit vulvar drawings along an emotional handwritten journal of rejection and self-acceptance. Encouraged by her friend, the feminist art critic Lucy R. Lippard, Chicago dealt with her continuing frustration with trying to address female experience while seeking recognition and respect from male colleagues. Most significantly, The Rejection Quintet, within the rich and complex oeuvre of Chicago, invites viewers to reexamine The Dinner Party as a work that emerged from decades of artistic experimentation, not only technically and aesthetically, but also within the making and raising of a feminist community.

A Voice of One’s Own: On Women’s Fight for Suffrage and Human Recognition
Malmö Konstmuseum
Malmöhusvägen 6, 201 24, Malmö, Sweden
June 6–September 7, 2014

This summer, Malmö Konstmuseum and Moderna Museet Malmö have collaborated to present A Voice of One’s Own: On Women’s Fight for Suffrage and Human Recognition, a celebration of women’ fight and achievements for suffrage and a gender-equal society that was central to the women’s own manifestation at the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö a hundred years ago. In the summer of 1914, visitors came to see an art-and-industry fair that portrayed an upbeat view of future and progress. The fair also featured the Swedish Women’s Exhibition, where discussions were held not only about the situation of Swedish women, but also with the participation of several national women’s organizations. The term “feminist” came into use in Europe in the 1890s, as the women’s movement became more organized through discussion and debate clubs. Women artists’ work was exhibited, and women authors’ books were available in the library. Then, women’ voting was an urgent issue. Society was on the threshold of radical change and the Nordic countries were among the first to implement votes for women.

The exhibition includes the participation of Petra Bauer, Catti Brandelius, Kajsa Dahlberg, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Roxy Farhat in collaboration with Shaza Albatal, and Grand Domestic Revolution Library/Casco. Some artists have looked back in history at the reform process that promoted women’s political, economic, and social rights since the local event in 1914, while others have focused in examining current issues relating the insertion for women in today’s society. Organized by Marika Reterswärd, Cecilia Widenheim, and Joa Ljungber, A Voice of One’s Own evidences current feminist discussions and is permeated by methods and strategies of organization that women communities have developed for a century toward a claim for their share of the public sphere.

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.

June 2014

Swoon: Submerged Motherlands
Brooklyn Museum
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, Fifth Floor, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
April 11–August 24, 2014

Submerged Motherlands, a solo exhibition by the Brooklyn-based artist Swoon, is a collaborative inhabitable shelter that explores social and environmental issues. Born in Florida in 1977 as Caledonia Dance Curry, Swoon is best known for her large, intricate linocut prints that are wheat pasted onto industrial buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In this occasion Swoon leaves the streets to appropriate the Brooklyn Museum as a temporary home for transforming the rotunda gallery into a “submerged motherland,” an inhabitable installation that includes previous traveling boats and rafts, figurative prints, drawings, and painting, dyed fabrics, and cut-paper foliage that grew around a monumental sculptural tree.

Swoon’s practice is rooted in collaboration, community, experimentation, and discovery. From conceptualization through production, her practice means an immersive, provocative, and transformative experience for both participants and visitors. She has translated her projects to both galleries and museums, but also to socially rooted arts activism in places such as Konbit Shelter Project in Haiti and Transformazium in Braddock, Pennsylvania, among others.

A meditation on humanity, climate change, and the artist’s own mother passing away during the ideation stage for the installation, Submerged Motherlands reflects on the notion of home—and the loss of it. In the artists’ words, the creative process of this inhabitable installation follows an “impulse to build a safe space in the world for herself and her community; some place to be a little bit different from the norm.” Swoon’s fantastic installation transformed the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Rotunda Gallery in a temporary and yet memorable shelter for many.

Judith Shea
Kent Fine Art
210 Eleventh Avenue, Second Floor, New York, NY 10001
May 9–June 28, 2014

Judith Shea’s solo exhibition is a sculptural homage to the role of women in the arts. For decades, Shea studied the representation of the human figure through a constant observation of people and the exploration of materials. In absence or presence of the body, from her late 1970s clothes-based series to the present sculptures that honors the role of women in the arts, powerful human emotions are evident in Shea’s work.

Shea reflects on the origin of her sculptural approach to the human form to different and yet meaningful experiences of her educational upbringing. Being raised as a Catholic, she was a constant witness of the representation of religious statues in church. While being trained as a ballet dancer as a child, she grew connected with her own body.

Graduated with a fashion-design degree from Parsons in 1969, Shea continues pursuing her interests in visual art, earning her BFA at Parsons in 1975. Based on “her own style”—as titled the successful exhibition she curated on women self-portraits at National Academy Museum in 2012—“the artist who makes clothes” was invited to collaborate with Trisha Brown and the Eye and Ear Theater Company—working with artists such as Red Grooms and Elizabeth Murray.

At Kent Fine Arts, Shea presents seven new sculptures that pay tribute to the role of women in the arts. Through these sculptural portraits, Shea demonstrates her unique sense of observation and virtuosity with materials. A fully illustrated monograph documenting Shea’s work from 1976 to the present accompanies the exhibition.

Nalini Malani: Transgressions
Asia Society and Museum
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021
February 19–August 3, 2014



Transgressions is a solo exhibition by Nalini Malani. Born in Karachi in 1946, Malani is considered one of the foremost artists from India today. Her work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India in 1947. Trained as a painter at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai, Malani has created work gradually evolved toward new media and international collaboration, expanding the pictorial surface into the surrounding environment, such as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, and theater. In the 1980s, she became a pioneer in India for her attention to feminist issues. In the early 1990s, her innovative theater, installations, and multimedia projects featured recurring themes on gender, memory, race, and transnational politics, especially in reference to India’s postcolonial history after independence and partition.

Her current exhibition at the Asia Society and Museum includes Trangressions II (2009), a video that draws from the museum’s collection, exploring the nuances of Western postcolonial dominance in India, integrating the folk sensibility of traditional shadow plays with new technology. Using projections through transparent Lexan cylinders, painted by the artist in a fashion that references the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bengal Kalighat style and inspired by the genre of reverse glass painting, brought to the subcontinent in the eighteenth century by the Chinese, Malani examines the power dynamics of transnational commerce in our increasingly globalized world. Through a mesmerizing projection of colors and imagery inspired by Edward Said’s book Orientalism, an ever-shifting tableau including wrathful female deity, boxers, and animals is accompanied by a recording of a poem written by the artist. The exhibition includes a selection of artist’s books that highlight the relevance of drawing and painting in Malani’s practice.

Zilia Sánchez: Heróicas Eróticas en Nueva York
Galerie Lelong
528 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
May 3–June 21, 2014

Heróicas Eróticas en Nueva York, Zilia Sánchez’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong, offers a delightful opportunity to experience masterpieces of sensuous and haptic minimalism, while timely questioning the canonic premises of Minimalism as being reconstituted at the Jewish Museum. Spanning fifty years of her production, including recent works such as the monumental diptych Conversation (from the Eros and Communication series), the exhibition brings together “paintings” rarely seen outside Puerto Rico, made in the artist’s signature technique of stretching canvas over hand-molded wooden armatures—often in modular configurations or reworked as parts of ongoing series—that was developed during the period she lived in New York (1964–72). Heroically erotic, Sánchez’s curvy and soft minimalist hybrid objects “queer” hard-edge minimalism differently evoking the body in a manner that does not adhere to fixed categories of gender.

Born in Cuba in 1926, Sánchez studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and became associated with the group Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo. Under the influence of Victor Manuel, she developed her own modernist approach to formal abstraction through paintings and drawings, while also designing furniture and theater sets (especially for the anti-Batista guerilla theater group Los Yesistas). Several grants allowed her to travel in Europe, and in 1964 she settled in New York, where she first begun experimenting with shaped canvases. In 1972, Sánchez moved to Puerto Rico, where she became inspirational through her teaching at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico. From 1972 to 1975 she designed the influential experimental literary journal Zona de Carga y Descarga, while in the 1980s she renewed her signature style by including line drawing or drawing transfer of semaphores and sign language on her canvases.

