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.

December 2013

Installation view of Harmony Hammond’s work at Alexander Gray Associates (artworks © Harmony Hammond)

Harmony Hammond
Alexander Gray Associates
508 West 26th Street, No. 215, New York, NY 10001
October 23–December 7, 2013

The first one-person exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond in New York since the 1990s at Alexander Gray Associates is a must-see minisurvey and a reminder that a retrospective of this feminist- and queer-art pioneer, activist, writer, and cofounder of A.I.R. Gallery and Heresies in the city where she began her career in the late 1960s, before moving to New Mexico in the 1980s, is still overdue.

In one of her statements Hammond reminisces that: “the post-modern focus on representation, contributed to an inaccurate reading of the creative climate in New York during the late 1960s and ’70s, a period of interdisciplinary experimentation that resulted in work both conceptual and abstract. Artists moved between the disciplines ignoring, crossing, dissolving boundaries. Abstract painting, especially that coming out of post-minimal concerns of materials and process, was central to the experimentation…. Feminism brought a gendered content to this way of working. I moved to New York’s Lower East Side, and then to the corner of Spring and West Broadway in early fall 1969. It was a period of civil rights and antiwar activism, the gay liberation movement, the second wave feminist movement, and the birth of feminist art. I was influenced by and contributed to early feminist art projects. I painted on blankets, curtains, and bedspreads recycled from women friends, literally putting my life in my art. Rag strips dipped in paint and attached to the painting surface hung down like three-dimensional brushstrokes, their weight altering the painting rectangle. Eventually the rags took over and activated the painting field…. This led to the series Bags, and the slightly larger than life-size Presences. These new pieces could be touched, retouched, repaired, and, like women’s lives, reconfigured. In 1973, I created a series of six floor paintings made out of knit fabric my daughter and I picked from dumpsters. Strips of fabric were braided according to traditional braided rug techniques, but slightly larger and thicker in scale, coiled, stitched to a heavy cloth backing, and partially painted with acrylic paint—the ‘braided rug’ literally and metaphorically becoming ‘the support’ for the painting. The Floorpieces occupied and negotiated a space between painting (off the wall) and sculpture (nearly flat). Placed directly on the floor they called into question assumptions about the ‘place’ of painting.”

Focusing on her longstanding commitment to process-based abstraction, the exhibition includes paintings and works on paper from the past five decades, with a focus on recent paintings and sculptures, allowing a fresh consideration of the way activist concerns and queer identity is inscribed in her work.

Martha Wilson: Staging the Self
Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series at the Douglass Library Galleries
Rutgers University, 8 Chapel Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
October 21, 2013–January 31, 2014

Named the 2013–14 Estelle Lebowitz Visiting Artist in Residence for the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series, Martha Wilson is the honorary subject of the exhibition Martha Wilson: Staging the Self, organized by the founding directors of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers University, Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, and featuring primarily early work, namely Wilson’s famed photo-text series A portfolio of models.

Born in 1947, Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, belatedly recognized for her innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through roleplaying, costume transformations, “invasions” of other people’s personae and the “camera’s presence.” She began making these works in the early 1970s while in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and further developed her practice after moving to New York in 1974. Two years later Wilson founded and continues to direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion, and preservation of artist’s books, video, and installation, online, and performance art, “challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums.” As a performance artist she founded and collaborated with Disband, the all-girl conceptual punk band of women artists who couldn’t play any instruments; she also impersonated political figures such as Alexander M. Haig Jr., Nancy Reagan, Barbara Bush, and Tipper Gore.

Wilson has been described by the New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s” and was championed early in her career by pioneering critics such Lucy R. Lippard. Yet while prefiguring notions of gender performativity as theorized by Judith Butler and explored by Cindy Sherman, Wilson’s prefeminist strategies of masquerade were marginalized, and her use of her own body often caused her to be written out of the history of Conceptual art, an area in which she radically intervened during the 1970s from the perspective of a woman. Tellingly, Wilson had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery, Martha Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971–74, only in 2008.

Isa Genzken. Disco Soon (Ground Zero), 2008, synthetic polymer paint on plastic, cardboard, mirror, spray paint, metal, fabric, hose lights, mirror foil, printed sticker, wood blocks, fiberboard, and casters, 86 1/4 x 80 11/16 x 64 15/16 in. Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Collection (artwork © Isa Genzken; photograph provided by the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin)

Isa Genzken: Retrospective
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
November 23, 2013–March 10, 2014

Isa Genzken: Retrospective is the first comprehensive retrospective of the German multimedia artist in an American museum and the largest survey of her work to date. Surprisingly embraced by MoMA, Genzken has been both a controversial and an influential figure in German art of the past thirty years, appreciated mostly outside her country and known as much for her work as for her marriage with Gerhardt Richter, her Nazi family background, and her self-destructive lifestyle (due to mental illness and alcoholism). Capitalizing idiosyncratically on found objects and collage, this exhibition features Genzken’s small- and installation- scale works that have helped to redefine contemporary assemblage. The artist, however, has worked in many media over the past forty years, including painting, photography, collage, drawing, artist’s books, film, and public sculpture. She begun in the 1970s with geometric curved sculptures from wood whose often-ellipsoid shape could reference the theosophic investigations of her grandfather. The cement sculptures she initiated in the 1980s remain an incredibly powerful chapter of her work and interweave her constant interest in architecture with the “metaphors of vulnerability” that play a central role in her art making, according to the Der Spiegel critic Ulrike Knöfel. Bringing almost 150 objects shown in the United States for the first time, this retrospective offers a thorough introduction to the artist’s work, as well as to the role of “minimalism and trash, neon and despair” in it, as the same critic observes. After its run at MoMA, the show will travel to museums in Dallas and Chicago.