Sharon Lockhart: Milena, Milena

Bonniers Konsthall
Torsgatan 19
SE-11390, Stockholm, Sweden
April 16–June 29, 2014



Bonniers Konsthall hosts the second iteration of the exhibition trilogy Sharon Lockhart: Milena Milena that begun in Warsaw in 2013 at the Center for Contemporary Art and will be concluded in Switzerland in 2015 at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. This exhibition is the first large-scale survey of the work of the renowned American photographer and filmmaker in Scandinavia, where Lockhart has been particularly influential. Drawing inspiration from filmmaking and documentary photography, as well as from ethnography and anthropology, she has distinguished herself since the 1990s for her fascinating portrayals of individuals and communities, and a minimalist attention to the everyday, the subjective, and the human.

As a cross-sectional presentation of both her photographic and filmic work in the past twenty years, the exhibition explores the middle ground between the filmic and the photographic that is inhabited by her meticulously staged photographs and almost still films, emphasizing the relationship they both maintain to time and space, while also claiming the biographical dimension of her work. As such, the exhibition opens with the cinematic Double Tide (2009)—filmed in Maine, where Lockhart spent her childhood—and concludes with the rarely exhibited series Untitled Studies (1993–ongoing), Lockhart’s photographic diary, composed of rephotographed snapshots found in her own family album.

At the center of the exhibition’s narrative is Milena, an enigmatic figure who remains disquietly absent, distilling different threads of identification in her very nonpresence. Lockhart first met Milena when nine years old in 2009 in Łódź, Poland, while filming Podwórka, also a centerpiece of the exhibition. Literally translated as “courtyard” from Polish, Podwórka displays six different courtyards in Łódź and the children that live and play there. Lockhart and Milena developed a friendship through the act of play. Upon the rekindling of their friendship when staging the show for Warsaw, Lockhart discovered Milena’s desire to write an autobiography about her life, which provided the impetus through which the two have explored artistic expression together. The exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall features a specially commissioned, monumental stained-glass portrait of the Polish master glass painter Piotr Ostrowski as a personal and culturally specific tribute.

Kalliopi Lemos: I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows
Ioakimion School for Girls
Fener, Istanbul
September 11, 2013–December 14, 2014

Curated by Beral Madra as a parallel event of the thirteenth Istanbul Biennale but now extended to December 2014, I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows is a major site-specific installation of new work by the London-based Greek artist Kalliopi Lemos. A painter, sculptor, and installation artist, Lemos has become internationally known for a series of public installations that make poignant commentaries about the hopes and tragedies that underpin illegal migration by using the abandoned relics of successful or failed illegal migration typical of the Aegean coasts—small wooden boats (such as Crossing, Eleusis, Greece [2006/9]; Round Voyage, Istanbul [2007]; At Crossroads, Brandenburg Gate, Berlin [2009]; and Pledges for a Safe Passage, Canakkale, Turkey [2012]). Complementing Lemos’s concern with the dispossessed from a transnational feminist perspective that links the injustices against the racial, classed, and religious underdogs of global capital—best represented by the illegal migrant—with those against the gendered others of patriarchal societies—women—I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows tackles the issue of violence against women in a poetic, multidisciplinary, and site-specific way.

I Am I Between Worlds and Between Shadows consists of a series of seven sculptures depicting variously violated hybrid creatures, a sound installation, and a constantly renewed archive of women’s abuse, comprised of world news print outs, all evocatively installed in the abandoned yet intact rooms of the Ioakimion Greek High School for Girls. A gem of the once booming Greek Orthodox minority in Fener, the latter was founded in nineteenth century but closed in the 1980s when its attendance dropped to six students. The sound collage of joyful schoolchildren playing and singing affectively evokes the lively atmosphere of the past of the school as a breeding ground of dreams for the girls who attended it. Yet the injustices awaiting women, even in Western societies, are hinted by the evocations of gendered violation and sacrifice embedded in the Greek folk songs and international fairy tales narrated by children (also part of the sound installation), echoing the monstrosity of contemporary actuality that marks the news’ readings of the absent schoolgirls with transcultural staples of patriarchal myth. Hung from a butcher’s hook, on crutches or on gigantic prosthetic devices or confined by rails—and more often than not mutilated, amputated, and violently dismembered—these sculptural bodies most poignantly hint at various kinds of bodily, psychic, and gendered abuse, both through their imaginative bodily articulations and their manner of installation. Masterfully cast in stonelike steel with embedded resin, these half-animal, half-human creatures evoke familiar mythological and Surrealist creatures that suggestively cut across a wide spectrum of cultural and artistic references. Melancholically posed in the place of the teacher, the beheaded mermaid, the multibreasted hung rabbit, and the decapitated hen with the splayed vulva hovering on crutches, for instance, become protagonists of a tale from a children’s book that keeps going wrong in the world of the adults, raising awareness of all kinds of abuse that, whether explicitly or implicitly, threatens not only the egalitarian realization of women in various societies, but also their unencumbered expression of difference, and above all their human dignity. A two-faced chicken, clumsily balancing on two bases—itself a metaphor of unstable youth, according to the artist—looms also as an evocative stand-in for liminal creatures of exile. With its gaze fixed here and there, it aids the artist by bringing in full circle her concerns by perhaps planting a metaphor for the modern transnational, subject—forced migrant or cosmopolitan—and its vulnerability in the heart of a charged site of convoluted transcultural and imperial histories—an abandoned stronghold of Greek and Christian culture in Istanbul in the era of globalization and yet renewed and bloody nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms that, like all kinds of violence, make children and women their primary victims.

Kara Walker: A Subtlety
Domino Sugar Factory
316 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249
May 10–July 6, 2014

Commissioned by Creative Time as a public-art farewell to a loaded site—the Domino Sugar Factory—where American industrial capitalism, consumerism, and racism have variously intersected and will be perhaps redefined through its upcoming neoliberal gentrification, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety is a both moving and canning, sugar-coated, monumental memorial to chief confectioners of the American Dream, black slaves and laborers, as well as the artist’s first large scale sculptural public work. The subtitle of the work tellingly summarizes its poignant agenda: Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plan.

A Subtlety comprises a gigantic sphinx whose hybrid body combines cliché apparitions of the black woman as domestic slave and sex object and a series of black boys cast in molasses. The latter are cast after contemporary giftware made in China but reference the original “subtleties”: sugar-made, edible sculptures and dinner emblems of power and wealth that decorated the tables of Middle Eastern sultans and European nobility.

“In Greek mythology the sphinx is a guardian of the city, a devourer of heroes and the possessor of a riddle that maybe can’t be answered,” says the artist, explaining its conception: “the factory is a modern-day ruin, and I think the sphinx contains the various readings of history that the place represents.” Exchanging her signature black for the site-specific whiteness of sugar, a material central to the slave trade and in effect of the American way, Walker has thus unsubtly “refined” the black body of her mighty benign monster, mixing references to the labor of sugar production and trade and white’s classical and sanctifying purity, in effect both honoring black bodies’ unsung contribution to Western pleasures while foregrounding the lasting whiteness of power in America. Moreover half a century after Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the temporary gigantic Nana that exorcised the riddles surrounding the female body, Sugar Baby toys with them yet also from the radical, even though controversial, perspective of a woman of color: “she’s a woman, a bootylicious figure with something paradoxical about her pose. She’s both a supplicant and an emblem of power. From the front, she seems to hold her ground. But what you see from behind is what happens when a nude woman bends over, raising a question of whether it’s a gesture of sexual passivity or not.”

As put by the project’s curator, Nato Thompson, A Subtlety speaks “of power, race, bodies, women, sexuality, slavery, sugar refining, sugar consumption, wealth inequity, and industrial might that uses the human body to get what it needs no matter the cost to life and limb. Looming over a plant whose entire history was one of sweetening tastes and aggregating wealth, of refining sweetness from dark to white, she stands mute, a riddle so wrapped up in the history of power and its sensual appeal that one can only stare stupefied, unable to answer.”