KIMSOOJA: Unfolding
Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada V6Z 2H7
October 11, 2013–January 26, 2014

Constantly addressing issues of the displaced self and conditions of humanity, Kimsooja “experiments with various media through immobility and non-doing that inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor and maker.”

Born in Daegu, Korea, Kimsooja is based in New York, Paris, and Seoul and came to international fame in the 1990s following a P.S.1 residency in New York. This period paved the way for some of her most signature pieces: Bottari, Cities on the Move—2727km Bottari Truck, and A Needle Woman, shown in numerous exhibitions and biennales around the world. Bottari Truck consisted of a truck loaded with bottari, the Korean word for bundle, which traveled throughout Korea for eleven days. Replaced by bags in modern society, as the artist has recently said, “Bottari is the most flexible container in which we carry the minimized valuable things and its use is universal through history. We keep precious things, mostly in dangerous zones of our life, such as war, migration, exile, separation or a move where urgency take places. Anyone can make Bottari…. however, I’ve been intentionally wrapping it with used or abandoned Korean bedcovers that were made for newly married couples with symbols and embroideries and mostly wrapping used clothing inside—that has significant meanings and questions on life. In other words, the Bottari I wrap is an object that contains husks of our body wrapped with a fabric that is the place of birth, love, dream, suffering and death—a frame of life. While Bottari wraps bodies and souls, containing past, present, and future, a Bottari truck is rather a process than a product, or rather oscillating between the process and the object that is a social sculpture. It represents an abstraction of personage, an abstraction of society and history, and that of time and memory. It is a loaded self, a loaded others, a loaded history, a loaded in-between. Bottari Truck is a processing object throughout space and time, locating and dislocating ourselves to the place where we came from, and where we are going. I find Bottari as a womb and a tomb, globe and universe, and Bottari Truck is a bundle of bundle of bundle folding and unfolding our mind and geography, time and space.”

Following the Bottari Truck project, Kimsooja started a video performance called A Needle Woman, showing the artist from the back standing in the middle of main thoroughfares in various cities throughout the world. This work further developed the concept of sewing toward abstraction, bringing together people, nature, cultures, and civilizations.

As a broad survey that includes early textile-based pieces from the 1980s to large site-specific installations as Bottari Truck and videos, this exhibition highlights works that address notions of time, memory, and displacement in the face of change and social flux, and of the relationship between the human body and the material world.

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

November 2013

Wangechi Mutu, still from The End of eating Everything, 2013, animated video with color and sound, 8 min. Commissioned by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (artwork © Wangechi Mutu)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Installation view of Anita of New York at Suzanne Geiss Company (photograph by Adam Reich)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rembrandt van Rijn, A Lady and Gentleman in Black, 1633, oil on canvas, 131.6 x 109 cm (artwork in the public domain)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Murphy, Tell Your Son to Behave, 2013, acrylic and ink on fabric mounted on wood, 14 x 14 in. (artwork © Margaret Murphy)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

October 2013

Chiharu Shiota, performance of IN SILENCE at Centre PasquArt, Biel/Bienne, 2008, black wool, burnt grand piano, and burnt chairs (artwork © Chiharu Shiota; photograph by Sunhi Mang and provided by VG Bild Kunst)

Chiharu Shiota: Trace of Memory
Mattress Factory
505 Jacksonia Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15212
September 12, 2013–May 31, 2014

The Japanese-born, Berlin-based, yet largely nomadic installation artist Chiharu Shiota started using wool to draw in space when she studied painting in 1992. Ever since she has become worldwide known for her haunting environments of dense, convoluted networks of black or red wool that often shroud found objects of personal or social significance, such as shoes, hospital beds, charred chairs, monumental or miniature dresses, et cetera. Her work evokes the psychic interlacing of loss and memory, dream and reality, past and present, the complexity and fragility of human relationships, and the body itself, and Shiota’s networks universalize the personal with an antimonumental scale, despite the often large size of her installations. Exploring remembrance, a central theme of her poetics, for the Mattress Factory’s Trace of Memory, the artist responds site specifically to the storied past of a nineteenth-century row house—the building at 516 Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh—filling eight rooms with her work.

Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves”
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
Columbia University, 826 Schermerhorn Hall, MC5517, 1190 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027
September 4–December 7, 2013

Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves” is a homecoming survey of the fascinating variety of “selves” that this Southern Californian artist invented and embodied between 1972 and 1991. These persons make sharp commentaries on history, identity, and their own fictions, often from a feminist perspective, that resonate with contemporary interrogations of identity and archival slippage. Focusing on themselves as they unfold in videos, photographic series, drawings, and installations, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity not only to follow the tragic and humorous ways in which Antin’s fictional lives develop in time and across media and unveil the complexities of history, identity, and gender under a postmodernist light, but also to study the radical ways in which the artist intervened in the all-male club of Conceptual art and dilated its rigidity with combinations of performance, narrative, fantasy, and biography.

The exhibition features Antin’s best-known alter ego, the African American ballerina Eleanora Antinova from Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who dreamed to play the classic roles of Giselle and Sylphide but was always relegated to more “exotic” types. Antinova helped Antin to interweave race into the feminist critique that underpins her impersonation of ballerinas. Multiple Occupancy also includes Antin’s Vietnam-era King of Solana Beach, a seventeenth-century-looking monarch who struggles to empower his disenfranchised subjects in their fight against the greed of wealthy landowners; a self-taught ballerina who has mastered poses but cannot dance in motion; the Nurse Eleanor Nightingale, who cares for soldiers at the front line of the Crimean War; and Little Nurse Eleanor, whose attempts to heal her patients fail due to their lust for her a century later. The exhibition ends with Yevgeny Antinov, an exiled Russian film director from the 1920s who disseminates his radical leftist politics through a silent film, The Man without a Word, that depicts Polish shtetl life. The work is an homage to Antin’s mother, who was an actress in Poland’s Yiddish theater.

n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal

Call for Contributions: Religion
n.paradoxa
November 1, 2013

The editorial board of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, published by KT press, seeks contributions on the topic of religion for volume 33, to be published in January 2014.
Women artists’ works that have provided a critical view of religious life, belief, doctrine, and representation will be the focus of this volume. How have women artists addressed, challenged, or critiqued representations of themselves in the major and minor religions around the world?

Religions are not only “opium for the masses”; they have also provided major rituals that mediate experiences of birth, marriage, and death in society. Explorations of female power, women goddesses, female spirituality, and sexuality have all been mediated by reconsidering or critiquing many aspects of religious ritual, belief systems, and representations of the role of women (such as Madonna/whore and veiled/unveiled). Women experience different religions and cults as both liberating and oppressive in their moral codes for how they should dress, behave, operate as sexual beings, have families, and live a “good” life.

Artworks that offer critical perspectives on the either liberating or oppressive views of religion for women will be considered here, as well as works that address multifaith (and tolerant) conceptions or readings analyzing the many different religions of the world today. In some parts of the world, artworks and exhibitions are still censored for their idolatry, offense to religious belief, or desecration of religious symbols. Case studies in which women artists have been central to different forms of censorship on religious grounds are welcome. Deadline for copy: November 1, 2013.

Şükran Moral, La Artista, 1994, silver print, 200 x 180 cm (artwork © Şükran Moral)

Despair and Metanoia
Galeri Zilberman
İstiklal Cad. Mısır, Apt. 163, K.3 D.10, Beyoğlu, Istanbul
September 12–October 26, 2013

Despair and Metanoia pairs the work of two pioneering performance artists, the Austrian VALIE EXPORT and the Turkish Şükran Moral, underlining the confluences between both artists’ artistic tropes, themes, gender politics, and provocation strategies. One of the two centerpieces that give the exhibition its title, Moral’s Despair, which features images of a boat of illegal immigrants in the middle of the sea. Another Moral work, Crucified, is a provocative response to the social exclusion and ridicule that her most controversial feminist performances (such as Hammam and Bordello) have triggered—though these contentious works best exemplify her subversive strategies and gender politics. The second part of the exhibition’s title reflects EXPORT’s centerpiece, an installation of twenty-nine videos of performances from the 1970s to today. While this video complements other photographs that showcase the artist’s use of the female body for various ends and her questioning of the construction of gender, it also offers an opportunity for audiences to reevaluate her moving-image work and contemplate its role in her oeuvre.

She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115
August 27, 2013–January 12, 2014

The first North American museum survey of female photographers from the Arab world, She Who Tells a Story brings together more than one hundred images and two videos from twelve leading Iranian and Arab photographers, celebrating the fact that some of the most groundbreaking work in photography from Iran and the Arab world is produced by women. Ranging from fine art to photojournalism, the works “tell stories” about their makers and their contexts, shattering stereotypes about the Orient and about Arab women and casting contemporary life in these countries—especially that of women—under a fresh and challenging light. The exhibition adeptly balances the individual artists, the cultural and sociopolitical specificities of their contexts, and the photographic genres under scrutiny through such themes as “Deconstructing Orientalism,” “Constructing Identities,” New Documentary.” The artists in the show are: Jananne Al-Ani, Boushra Almutawakel, Gohar Dashti, Rana El Nemr, Lalla Essaydi, Shadi Ghadirian, Tanya Habjouqa, Rula Halawani, Nermine Hammam, Rania Matar, Shirin Neshat, and Newsha Tavakolian.