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 2014

Regina José Galindo: Estoy Viva
Pac/Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea
Via Palestro, 14, Milan, Italy
March 25–June 8, 2014

Curated by Diego Sileo and Eugenio Viola, this is the first survey of the work of the acclaimed Guatemalan performance artist and poet Regina Jose Galindo (b. 1974). Galindo became first known for political performances in Guatemala in the late 1990s, including her bloody walk from the Congress of Guatemala building to the National Palace in protest against the presidential candidacy of Guatemala’s former dictator, Jose Efrain Rios Montt. In 2005 she received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, in the category of “artists under 30,” for her video Himenoplastia, a controversial feminist work featuring the artist undergoing surgical reconstruction of her hymen. Although Galindo has organized performances in which she does not take part, her work is distinguished for the political use of her own body in order to tackle a variety of social issues, including cultural traumas, and to denounce the ethical implications of social and cultural injustices, discriminations of race and sex, and, more in general, all kinds of abuses stemming from power. A postidentarian turning of her body into a symbolic evocation of the “social body differentiates the use of her self as the tool of her critique from the autobiographic one of several of her performance art progenitors.”

The exhibition Estoy Viva is divided in five sections that, conceived as permeable categories, illustrate the focus of her critique and poetics: politics, woman, violence, organic, and death. It is titled after the eponymous performance conceived and performed for the opening of the exhibition and featuring the artist naked in a white chilly room on a sort of tombstone, her life proved only by her invisible breath’s imprint on a mirror held by each visitor in front of her nose. The exhibition is accompanied by a film by Cosimo Alemà, a cinematographic reading of her work produced in collaboration with the artist as an emotional key to her work.

Sara VanDerBeek
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH
March 7–June 8, 2014

The New York–based photographer Sara VanDerBeek (b. Baltimore, 1976) is known for her formally striking employment of photography, sculpture, and performative gestures that contemplate the construction of images, their relation to objects, and the passage of time. For her solo exhibition at MOCA Cleveland, organized by David Norr, VanDerBeek responded to the city of Cleveland in line with her recent work. She began by testing the relation of photograph to object by photographing architectural objects made in her studio that were in turn turned into photographic objects, but her most recent work explores photographically cities central to American history, such as Baltimore, New Orleans, and Detroit, their personal, historical, and political connotations, as well as their distinct urban features. Engaging the city as a physical site and a system undergoing continuous change, the displayed photographs are combined results of VanDerBeek’s experience of Cleveland’s landscape and cultural monuments within a range of material and cultural shifts.

Hito Steyerl: Junktime
Home Workspace Program
Ashkal Alwan, Building 110, First Floor, Jisr al Wati, Street 90, Beirut 2066-8421 Lebanon
April 16–May 31, 2014

Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Program 2013–14 presents Hito Steyerl: Junktime, a series of video installations, screenings, and conversations as part of Creating and Dispersing Universes That Work without Working, led by the resident professors Jalal Toufic and Anton Vidokle. The screening series includes twelve films and video installations developed by Steyerl between 2004 and 2014. Between them is presented How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, launched in the Venice Biennale exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico in 2013.

Born in Munich in 1966, Steyerl has produced a variety of work as a filmmaker and an author in the field of essayist documentary video. With the global circulation of images as her principal topic of interest, she focuses on the intersection of media technology, political violence, and desire. Departing from the digital image and using humor and charm as political means of expression, her films and essays envision a world in which war, genocide, capital flows, class conflicts, and digital detritus seem to take place only partially within images, thus reminding us we are no longer dealing with the virtual but with a “confusing concreteness.”

Eva Koťátková
Art en Valise
April 3–June 28, 2014


In collaboration with the scrap metal gallery in Dublin and the Unit E in Toronto, Art en Valise presents, as its inaugural project, the first solo exhibition of the multimedia Czech artist Eva Koťátková in Canada. Born in Prague (in 1982), where she lives and works today, Koťátková studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, as well as at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. The youngest-ever winner of the prestigious Jindrich Chalupecky Award for Czech artists, she has widely exhibited internationally, both in solo and group exhibitions, and her work was distinguished as one of the highlights of the exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace in the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale (2013).

Underpinned by her generation’s trauma—the contrast of her freedom to do what she wants as opposed to the suppression that haunted the dreams and desires of her parents generation—Koťátková creates work in various media, including collage, film collage, and “mad” sculptures, that seem to explore the often-failed attempts of people to both conform to and break free of the rules and codes of contemporary societal institutions, including family and school. Kotátková undermines and recontextualizes the values and mechanisms used to regulate our perception of the world, and, in turn, the way we perceive ourselves.

Bringing together drawing, collage, installation, sculpture, and performance, the exhibition investigates Kotátková’s process of deconstructing traditional behavioral systems to produce fragmented models that invite alternative ways of communication, while offering a unique opportunity to explore the idiosyncratic surrealist sensibility that underpins her multimedia practice, signature themes such as the cage, and her use of the body.

Dorothy Iannone: This Sweetness Outside of Time; Paintings, Objects, Books 1959–2014
Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin, Germany
February 20–June 2, 2014

The Berlinische Galerie presents This Sweetness Outside of Time, a major solo exhibition of the Berlin-based American artist Dorothy Iannone. This will be the first extensive retrospective to address the humorous and erotic oeuvre of one of the most unusual women artists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. This Sweetness Outside of Time includes paintings, objects, and books created by the self-taught artist between 1959 and 2014. The aim of this retrospective is to illustrate the radical subjectivity of this unique artist to a wider audience.

A pioneering spirit against censorship and for free love and autonomous female sexuality, Iannone (b. Boston, 1933) occupies a distinct place as an artist in the second half of the twentieth century. Her oeuvre spans more than fifty years and includes painting and visual narrative, autobiographical texts and films. Since the 1960s Iannone continues to go her own way without compromise, artistically and conceptually. She is a pioneer of women’s sexual and intellectual emancipation that draws uncompromisingly on her own life.

Iannone’s art frequently depicts the sexual union between man and woman with an unmistakably mystical dimension rooted in the spiritual and physical union of opposites. Through graphic paintings, object, and books, her visual universe portrays partly clothed and naked figures on bright psychedelic backgrounds of flora, mandalas, and biomorphic patterns in which male and female sexuality celebrate the joy of intimate relationships while subverting traditional gender stereotypes of control an dominance. This Sweetness Outside of Time presents a personal narrative of a passionate pursuit of “ecstatic unity” through transcendence and spirituality.

Tauba Auerbach: The New Ambidextrous Universe
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London
SW1Y 5AH, United Kingdom
April 16–June 15, 2014

The Institute of Contemporary Art, London, presents The New Ambidextrous Universe, the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom of Tauba Auerbach (b. San Francisco, 1981), a New York–based artist who works in sculpture, photography, painting, weaving, prints, artist’s books, and performance. In her early career she created graphic sign paintings, producing abstract renderings of calligraphy and typography. In recent work she has developed a signature practice of ironing creases into her canvases and using industrial paint guns or hand-painted Ben Day dots to create the illusion of three-dimensional folded fabric that Auerbach describes as “Fold” paintings that occupy “a liminal state between two and three dimensions.” The artist plays with perceptions of space, taking a highly innovative approach to mechanical processes and color. For The New Ambidextrous Universe, Auerbach presents newly created sculptures and photographs that translate the scientific principles of symmetry and reflection in pallid plywood as a means “to hint at an alternate, mirror universe.”

Open Engagement Conference 2014
Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, NY 11368
May 16–18, 2014

Open Engagement is a free international conference that sets out to explore various perspectives on art and social practice with the aim to expand the dialogue around socially engaged art making. The conference will examine how economic and social conditions connect to life values and philosophies, situating the everyday in relation to a larger political and social issues that includes labor, economics, food production, ways of being, and education.

Directed and founded by Jen Delos Reyes, the 2014 Open Engagement Conference is copresented by the Queens Museum of Art and A Blade of Grass and takes place in the Hall of Science, the Queens Theater, Immigrant Movement International, and various locations throughout New York. As in previous conferences, Open Engagement will include a partnership with graduate programs featuring art and social engagement. This year this partnership will include a number of New York–based programs led by Social Practice Queens at Queens College, City University of New York. The event also features two keynote presenters, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and J. Morgan Puett, and focuses on the theme of “life/work.” The legacies of these two seminal figures have through their practices defined and redefined how life and work can be the foundation for artistic exploration.

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 2014

Claudia DeMonte: La Forza del Destino
June Kelly Gallery
166 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012
April 10–May 13, 2014

Claudia DeMonte: La Forza del Destino presents a new series of paintings and sculptures focused on symbols of good and bad luck from around the world. For decades, Claudia DeMonte has been involved in collaborative research and art production with women artists across the globe. As curator, DeMonte is the artifice of WOMEN OF THE WORLD: A Global Collection of Art. This traveling exhibition, with accompanying comprehensive publication, includes the works and statements of women artists from 177 countries portraying their image of what means being a woman in their cultural environment. In her later project, Real Beauty, DeMonte commissioned handmade fabric dolls from artists and crafters to express local concepts of female beauty, standards that are being lost due to plastic reproductions and globalization.

From Bhutan, Laos, and Saudi Arabia to Senegal and Tibet, DeMonte has traveled the globe observing cultures, customs, and idiosyncrasies from women perspectives and often working collaboratively with local women workshops. In one of the works presented in La Forza del Destino, DeMonte uses a female form sculpted from wood and laden with pictographic configurations suggesting lucky charms of protection. Her new works make evident, once again, her continued interest in women’s multifaceted roles and impact as storytellers, historians, and mythological controllers of destiny. In DeMonte’s own words, La Forza del Destino examines from a women’s perspective the icons that represent luck, superstition, and protection from the evils of the world.

Ane Mette Hol: In the Collection
Trondheim Kunstmuseum
Bispegata 7 B, 7013 Trondheim, Norway
February 8–May 18, 2014

Trondheim Kunstmuseum presents In the Collection, a solo exhibition by the Oslo-based artist Ane Mette Hol (b. Bodø, 1979), who uses drawing as a research method that investigates the relationships between originals and reproductions. The “accurate copies” of objects and phenomena are the result of a painstaking work, questioning the very medium of drawing. By using paper and drawing tools, Hol copies things with precision down to the finest detail. She has made copies of brown paper, rolls of drawing paper, music sheets, drawing pads, and book covers, as well as printouts from the internet and botched photocopies. Through her completed works, she challenges the relationship between original and copy with an almost Borgesian approach. Furthermore, through this relationship, Hol’s works comment on our continuous recycling of what already exists and on our common knowledge about art history and theory. In this, she questions the nature of art; its premises in terms of content, politics, and institution through remarkable technical skill and through innovative frames of reference and conceptual discourse.

In the exhibition at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Hol has based her work on a drawing of a photocopy from Charles Wood’s book How to Draw Portraits (1943). The drawing shows the book’s list of contents, and the exhibition is based on the different sections of the book. As the exhibition title suggested, the show features works from the museum’s collections and from Hol’s drawings, animations, and sound installations.

Maria Lassnig
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101
March 9–May 25, 2014

Maria Lassnig (Austrian, b. 1919) is one of the most important contemporary women painters. Through what she called “body awareness,” her paintings mean an exploration of the inner world. She focused on representing the way her body feels to her from the inside, rather than attempting to depict it from outside. Lassnig’s remarkable career has spanned more than seventy years. Throughout the decades she has continued to create work that vulnerably explores the way she comes into contact with the world, emphasizing often the disjunctions between her own self-image, challenging the way she may be seen by others as a woman, as a painter, and as a person who has lived through the dramatic technological and cultural shifts that have marked the century of her lifetime. In her paintings, Lassnig exposes personal traumas, fantasies, and nightmares, offering instruction for courageous living in a time of social interaction.

From all creative periods of her career, spanning her early involvement with graphic abstraction in Paris and Art Informel, to her later shift to figural representation, Lassnig’s exhibition at PS1 is the most significant survey of the artists’ work ever presented in the United States. The show, focusing in her self-portraits, features approximately fifty paintings drawn from public and private holdings and from the artist’s own collection. A selection of watercolors and filmic works, many of which have never been previously seen in the United States, also make an appearance in the exhibition.

Mimi Smith: Constructing Art about Life
Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery
New Jersey City University Galleries, Hepburn Hall, 2039 Kennedy Boulevard, Room 323, Jersey City, NJ 07305
March 20–April 24, 2014

Mimi Smith: Constructing Art about Life is a concise survey of Mimi Smith’s work over the past five decades, curated by Midori Yoshimoto. A New York–based artist and a graduate of Rutgers University, Smith is best known for the clothing sculptures she begun in the mid-1960s, the most prominent being Steel Wool Peignoir (1966), a see-through dressing gown embellished with lace and steel wool that has become an icon of early feminist art. Combining banal consumer or domestic objects—such as the wrapping plastics of various consumer goods in Recycle Coat (1965), the bath mats in Girdle (1966), or the pieced-together plastics in Maternity Dress (1966)—Smith radically intervened in Pop art, producing feminist sartorial sculptures that addressed the role of fashion in women’s individual and social identities, while unmasking the complicated relationship of the public and the private in women’s lives.

In the early 1970s Smith challenged the Conceptual art of her time from the homebound perspective of a female artist and a mother, then raising her children in Ohio, with a series of works that merit further evaluation for their contribution to postwar art and their diverse politics. These include series of large-scale drawings done with measuring tape and knotted thread that replicates the rooms and furniture of her home, as well as multimedia installations that allude to the pervasiveness of new technologies and the increasing invasiveness of the news media, and also to the environment and nuclear threats.

Sculptural cloth making and clothing itself continue to play a great role in Smith’s contemporary investigation of gendered identity and politics, as seen in her recent ruminations on women’s aging through drawn representations of underwear.

Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds
Menil Collection
1533 Sul Ross Street, Houston, TX 77006
January 31–May 11, 2014

Curated by Michelle White under the auspices of the Menil Drawing Institute, Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds is the first museum survey to focus on Lee Bontecou’s works on paper. It brings together over seventy works from various collections, including that of the Menil, that sample her drawing practice from 1958 to 2012. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by White, Dore Ashton, and Joan Banach.

Advancing the understanding of the work of this incredible artist, Drawn Worlds explores Bontecou’s experimentation in materials and techniques, such as her early use of a welding torch to deposit velvet layers of black soot on paper, muslin, and canvas. The exhibition also contextualizes the artist’s distinctive iconography, especially her penchant for circles and voids, within the political and environmental concerns of the time of their making. Above all it provides a unique opportunity to witness the “unsettling realms of human folly and the frailty of the natural world” in which Bontecou’s “drawn words” take the viewer, while studying the forms that characterize them, whether as origins of her sculptures or independent transmutations of her haunting vocabulary.

Betye Saar: Redtime Est
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
100 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
March 15–May 3, 2014

Betye Saar is widely known for multimedia collages, box assemblages, altars, and installations consisting of found materials that, as put by the artist, “reach across the barriers of art and life to bridge cultural diversity and forge new understandings,” in effect voicing various political, racial, spiritual and gender concerns. Redtime Est (2011), a variation of the eponymous installation for Pacific Standard Time in Los Angeles three years ago, offers a unique opportunity to indulge the affective sensibility of her highly political objects.

Redtime Est consists of red, or chameleonlike red, works that are curated by the artist in and around a room whose walls are painted red, “the color of anger, danger, violence, heat, passion, blood and fire.” A caged mannequin with a crow as head and dressed with shackles guards the entrance to Redtime Est, setting its tone, while Red Ascension, a painted red ladder, hangs diagonally across the wall that faces the viewer upon his or her entrance, cinematically commemorates the slaves’ trip from Africa to America with various symbolic objects featured in each frame, ranging from an African mask to handcrafted ships to red-painted chains and padlocks.