Nalini Malani, installation view of In Search of Vanished Blood, 2012, 6-channel video and shadow play with 5 rotating reverse painted Mylar cylinders, with sound, 11 mins., dimensions variable (artwork © Nalini Malani)

Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood
Galerie Lelong
528 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
September 6–October 26, 2013

A leading video artist in India, Nalini Malani debuts in New York with a projection work called In Search of Vanished Blood that distinguished her participation in last year’s Documenta. Video projections filter across five suspended, rotating Mylar cylinders featuring reverse painted imagery of Hindu and Western icons. The effect creates an immersive shadow play that is complicated by the different speeds of the moving images and further enhanced by sound. Taking its title from the 1965 Urdu poem “Lahu Ka Surag,” In Search of Vanished Blood is also inspired by the 1984 novel Cassandra by Christa Wolf and the 1910 book The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke. The artist, however, draws from history and her own experience as a refugee of the Partition of India, colonialism, and decolonization as she does from literary culture. These investigations form a fleeting narrative that synthesizes the themes that have always preoccupied her—violence, the feminine, and national identity—from an idiosyncratically “internationalist” perspective. The exhibition also includes paintings related to the installation yet hung in a separate room.

The Beginning Is Always Today: Contemporary Feminist Art in Scandinavia
SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum
Skippergata 24 B, Kristiansand, Norway 4666
September 21, 2013–January 2004

Titled with a quote from the eighteenth-century British writer Mary Wollstonecraft and culminating SKMU’s centennial celebration of women’s suffrage in Norway, The Beginning Is Always Today is the first major museum survey of feminist art to be held in Scandinavia in twenty years. The exhibition brings together the work of forty artists from a region where, in spite of advances in sexual liberation and gender equality, feminism is often considered outdated and the feminist art scene remains little known. It also explores both the far-reaching social scope of contemporary feminism in the arts and the legacy of early feminist art’s strategies, while questioning the success of past battles for gender equality and equal rights. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue that promises to shed light on the recent developments of feminist art in Scandinavia, an illuminating sequel to the groundbreaking publication on Swedish art feminism, Konstfeminism (2005), and a recent exhibition on Norwegian art feminism held earlier this year, organized by artists included in this show.

The Beginning Is Always Today features the following artists: Lotta Antonsson, Elisabet Apelmo, Pia Arke, Bob Smith, Catti Brandelius, Peter Brandt, Nanna Debois Buhl, Kajsa Dahlberg, Ewa Einhorn, Åsa Elzén, Unn Fahlstrøm, Roxy Farhat, Fine Art Union, FRANK, Unni Gjertsen, Trine Mee Sook Gleerup, Jenny Grönvall, Annika von Hausswolff, High Heel Sisters, Leif Holmstrand, Maryam Jafri, Dorte Jelstrup, Jesper Just, Jane Jin Kaisen, Line Skywalker Karlström, Kvinder på Værtshus, Ane Lan (alias Eivind Reierstad), Lotte Konow Lund, Annika Lundgren, Jannicke Låker, Malmö Fria Kvinnouniversitet (MFK), Eline Mugaas, Ellen Nyman, Radikal pedagogik, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Annica Karlsson Rixon, Joanna Rytel, Katya Sander, Mari Slaattelid, Lisa Strömbeck, Vibeke Tandberg, Lisa Vipola, and YES! Association/Föreningen JA!

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 2013

Linder’s artwork for the Buzzcocks’ first single, “Orgasm Addict”

Linder: Woman/Object
Kestnergesellscahft Hanover
Goseriede 11, 30159 Hanover, Germany
June 7–August 4, 2013

The first major survey in Germany of the oeuvre of a leading protagonist of the late-1970s punk scene, Linder: Woman/Object brings together more than two hundred selections that capture the diversity of an artistic practice that cuts across music, dance, and fashion and transcends all types of visual media, from collage and photography to video and performance. The exhibition also highlights the feminist politics that underpin the artist’s work and self-staging.

Linder Sterling—known simply as Linder—was born in Liverpool as Linda Mulvey in 1954. By the end of the 1970s, she had become a key figure in the culturally explosive period of punk and postpunk, developing her art alongside bands such as the Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, and the Smiths. One of her best-known works is the cover of the Buzzcocks’ single “Orgasm Addict,” which shows a naked woman with grinning mouths on her breasts and an iron replacing her head. In 1978 Linder cofounded the postpunk group Ludus, whose singer she remained until the band split up in 1983. She caused a furor in 1982 by appearing—a quarter of a century before Lady Gaga—in a dress made of scraps of poultry. Linder’s work has become internationally known in recent years through presentations at important institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tate, both in London, and with a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York.

Mother Armenia
Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art
1/3 Pavstos Biuzand Boulevard, Yerevan, Armenia
July 3–August 17, 2013

Organized by the 4Plus Documentary Center in Armenia and curated by Svetlana Bachevanova, this exhibition brings together the work of ten female documentary photographers: Mery Aghakhanyan, Sara Anjargolian, Nazik Armenakyan, Anush Babajanyan, Knar Babayan, Anahit Hayrapetyan, Hasmik Hayrapetyan, Piruza Khalapyan, Inna Mkhitaryan, and Nelli Shishmanyan. Addressing the role of women in modern Armenia as well as broader social injustices, their work captures several aspects of Armenian life from a female point of view that remains rarely voiced in the region. “Women in Armenia still battle to establish a career,” the curator says. “Women are still expected to be full time mothers and housekeepers. But these ten documentarians broke the rules and found a way to pursue careers and create powerful bodies of work.”