Unlike the miniretrospective character of the Redtime Est, this one is a mega-assemblage of recent works, the earliest dating from the early 1990s, whose subject matter, as in Justice (2011) features Aunt Jemima, is manifested with signature tropes of the feminist and antiracist underpinnings of the artist’s assemblage practice since the 1960s. Focusing on the most political aspects of her work, the artist brings together objects for Redtime Est that, while sampling the various modes of her practice from painting to assemblage and the sheer repurposing of found objects, illustrate the way in which she used “derogatory” stereotypes of blackness and recycled objects of poignant history and function, such as washboards, to make powerful and empowering critical statements about race and gender with an idiosyncratic marriage of past and present, her homage to her ancestors and her radical legacy to future.

Alexandra Bachzetzis and Claire Hooper
Bonner Kunstverein
Hochstadenring 22,
D-53119 Bonn, Germany
February 22–May 25, 2014

Bonner Kunstverein juxtaposes the deconstructive and seductive ways in which pop culture is respectively employed in the work of the performer and choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis and the filmmaker Claire Hooper, putting in dialogue the exploration of the distinct significance given by social media in the staging of personality and life today as well as the ways in which their practice challenges the exhibition format. While Bachzetsis performed with Anne Pajunen for A Piece Danced Alone (2011) during the opening, her work is mostly represented through video documentations of her choreographies. Hooper’s videos are exhibited as part of structures that function as projection surfaces and architectural ornamentation, creating links between the exhibition space, the illusionistic space of the film, and its documentary function in a manner typical of Hooper, as, for instance, by recreating a Berlin subway environment.

Bachzetsis’s works depict the controlled movements of bodies following a clear sequence in evocative situations that condense reflections of the contemporary media culture into studies of motion by means of mirroring and repetition. By isolating gestures and body language from the flow of the familiar as signs of cultural codes she deconstructs the sequence of events, while also variously analyzing the mechanics of TV soaps and hip hop video clips, classical ballet, modern dance, and performance art.

Hooper’s films, in which the British tradition of documentaries encounters Greek mythology, focus on figures in precarious social circumstances and their entanglement in restrictive systems that are converted into collective social areas through parablelike, mythological enhancement. Interchangeable elements from everyday life in documentary fashion oscillate kaleidoscopically with theatrically charged passages. While pop culture plays an equally important part in the staging of her figures, Hooper depicts the body in seemingly surreal dance performances that enable her to portray the irrational and also the compulsive forces that continue to drive our society. A dialogue about the body and its representation in the media, as well as its physical and social limitations, develops between their works. Both artists depict the body and the figure as shimmering, constantly changing projection surfaces.

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, still from Y, 1974, 8mm film transferred to DVD, black and white with sound, 2:28 mins. (artwork © Anna Maria Maiolino; photograph by Max Nauenberg)

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.

Nicole Eisenman, Sloppy Bar Room Kiss, 2011, oil on canvas, 39 x 48 in. (artwork © Nicole Eisenman)

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, Hoodo (Laura) from the Series “How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts” Vertical & Horizontal Cross-section of the Ether Wind (1981), 1990/2012, watercolor and ink on paper, 27½ x 39¼ in. Collection of the artist (artwork © Alice Aycock)

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, Bottle, 1962, gelatin-silver print, 9 5/16 x 6½ in. (artwork © Kati Horna)

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.

Posters (ca. 1991–present) from Riot Grrrl–related shows, conventions, and meetings internationally, solicited from institutional and personal archives through open calls, word of mouth, and invitations

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.”

Installation view of Leonor Fini: Pourquoi pas? (artworks © Leonor Fini; photograph by Polly Yassin/Bildmuseet)

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.

Installation view of Were I made of matter, I would color (photograph by Stephan Wyckoff)

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.

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.

2014 Annual Conference in Chicago

The CWA Picks for the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago are dedicated to the memory of Wanda D. Ewing (January 4, 1970–December 8, 2013), an artist and educator who lived and worked in Omaha, Nebraska, by her friends and fellow members of the Committee on Women in the Arts.

Installation view of Lilli Carré (artwork © Lilli Carré; photograph by Nathan Keay and © Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago)

Lilli Carré: BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
December 17, 2013–April 15, 2014

Although Lilli Carré is perhaps best known for her award-winning comics, animated films, and commercial illustration, her interdisciplinary creative practice employs a wide range of media including printmaking, artists’ books, painting, and, most recently, sculpture. Her work, which defies simple classification by medium, encompasses delicate and moving explorations of humor and failure, narrative and time, the human form and abstraction, and presence and mortality.

For BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works—the artist’s first solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago—Carré presents an entirely new body of work in animation, sculpture, and drawing, highlighting new directions in her creative process. Sculptures are displayed in pairs to show the objects in two separate states of being, while their dimensional forms are abstracted, flattened, and reflected in accompanying drawings. A new work, made specifically for this installation, consists of two videos projected on opposite walls. The dual projection reveals slowly shifting temporal relationships between images, which alternate between abstraction and figuration, and positions the viewer in the empty space between the two animations. The artist encourages viewers to interpret this space and play an active role in filling the gap between objects and their resonant images.

Ghost Nature
Gallery 400
University of Illinois, Chicago, 400 South Peoria Street, Chicago IL 60607
January 17–March 1, 2014

The Northwest Passage—a historic golden fleece of shipping routes—has opened up in the Arctic, and scientists continue to predict dramatically rising seas. Bee populations have fallen rapidly, raising questions about food production. Mice grow human ears on their backs in laboratories, and rabbits glow in the dark. In this new age of ecological awareness, “Nature” as a Romantic ideal—a pristine mountainside beyond the scope of human influence—is but a dithering spirit. Rather than succumbing to the pang of this loss, Ghost Nature exposes the limits of human perspective in the emergent landscape that remains: a slippery network of sometimes-monstrous creatures, plants, and technological advances. Organized by Caroline Picard, the exhibition consists of the following artists: Sebastian Alvarez, Art Orienté objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin), Jeremy Bolen, Irina Botea, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Robert Burnier, Marcus Coates, Assaf Evron, Carrie Gundersdorf, Institute of Critical Zoologists, Jenny Kendler, Devin King, Stephen Lapthisophon, Milan Metthey, Rebecca Mir, Heidi Norton, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Tessa Siddle, and Xaviera Simmons.

Judy Ledgerwood: Chromatic Patterns for the Smart Museum
David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art
University of Chicago, 5550 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
December 26, 2013–spring 2015

The Chicago-based artist Judy Ledgerwood has created an immense, site-specific wall painting for the Smart Museum of Art that is part of an ongoing series inspired by the energetic, asymmetrical rhythms of the composer Morton Feldman’s Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981). The painting comprises horizontal bands of boldly colored patterns—blue with bronze, fluorescent red with mint green, spring green with copper—that run across the large central wall in the Smart’s lobby. The work responds to both the soaring, symmetrical architecture of the space and, in its repeating patterns, the design of Louis Sullivan’s elevator screens for the Chicago Stock Exchange building (two of which are on view in the lobby). The artist painted Chromatic Patterns by hand directly on the wall. The work, in the artist’s words, is made to “hang tapestry-like” with drooping and irregular edges that contrast with the clean lines of the museum’s modernist architecture.

RISK: Empathy, Art, and Social Practice
Glass Curtain Gallery
Columbia College Chicago, 1104 South Wabash Avenue, First Floor, Chicago, IL 60605
February 10–April 26, 2014

RISK considers the interdependent role of empathy and risk in socially engaged art as practiced by contemporary Chicago artists. Organized by Amy M. Mooney and Neysa Page-Lieberman, the exhibition features artists who work in a public arena to foster connections among individuals and to activate communities. Their work invites the outside in, blurs the lines of public and private, reveals our mutual dependencies, and effects social change. The “success” or “failure” of these relationship-driven projects, however, can never be guaranteed, as this porous, process-based art form exists in unpredictable, shifting environments.