Installation view of Sturtevant: LEAPS JUMPS AND BUMPS at the Serpentine Gallery (photograph © 2013 Jerry Hardman-Jones)

Sturtevant: LEAPS JUMPS AND BUMPS
Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens, London, W2 3XA, United Kingdom
June 28–August 26, 2013

The first solo exhibition of Sturtevant in a public institution in the United Kingdom, LEAPS JUMPS AND BUMPS showcases work created since the 1970s by this Paris-based American artist, illuminating her groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between repetition and difference while demonstrating the wide variety of media she has embraced. The exhibition includes a large-scale video work, Finite Infinite (2010), and a piece comprising garlands of light bulbs, Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (America) from 2004, that is a later version of a work shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 2000 in the Félix González-Torres exhibition.

Autoritratti: Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte italiana contemporanea
Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
Via Don Giovanni Minzoni 14, 40121, Bologna, Italy
May 12–September 1, 2013

Autoritratti features old and new works—including some made specifically for the show—by a large number of female Italian artists. Exploring inscriptions of difference in contemporary Italian art, this exhibition, first proposed initially by Uliana Zanetti, is part of an inter- and extramuseum collective initiative that is investigating the role of gender in the work of contemporary women artists in a country in which second-wave feminism was not influential in the arts. That said, the positions and practices of several women artists clearly demonstrate intriguing negotiations of gender difference.

The title of the show merges references to two important feminist thinkers: the British Griselda Pollock and the Italian Carla Lonzi. The artists in the show are: Alessandra Andrini, Paola Anziché, Marion Baruch, Valentina Berardinone, Enrica Borghi, Anna Valeria Borsari, Chiara Camoni, Annalisa Cattani, Alice Cattaneo, Daniela Comani, Daniela De Lorenzo, Marta Dell’Angelo, Elisabetta Di Maggio, Silvia Giambrone, goldiechiari, Alice Guareschi, Maria Lai, Christiane Löhr, Claudia Losi, Anna Maria Maiolino, Eva Marisaldi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Marzia Migliora, Ottonella Mocellin and Nicola Pellegrini, Maria Morganti, Margherita Morgantin, Liliana Moro, Chiara Pergola, Letizia Renzini, Moira Ricci, Mili Romano, Anna Rossi, Elisa Sighicelli, Alessandra Spranzi, Grazia Toderi, Sabrina Torelli, Traslochi Emotivi, Tatiana Trouvé, Marcella Vanzo, and Grazia Varisco.

Dame Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, 1943. Imperial War Museum, London (artwork © Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA)

Laura Knight: Portraits
National Portrait Gallery
Saint Martin’s Place, London, WC2H 0HE, United Kingdom
July 11–October 13, 2013

With over thirty portraits, this exhibition revisits the work and exceptionally successful career (for a woman of her time) of Dame Laura Knight, among the most popular British artists of twentieth century and the first official female member of the Royal Academy of Arts (since 1936). Knight studied art at the Notthingham Art School, encouraged by her mother, an amateur artist herself, who is remembered setting such ambitious goal for her daughter by saying “one day you will be elected in the Academy.” Knight eventually became so successful that she was featured as a role model in books for careers aimed at women in England.

Knight rejected modernism but focused on capturing modern life and culture through portraiture. She was recognized for her commissioned work as an official war painter, creating propagandistic portraits of female factory workers and heroines of wartime bravery. Yet it is her portraits of theater, ballet, and circus performers, English gypsies, and the segregated black patients of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Memorial Hospital that illuminate the diversity of the works’ backgrounds, vividness of their style, and the immersive method of their production.

Platform: Josephine Meckseper
Parrish Art Museum
279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill, NY 11976
July 4–October 14, 2013

Josephine Meckseper is known for the cool, seductive conflation of art objects and commodities in her installations, films, and photographs that unmask the political implications of consumer culture. As this year’s Platform guest at the Parrish, she has responded to the museum’s site, using it as “a perfect display platform” that resonates with the use of commercial displays and everyday items in her work. Two vitrines near the museum’s entrance, containing original sculptures and mass-produced objects, introduce visitors to Meckseper’s signature approach, while other works referencing automobile culture engage the museum’s collection and the world outside it. Alluding to both Jean-Luc Godard’s driving-centric film Weekend and the nearby car dealerships, Sabotage Auto Assembly Line to Slow It Down (2009) incorporates car tires, a conveyer belt, two of the artist’s videos on stacked monitors, and mirrored tiles that cinematically reflect the vehicles in transit along Montauk Highway. With its prominent Jeep insignia, Crow (2011) is placed adjacent to John Chamberlain’s crushed car sculpture

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 2013

Martha Wilson, The Working Girl from A Portfolio of Models, 1974, 6 black-and-white gelatin-silver prints and 7 typed index cards, 20 × 14 in. (artwork © Martha Wilson)

Martha Wilson
Institute of Visual Arts
Kenilworth Square East, University of Wisconsin, 2155 North Prospect Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53202
June 7–August 11, 2013

It’s been already forty years since Martha Wilson radically intervened in Conceptual art by including the female body, especially her own, in her endeavors. She also pioneered uses of masquerade to explore the effects of the camera in self-representation, deconstructing gender stereotypes and exposing the fluidity of gender and identity. Organized by the Independent Curators International and curated by Peter Dykhuis, this traveling exhibition examines the radical strategies and politics that underpin Wilson’s work as a visual artist—especially her performances, videos, and photo-text compositions—and as an activist and the founder of Franklin Furnace from the 1970s to today. Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue and a parallel program that will raise interesting questions about feminism today, the state of masculinity codes, and more.

Call for Papers: “Recollecting Forward: Feminist Futures in Art Practice, Theory, and History”
Association of Art Historians Annual Conference
Royal College of Art, London, England
April 10–12, 2014

In recent years, a series of blockbuster exhibitions and several high-profile symposia have set out to assess the past and present of feminist art practice, theory, and history. This session seeks to pinpoint and debate the key issues arising from these attempts to make retrospective sense of the past forty years of feminist work in the visual arts. Does this remarkable upsurge in artistic, curatorial, and art-historical interest in art practice inflected by feminism constitute the first step in putting feminism on the map, or else does it draw a line under a diverse constellation of works, practices, and texts that are to remain forever suspended between countercultural revolution and institutional acknowledgement? Feminism’s impact on art practice, theory, and history is frequently presented either as a series of successive “waves” or as a set of (often mutually antagonistic) mother/daughter/granddaughter relations. This session for the 2014 annual conference of the Association of Art Historians aims to redress this focus on linear progression and generational division by reconsidering temporality in feminist art practice, theory, and history. The session chairs invite contributions from practicing artists, art historians, and art critics that revisit and recast historical practices and texts or otherwise explore potential feminist futures in the visual arts.

To foster a productive encounter among a multiplicity of feminist perspectives and to stimulate open dialogue among those who may have come to feminism at different moments in time and from different cultural contexts, the chairs seek short papers of twenty minutes, which will be followed by a roundtable discussion featuring all speakers. If you would like to participate, please email the chairs directly, providing an abstract of a proposed paper of twenty minutes (unless otherwise indicated): Joanne Heath, independent scholar; and Alexandra M. Kokoli, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. The abstract should be no more than 250 words; proposals should include your name and institution affiliation (if any). You will receive an acknowledgement of receipt for your submission within two weeks. Deadline: November 11, 2013.

Lorna Simpson, Momentum, 2010, HD video with color and sound, 6:56 (artwork © Lorna Simpson)

Lorna Simpson
Jeu de Paume
1 Place de la Concorde, Paris, France 75008
May 28–September 1, 2013

The first major survey of the work of Lorna Simpson in Europe brings together signature masterpieces from all stages of her thirty-year-long career, including examples of the large-format photo-texts from the mid-1980s that first brought her critical attention, such as Gestures/Reenactments, Waterbearer, and Stereo Styles, and several series of screen prints on felt from the 1990s, including Wigs, The Car, The Staircase, Day Time, Day Time (gold), and Chandelier. The show also presents a group of recent drawings called Gold Headed, her Photo Booths ensembles of found photos and drawings (such as Gather and Please remind me of who I am…), and several video installations, including Cloudscape and Momentum, with evocative narratives that question the way in which experience is created and (mis)perceived. As such, the exhibition traces the continuity that underpins Simpson’s experimentation with photography and film and her questioning of the conventions of gender, identity culture, and memory, especially as an African American female artist, while seeking to further illuminate the intimate relationship of text and image that characterizes her work and the centrality of memory among her thematic preoccupations.

Yoko Ono: Half-a-Wind Show
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark
June 7–September 29, 2013

Another exhibition celebrating Yoko Ono’s eightieth birthday, Yoko Ono: Half-a-Wind Show is a major retrospective that seeks to reinstate her importance as a Conceptual artist, both political and avant-garde, as well as to complicate the experience of her work in various media. The show is introduced by En Trance, a major architectural installation shown for the first time in many years that offers six entry points to her work, alluding to the participatory aspect of her work while enabling different narratives of it to unfold.

The exhibition’s first section features groundbreaking experimental and conceptual works from the early 1960s, performed first in New York and later in Japan. It continues with large installations and recent works and also includes Moving Mountains, a new installation that invites its participants to form mobile sculptures from cloth bags. One area is devoted to Ono’s music videos, concert recordings, covers, posters, and more. The exhibition also emphasizes Ono’s political commitment and her efforts to engage in dialogue with people all over the world—both inside and outside the museum—through social media, billboards, and participation pieces. In Louisiana Park visitors are invited to hang their personal wishes on a Wish Tree, and large billboards throughout Copenhagen display poetic messages from the artist.

Agnès Varda
Bildmuseet
Umeå University, Konstnärligt Campus, Östra Strandgatan 30, B903 33 Umeå, Sweden
June 2–August 18, 2013

Agnès Varda (born 1928) established herself as an important figure in French cinema with her first film, La Pointe Courte (1954), which was considered as the starting point of the French New Wave—even though she was then in her mid-twenties and had no formal training as a filmmaker. Celebrating her lifelong achievement in filmmaking, Bildmuseet is showing a selection of Varda’s documentary projects from the 1960s and 1970s as well as newer works that display the boundary-transcending way in which she moves between the cinema theatre and the gallery showroom, between photography and cinema, and between moving and still images. Many of her films have political and feminist dimensions, such as Black Panthers (1968) and Réponse de femmes (1975), in which documentation and fiction overlap.