The works in RISK are divergent in medium, content, and scope, but all share an interest in initiating and negotiating relationships through personal interaction. Projects range from a community Shack built in the gallery and the staging of an actual Wedding Party to herbal-remedy offerings from an Anxiety Garden and vintage Tintype Portrait sessions. Working with cultural partners and sites across the city, RISK highlights many exciting practices that are emerging in this field and explores artists’ motivations and viewers’ expectations for socially engaged art. Participating artists include: Alberto Aguilar, Jim Duignan, Industry of the Ordinary, Samantha Hill, Kirsten Leenaars, Faheem Majeed, Cecil McDonald Jr., Jennifer Mills, Cheryl Pope, the Museum of Contemporary Phenomenon, Potluck: Chicago, and Fereshteh Toosi.

Nora Schultz, image from Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real, 2013 (artwork © Nora Schultz)

Nora Schultz: Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real
Renaissance Society
University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
January 12–February 23, 2014

The Renaissance Society presents the first museum solo exhibition of Nora Schultz, a Berlin-based artist who produces sculptural installations that double as analogue printing studios. Her primary materials are discarded objects scavenged from her studio and the site of her exhibitions, often in the form of metal bars and sheets, grates, tubes, and plastics. Schultz repurposes this refuse into sculptural objects, as well as contact printing devices, stencils, and even simple rotary presses with which she prints (often as public performance) abstractions scaled from the intimate to the monumental, exhibited individually or in accumulating heaps. Deeply engaged with material and process, Schultz’s installations are themselves, at times, engines of ongoing artistic creation.

Social Paper
Center for Book and Paper Arts
Columbia College Chicago, 1104 South Wabash Avenue, Second Floor, Chicago, IL 60605
February 10–April 15, 2014

Social Paper, curated by Jessica Cochran and Melissa Potter, charts the evolution of the art of hand papermaking in relation to recent discourse around socially engaged art, pointing specifically to craft, labor, and site-specificity and to the collaborative and community aspects of contemporary hand papermaking. According the medium’s proponents, socially engaged art blurs the lines separating politics, community organizing, and art. Projects such as community gardens and centers, interactive and multigenerational workshops, educational programs, and public art invoke the spirit of urgent social transformation.

From urban elementary schools to indigenous tribes in Latin America to communities of international war veterans, hand papermaking artists translate this medium into meaningful activity with diverse constituencies. To date, no major exhibitions or discourse around this important and timely theme exist. This exhibition will contribute to new scholarship in the field of craft arts and specifically hand paper making, as well as feature the work of the Center for Book and Paper Arts, a unique institution in Chicago, and the world that supports critical discourse and interdisciplinary activity in the book and paper arts. Artists include: Loreto Apilado and Trisha Martin, Laura Anderson Barbata, Kim Berman, Combat Paper, Nick Dubois, Fresh Press (University of Illinois), Julia Goodman, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Cathy Mooses, Paper Road Tibet, Parents Circle – Families Forum, Peace Paper, Maggie Puckett, John Risseeuw, Kiff Slemmons, the People’s Library (Richmond), and Women’s Studio Workshop (Art Farm).

MCA DNA: Warhol and Marisol
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
September 21, 2013–June 15, 2014

The 1960s were important years for two artists and friends—Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987) and Marisol (Marisol Escobar, American, b. France, 1930)—and marked a formative period in the development of their individual careers. Warhol began using his celebrated silkscreen techniques to produce serial paintings, often based on mass-media images. Marisol made the first of many portraits and developed her signature style: wooden sculptures with flat painted surfaces and additional elements such as everyday objects or plaster castings. Both were prominent figures in New York’s lively art scene during this time. The two attended events together and each exhibited their work in solo shows at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery as they came to be identified with the rising Pop art movement. Warhol and Marisol even turned to one another as occasional subjects: Marisol made a sculptural portrait of Warhol in the early 1960s, titled Andy; and around the same time, Warhol featured Marisol in some of his legendary early films.

Inspired by the multifaceted relationship of these two artists, MCA DNA: Warhol and Marisol presents a focused selection of their works, side by side, drawn primarily from the museum’s collection. Key examples of Warhol’s silkscreen paintings and Marisol’s wood sculptures illuminate the artists’ respective approaches to portraiture, while the pairing of their work brings certain affinities into view, including a similar use of repeating figures. At the same time, their methods diverge in significant ways, perhaps most visibly in the contrast between Warhol’s overtly mechanical approach to painting and Marisol’s more handcrafted, labor-intensive techniques as a sculptor.

Faith Wilding performing as Isadora Duncan at the Fresno Feminist Art Program in 1971, with a collaborative costume image and staging by Nancy Youdelman (photograph by Dori Atlantis)

Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries Retrospective
Three Walls
119 North Peoria Street, No. 2C, Chicago, IL 60607
January 10–February 22, 2014

Although best known for her contribution to Womanhouse—the 1972 performance Waiting—and for her role in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program in Fresno and Cal Arts, Faith Wilding remains largely understudied. As the first major retrospective of her work, Fearful Symmetries spans forty years and brings together and contextualizes the studio practice—especially works on paper—that accompanies Wilding’s performative work, illuminating the allegorical imagery that underpins her feminism and the centrality of transformation and emergence in its articulation. As such the exhibition highlights the theme of becoming—as transformative event and threshold to transfiguration—as a state of in-between-ness, evoked by iconographic motifs such as leaves, the chrysalis, hybrid beings, or “waiting” itself.

Alongside the exhibition is a curated archive featuring Wilding’s work with the collaborative research and performance group subRosa; rare videos of performances made throughout her career; and papers and publications dating from her participation in the feminist art movement in the 1970s. A series of special events will punctuate the exhibition.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: Violet Fogs Azure Snot and Sensitive Instruments
Corbett vs Dempsey Gallery
120 North Ashland Avenue, Third Floor, Chicago, IL 60622
February 7–March 15, 2014

Violet Fogs Azure Snot is an exhibition of new paintings by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, a Chicago-based artist who will be included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color, eighty-page catalogue. In Sensitive Instruments, Zuckerman-Hartung has invited nine artists to exhibit works in tandem with a CAA panel of the same name: Cora Cohen, Dana DeGiulio, Abigail DeVille, Susanne Doremus, Michelle Grabner, Suzanne McClelland, Deirdre O’Dwyer, Jennifer Packer, and Monique Prieto.

Strange Bedfellows
Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery
Columbia College Chicago, 619 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605
January 16–February 22, 2014

Columbia College Chicago’s Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery presents Strange Bedfellows, organized by the San Francisco art historian Amy Cancelmo. Artists from across the United States who range in their gender and sexual identities, politics, and strategies for collaboration will contribute artworks that explore collaborative roles in contemporary queer art practice, including the personal, performative, and political.

This exhibition includes work by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, who have been married sixteen times. They’ve married each other legally in Canada and also married their community, the Earth, the sea, the rocks, the moon, the snow, and many other natural elements in extravagant and colorful performances. For Strange Bedfellows, Sprinkle and Stephens present an audiovisual installation featuring simultaneous screenings of their first seven weddings.

Participating in the exhibition are: Bren Ahearn and Jesse Kahn,
E. G. Crichton,
Sean Fader,
Alexander Hernandes and RUDE House,
Sarah Hirneisen,
Amos Mac and Juliana Huxtable LaDosha,
Tara Mateik,
Barbara McBane and Susan Working,
Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger,
billy ocallaghan, PosterVIRUS/Jordan Arseneault,
Adrienne Skye Roberts,
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens,
Julie Sutherland,
Tina Takemoto and Angela Ellsworth,
Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans,
Joe Varisco and QUEER LEXICON, and
Angie Wilson and Amber Straus.

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.