Cornelia Parker, Pavement Cracks (City of London), 2012, black-patinated bronze, 206 x 152 x 9 cm (artwork © Cornelia Parker)

Cornelia Parker
Frith Street Gallery
17-18 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JJ, United Kingdom
June 7–July 27, 2013

Bringing together new sculptural and photographic works by the acclaimed British artist Cornelia Parker that transform overlooked and often uncanny facets of the city streets such as pavement cracks, accidental spills, and discarded pieces of wood into evocative objects and images, this exhibition captures a few of the hard-to-pin down threads that mark Parker’s diverse production: her interest in architecture; the antisculptural fragility of her sculptural objects and their mode of display; and the dark, personal, or social evocations and origins of their conception.

The exhibition consists of Black Path (2013), a linear structure of black bronze that hovers above the floor and three-dimensionalizes the cracks of the paving stones of the Bunhill Fields cemetery, through which the artist has been walking her daughter to school, often playing “don’t step on the lines,” a game that rekindled childhood memories and fears of street cracks. Unsettled (2012) uses wood collected from the streets of old Jerusalem, reassembled and precariously relocated against the walls of the gallery. The found abstract patterns on cracked walls provide the inspiration for Prison Wall Abstracts: A Man Escaped (2012–13), a set of twelve photographic prints depicting the perimeter wall of Pentonville Prison in London, whose broken surface of wall had been repaired by workmen with white filler in gestural patterns worthy of any Abstract Expressionist painter. Parker captured these walls before they were obliterated forever by a layer of magnolia paint. “Jerusalem”—both the poem of Bunhill Fields cemetery’s famous incumbent, William Blake, and the “holy city” where Parker filmed her latest work—lace up all three works, especially due to the effect of the Jerusalem syndrome (the tendency of the locals to attribute religious importance to random images) on the artist and the rekindling of her childhood fascination with identifying configurations on the cracked walks of her room at bedtime.

Valérie Favre: Selbstmord, Suicide
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
Chausseestrasse 128, 10115 Berlin, Germany
June 8–July 28, 2013

Selbstmord, Suicide presents two extensive series of works by the Swiss-born, Berlin-based painter Valérie Favre that respectively deal with life and death. The Suicide cycle (2003–13) consists of 129 small-format paintings representing scenes of self-chosen death, focusing on the moment of the radical decision to end one’s life and the self-dramatization of the theatrical moment of death. The works refer to known suicide scenes from history, art, and literature as well as from current newspaper reports. Created especially for the exhibition, the second group, called still/leben (de la fragilité des fleurs n°5) (2013), consists of small- and large-scale paintings of floral still lifes. Addressing the creative process in a diaristic manner, the artist produced a small still life of a flower arrangement every day three months prior to the show, while adding one brushstroke at a time to the larger canvases. During the exhibition, a different small work is selected daily for exhibition.

Jane and Louise Wilson, Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 1 (H-Bomb Testing Facility, Orford Ness), 2012, C-print Diasec mounted with aluminum and Perspex, 86½ x 71 in. (artwork © Jane and Louise Wilson)

Jane and Louise Wilson
303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street, New York, NY
June 25–August 2, 2013

At 303 Gallery, the twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson will for the first time combine several bodies of work, including two photographic series: Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) (2010–12), depicting the town of Pripyat, built in the early 1970s by the Soviet Union to house Chernobyl factory workers; and Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 1 (2012), which documents the Wilson’s first publicly sited installation, on a former H-bomb test facility on Orford Ness, an island off the Suffolk Coast owned by the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense.

Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Lichfield Street, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, WV1 1DU, United Kingdom
June 1–November 16, 2013

Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman is the first survey of this major yet short-lived contributor to British Pop since the rediscovery of her work in a family barn in the early 1990s. Before written out of British Pop’s history and reduced to a pale memory of a mythic figure, Pauline Boty (1938–1966) was included in Ken Russell’s landmark 1962 television documentary Pop Goes the Easel, which introduced her as one of the four protagonists of the Royal College of Art’s Pop scene in London (alongside Peter Blake, Derek Boshier, and Peter Philips). Soon, however, Boty, who had studied stained glass, reinvented herself as a painter by grafting her penchant for abstraction and collage through a figurative Pop idiom and by passionately embracing popular culture—all while speaking subversively as a woman, that is, by using the objects of her fanzine fascination to transgressively celebrate female sexuality and desire and to critically expose the sexism of pop and visual culture.

Bringing together more than forty works, some of which were considered lost and have never before been shown, Pop Artist and Woman traces the development of Boty’s work from a stained-glass student to a British Pop painter and establishes its unmistaken Popness and the radical nature of its politics, especially its feminism. Contextual archival material and an extensive catalogue by the curator Sue Tate further establishes her importance, analyzing her neglect and shedding light onto her life and her brief media stardom as a beauty and an actress. Most important, the exhibition joins other recent scholarship and exhibitions that question the neglect of female Pop artists by standard art history.