February 2014

The CWA Picks for February 2014 are dedicated to the memory of Wanda D. Ewing (January 4, 1970–December 8, 2013), an artist and educator who lived and worked in Omaha, Nebraska, by her friends and fellow members of the Committee on Women in the Arts.

Jillian Mayer: Salt 9
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
University of Utah, Marcia and John Price Museum Building, Salt Lake City, UT 84112
January 17–August 17, 2014

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts presents the first museum exhibition of Jillian Mayer (American, b. 1984). Engaging the ubiquitous self, duping Google Image, or subverting facial-recognition software, Mayer’s newest body of work tosses aside the physical body to investigate modern identity formation. Identity, online and IRL, is a fluid performance of multiple selves in constant construction, but online there is no place, need, or value for the real body.

The mind, untethered by physical limits, can be free in its construction of identity. While presenting tools to maintain online identities, Mayer exposes moments when the virtual world defines the physical world, creating an alternate reality. In salt 9 she sets up scenarios, often using her own image, that call attention to how Web 2.0’s architecture of participation is changing perceptions of truth, privacy, authorship, and authenticity. By accepting the web’s uncontrollable context and by being open to malleable meaning, Mayer enlists an ever-expanding audience of collaborators and challenges the traditional relationship between artist and viewer, in which the latter becomes a participant, a collaborator, and even an active creator of content and meaning.

Doris Salcedo
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
February 21–May 31, 2015

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, presents the first survey of the work of the renowned sculptor Doris Salcedo (Colombian, b. 1958). Salcedo, who lives and works in Bogotá, gained prominence in the 1990s for her fusion of Postminimalist forms with sociopolitical concerns. The exhibition features all major bodies of work from the artist’s twenty-five-year career—most of which have never been shown together before—as well as the American debut of her recent major work Plegaria Muda (Silent prayer) (2008–10) and a site-specific public project.

Salcedo’s work is deeply rooted in her country’s social and political landscape, including its long history of civil wars, yet her sculptures and installations subtly address these fraught circumstances with elegance and a poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects. She grounds her art in intense research and fieldwork, which involves extensive interviews with people who have experienced loss and trauma in their everyday lives due to political violence. In more recent years, Salcedo has become increasingly interested in the universal nature of these experiences and continues to pursue research in different locations, including Turkey, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. Rather than making literal representations of violence or trauma, however, her artworks convey the idea of corporeal fragility and evoke a collective sense of loss. The resulting pieces engage with multiple dualities at once—strength and fragility, ephemeral and enduring—and bear elements of healing and reparation in the careful, laborious process of their making.

Güler Ates: Whispers of Colour
Kubik Gallery
Rua da Restauração, 2, 4050-499 Porto, Portugal
January 25–March 1, 2014

The central themes of gender, identity, and cultural hybridity are driving forces in Güler Ates’s practice, which examines how various settings can challenge and disrupt a person’s assumptions on these topics. The lone veiled woman is the central motif of her work, an ambiguous figure whose identity is consistently kept from the viewer.

While the veiled female figure is a recurring motif, it is the setting that informs her practice. Each series is site-specific in that Ates’s captures through photography the ways in which her figure interacts with each environment. Thus, by responding to her surroundings, her work explores the nuanced ways in which locale and context affect our interpretation of figures. This aspect works in tandem with the concept of performativity. An essential element to Ates’s work, this theme stems form Judith Butler’s seminal theory that such supposedly fixed concepts, such as gender, ethnicity, or nationality, are in no way fixed but are rather merely roles that we perform. Thus, while the repetition of our actions reinforces the identity to which those actions are associated, when the cultural context in which this performance takes place changes, so too does the identity. In her use of a veil, Ates interrogates what it means for a woman to be covered. She reclaims the female body by respecting the autonomy of the figure. In doing so, the artist is able to reclaim not simply the female body but also Orientalist imagery, thus creating highly charged images that are alluring yet defiant.

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
January 24–May 14, 2014


Organized by Frist Center for Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee, where it first opened in 2012, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video—the first major museum retrospective of the work of Carrie Mae Weems—finally comes to New York. Featuring more than 120 works—primarily photographs but also texts, videos, and an audio recording—and a range of related educational programs, the exhibition thoroughly traces the evolution of the artist’s career over the last thirty years, from her early documentary and autobiographical photographic series to later conceptual and philosophically complex works of global concerns. As such Carrie Mae Weems offers a great opportunity to explore the breadth of her practice and marvel at the visual poetics of her politics.

Having opened influential paths for younger generations of photographers with sociopolitical and gender concerns over the past forty years, Weems has sharply, movingly and beautifully contemplated issues surrounding race, gender, and class inequality. It is by positioning herself “as history’s ghost,” as put by Nancy Princenthal, that her work brings to light the ignored or erased experiences of marginalized people, even though the artist strives to propose a multidimensional picture of history and humanity, intended to raise greater cultural awareness and compassion. While Weems’s subjects are often African American, “Her work speaks to human experience and of the multiple aspects of individual identity, arriving at a deeper understanding of humanity,” as said by Mary Jane Jacobs.

Organized in a loose chronology throughout two of the museum’s Annex Levels, Carrie Mae Weems begins with the breakthrough series Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) and brings together most landmark series of the artist’s photographic work. Also included, of course, is the celebrated Kitchen Table Series (1990), which employs text and photography and explores the range of women’s roles within a community, pointedly situating the photographs’ subject within a domestic setting and foregrounding the artist’s gendered concerns. The exhibition also looks at the role of video as a natural extension of Weems’s narrative photographic practice and as an opportunity to include music in her work. Along with a selection of videos such as Italian Dreams (2006), Afro Chic (2009), and Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008) placed near related photographic series, Weems’s first major endeavor in film, Coming Up for Air (2003–4), a work comprised of series of poetic vignettes, will be screened in the New Media Theater in the Guggenheim’s Sackler Center for Arts Education.

Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art
Phillips Museum of Art
Franklin and Marshall College, Colonel J. Hall Steinman College Center, College Avenue, Lancaster, PA
17603
February 7–April 12, 2014

This exhibition features work from the American artist Theresa Bernstein (1890–2002), one of the few—if not the only—artist to display work in every decade of the twentieth century. Although Bernstein found great success early in her career as an art student, she struggled with fluctuations in popularity as various art movements came and went, resulting in her work falling into obscurity for most historians and art critics. Despite this neglect, Bernstein has recently begun to receive recognition, and her work is being touted as noteworthy, even in comparison to her contemporaries such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, and John Sloan. Through her realist technique, Bernstein captured many iconic American themes from the twentieth century, such as women’s suffrage, World War I, the struggles of immigrants, jazz, and even Hassidic life. Therefore her work is not only skilled and aesthetic, but it also offers another perspective on American history. Theresa Bernstein: A Century in Art was curated by Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor of Art History, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
December 21, 2013–April 21, 2014

Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New is an homage to one of the most foresighted art dealers of the late twentieth century. Organized by Ann Temkin with the assistance of Claire Lehmann, the exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication with the same title and celebrates the donation of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine Canyon (1959) to the Museum of Modern Art by Ileana Sonnabend’s Estate. Bringing together works of over forty major artists—from Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol to Mario Merz and Vito Acconci—who either debuted at her gallery in Paris (1959–1968) or New York (1968– ) or entered into her personal collection early, the exhibition captures Sonnabend’s instrumental role in introducing American Pop and Minimalism to Europe and Arte Povera to the United States, while exploring her legendary eye and championship of new artists.

Despite frustrating limitations, including the politics of the exhibition, the donation of Canyon, and an unsurprising selection of masterpieces that self-congratulatorily reinforces mainstream narratives of American and European art of the late twentieth century housed in modern art temples such as MoMA (as justly implied by Holland Cotter in his New York Times review), Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New is a great reminder that the often-catalytic contribution of several female agents’ of postwar art in shaping its course in North America and Europe remains unexplored, if not unsung. Instead of just marveling at iconic landmarks of postwar, especially American, art as known, this exhibition should trigger further interest in Sonnabend’s story and raise questions that will pressure the histories of postwar art as we know them by illuminating the impact of the stories Sonnabend fashioned from the art of her time with her choices or the difference of her staging of her finds in Europe and in the United States.

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.

January 2014

Jennifer Yorke, Pretty Little Lies, 2012, collage and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 in. (artwork © Jennifer Yorke)

Jennifer Yorke: Twerks on Paper
Packer Schopf Gallery
942 West Lake Street, Chicago, IL 60607
January 10–February 15, 2014

Fashion! Food! Sex! Death! Through her Twerks on Paper, Jennifer Yorke laughs at them all. In her collages, the failures and flaws of the body assert themselves over the seductive veneer of beauty and propriety created by both costume and custom. Despite our best efforts to create controlled, socially appropriate selves, our bodies are often filled with unruly desires and only imperfectly contain the sticky, the smelly, and the wet. Yorke demonstrates the absurdity of our efforts at control through humor—and the humors that seep and spurt out of her fashionable figures. She conflates fashion’s celebration and distortion of the body with our more day-to-day experience of its flaws, failures, and expellants, encouraging us to shake our asses at them.

Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries
Three Walls
119 North Peoria Street, No. 2C, Chicago, IL 60607
January 10–February 22, 2014

Although best known for her contribution to Womanhouse—the 1972 performance Waiting—and for her role in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program in Fresno and Cal Arts, Faith Wilding remains largely understudied. As the first major retrospective of her work, Fearful Symmetries spans forty years and brings together and contextualizes the studio practice—especially works on paper—that accompanies Wilding’s performative work, illuminating the allegorical imagery that underpins her feminism and the centrality of transformation and emergence in its articulation. As such the exhibition highlights the theme of becoming—as transformative event and threshold to transfiguration—as a state of in-between-ness, evoked by iconographic motifs such as leaves, the chrysalis, hybrid beings, or “waiting” itself.

Alongside the exhibition is a curated archive featuring Wilding’s work with the collaborative research and performance group subRosa; rare videos of performances made throughout her career; and papers and publications dating from her participation in the feminist art movement in the 1970s. A series of special events will punctuate the exhibition, including a performance and discussion with Irina Aristarkhova on January 9.

Nora Schultz, image from Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real, 2013 (artwork © Nora Schultz)

Nora Schultz: Parrottree—Building for Bigger Than Real
Renaissance Society
University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
January 12–February 23, 2014

The Renaissance Society presents the first museum solo exhibition of Nora Schultz, a Berlin-based artist who produces sculptural installations that double as analogue printing studios. Her primary materials are discarded objects scavenged from her studio and the site of her exhibitions, often in the form of metal bars and sheets, grates, tubes, and plastics. Schultz repurposes this refuse into sculptural objects, as well as contact printing devices, stencils, and even simple rotary presses with which she prints (often as public performance) abstractions scaled from the intimate to the monumental, exhibited individually or in accumulating heaps. Deeply engaged with material and process, Schultz’s installations are themselves, at times, engines of ongoing artistic creation.

Hannah Höch
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX, United Kingdom
January 15–March 23, 2014

The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first major UK exhibition of the influential German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978), an important member of the Berlin Dada movement and a pioneer in collage. Splicing together images taken from popular magazines, illustrated journals, and fashion publications, Höch created a humorous and moving commentary on society, in particular questioning traditional gender and racial stereotypes, during a time of tremendous social change. She also established collage as a key medium for satire with extraordinary skill and beauty.

Nargess Hashemi: The Pleasure in Boredom
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 17, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
January 12–February 27, 2014

Nargess Hashemi (b. 1979, Tehran) takes a new direction in her latest show, deviating from largely figurative works centering on themes of domesticity and everyday life and moving in a surprising new trajectory. The Pleasure in Boredom charts Hashemi’s process of developing over ten years worth of experimentation on graph paper. Doodling in notebooks from a young age, the artist has made the practice somewhat of a lifelong obsession. Using only the most basic materials, Hashemi adopts a commonly unfocused and subliminal practice and refines it, resulting in vibrant artworks of great complexity. The title of the exhibition references an essay by E. H. Gombrich, in which the art historian examined the psychology behind the act of doodling and explored its artistic merit. A doodle by its very nature is a subconscious impulse, something that we are naturally compelled to do in a dreamlike, absentminded state. In her new series, Hashemi has evolved this instinctual act into artistic endeavors of great structure and precision.

Salla Tykkä: The Palace
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead, NE8 3BA, United Kingdom
November 22, 2013–March 2, 2014

The Finnish artist Salla Tykkä (b. Helsinki, 1973) is known for photographs and videos with historically and psychologically charged narratives. Her dramatically edited footage plays with cinematic structures and is often set to familiar, grandiose film scores. Since 2008, Tykkä has been completing a trilogy of films: Victoria (2008), Airs above the Ground (2010), and, most recently, Giant (2013), which was partially commissioned by the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. The Palace comprises an installation featuring all three works and is the first exhibition to bring them together. It also marks the international premiere of Giant.

Victoria is a documentation of the nightly blossoming of the giant water lily; a ten-minute time-lapse of the plant’s life cycle as it unfurls its petals in the dark. The lily blossoms over two nights; the first night it is white and when it opens for a second time a day later, its color has changed to a red hue. European explorers brought Victoria amazonica and Victoria cruziana from South America to Europe and named them after Queen Victoria. Tykkä offers the plant as a symbol of colonial power and domination in the nineteenth century.

Chryssa Romanos, Labyrinth, 1965, collage on canvas, 55 x 65 cm (artwork © Chryssa Romanos)

Chryssa Romanos
The Breeder
45 Iasonos St, GR 10436, Athens, Greece
January 17–February 17, 2014

Focusing on Chryssa Romanos’s 1960s collage on canvas and her recent décollage on Plexiglas, this exhibition surveys the practice of this outstanding Greek artist—a vanguard member of the Greek diaspora in Paris from the 1960s to the 1980s and a neglected female participant in intersecting circles of the Parisian avant-garde—whose reputation has suffered from the usual predicament of gender, including the overshadowing of her work from that of her life partner, the celebrated artist Nikos Kessanlis.

Romanos began as an abstract painter in Greece, rebelling against both the academic realism favored by the art establishment and the social realism propagated by the communist party, though she was an active member of it. In the early sixties she moved to Paris and became affiliated, along with Nikos, with intersecting circles of the Parisian avant-garde, especially those evolving around the critic Pierre Restany. Reconsidering the communicative role of her art, she rediscovered herself in 1964 as a Pop collagist, turning to what Restany called the “sociological reality”—yet through a surfeit of print media rather than the everyday objects of “urban folklore”—in order to launch a staunch critique of societal injustice, industrialization and the society of spectacle, as put by Kalliopi Minioudaki in the exhibition Power Up: Female Pop Art (at the Vienna Kunsthalle in 2010), where she mapped Romanos’s work in the context of Pop.

In several collages, which constitute the first part of this exhibition at the Breeder, Romanos “explicitly criticized consumerism, exposing its inextricability with vital engines of capitalism, such as war. In her Reportage series, for instance, she unmasked the fallacies of capitalist democracy and the industries that supported its domestic myths in the years of decolonization struggles and the Vietnam War—by mimicking the symbiosis of advertising and photojournalism in print media, while sarcastically miscaptioning scenes of famine or war with alluring advertising messages and unfit captions. In her various versions of the Luna Parc (1965) series—structured as a vicious shooting gallery—the consumerist cornucopia of the American Dream, promised to the Cold War era consumer by means of the consumer goods that are pasted around targets—is suggestively predicated upon the extinction of humanity, whether by its shooting, or its rendering into mass. This is at least suggested by the anthropocentric collages that constitute the targets.” Such signature collages were well received when exhibited in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, in 1965 and at the São Paolo Biennial in 1967. In response, however, to a studio visit by Restany—who demanded she substitute clippings with found objects as a true Nouveau Realist would do—Romanos resolutely quit what she considered, by her account, as the most important step in her career: her political Pop.