Moyra Davey, Kevin Ayers (Psychic), 2013, chromogenic print with adhesive tape, stamps, and ink (artwork © Moyra Davey)

Moyra Davey: Hangmen of England
June 8–October 6, 2013
Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool, L3 4BB, United Kingdom

Moyra Davey: Hangmen of England introduces the work of a New York–based photographer, filmmaker, and writer—and a star of the 2012 Whitney Biennial—to the United Kingdom as part of a program called LOOK/13 at the Liverpool International Photography Festival. The project draws attention to the intimacy of Davey’s photographic practice and her use of common objects as starting points to unravel complex themes. For this exhibition, she presents work created using photographs taken in Liverpool and Manchester. As often the case with this artist, these images are influenced by personal stories and by narratives drawn from literature and theory. They were mailed to their city of origin, allowing the creases, tape, and mailing stamps marking each photograph to provide a physical trace of its journey.

The exhibition also includes a new version of the artist’s celebrated Copperhead series. Inspired by the global economic crisis, this series consists of one hundred close-up photographs of the profile of Abraham Lincoln engraved onto the most devalued denomination of American currency—the one-cent coin—to encourage a reevaluation of the fleeting beauty of the everyday. Copperhead reflects on the psychology of money and the varieties of decay brought about by the passage of time.

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 2013

Carolee Schneemann, Untitled (from the Dust Paintings series), 1984, ink, ashes, acrylic paint, string, vegetable dye, glass particles, photograph on fabric, and circuit board on heavy rag paper, 37½ x 49 in. (artwork © Carolee Schneemann)

Carolee Schneemann: Flange 6rpm
PPOW Gallery
535 West 22nd Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10011
May 11–June 22, 2013

Titled after a multisensory installation that immerses the viewer in an environment of projected foundry fires, animated by motorized hand-sculpted components cast in aluminum, the fourth exhibition of the pioneering feminist multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann at PPOW Gallery brings together an assortment of works that date from the 1980s to today, illuminating diverse aspects of her expansion of media and her exploration of materials, as well as revealing the politics of her work. In addition to Flange 6rpm, the show features four examples from her Dust Paintings series (1983–86), created with degraded materials, layers of dust, spilled paint, and circuit boards in critical reference to the effacement of Lebanese and Palestinian villages by continuous bombardment. Two major grid installations of photographs and text—Saw Over Want (1980–82) and Vulva’s Morphia (1995)—are also included.

Nicole Eisenman / Matrix 248
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Woo Hon Fai Hall, 2625 Durant Avenue, No. 2250, Berkeley, CA 94720
May 3–July 14, 2013

Curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248 brings together approximately forty paintings and works on paper by this New York–based artist created after 2009 that variously contemplate the human condition—though they are specifically inspired by and reflect the post-Bush-era economic crisis and sociopolitical instability. The exhibition includes examples of Eisenman’s first reaction to social turmoil—a series of monotypes featuring weeping people—and other works in which she idiosyncratically grafts historical styles such as American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, updating familiar art forms to make timely social commentaries, as in Triumph of Poverty (2009), based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of the same name, and Tea Party (2011).

Ellen Gallagher, Wiglette from DeLuxe, 2004, photogravure and plasticine, 13 x 10¼ in. (artwork © Ellen Gallagher)

Ellen Gallagher: AxME
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, England
May 1–September 1, 2013

The first overview of this American artist’s twenty-year career and the first major survey of her work in the United Kingdom, Ellen Gallagher: AxME illuminates signature themes of her exploration of myth, nature, social issues, and art history through painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film, and animation, while inviting the viewer to closely study her fascinating mode of production. Along with key works such as the various series of wig-map grid collages that cast sharp commentaries on black beauty ideals, along with the intricate relief Bird in Hand, the exhibition presents Gallagher’s film installation Murmur (2003–4), her ongoing series of watercolor collages Watery Ecstatic, and a new series called Morphia, comprising two-sided drawings that combine “the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical, and history with the present.”

Nicola L: Body Language under the Sun and the Moon
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2013

Focusing on Nicola L’s radical perspective on the gendered body, whether in pain or in joy, this exhibition introduces the work of an overlooked French artist. Although based in New York since the 1980s, Nicola began her career in Paris in the 1960s as a conceptual artist working in installation, performance, and functional art (since 1976 she also turned to film). A larger-than-life-sized installation, a penetrable sculpture for three performers called The Cylinder, debuted at the Biennale de Paris in 1967 with the rock group the Soft Machine; it was then shown at La MaMa Theater in New York. Pierre Restany welcomed her exceptional vision in his essay “A Long Day’s Journey to the End of the Skin” for her first exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in 1969, the same year he hailed Evelyne Axell’s nudes, shown in the same gallery, as signs of sexual liberation.

Nicola’s functional objects became classics of 1960s experimental furniture and soft-art design. But their eroticism is underpinned by an early feminist perspective that merits comparison with the work of several women artists of the sixties onward, whether in France or elsewhere: see, for instance, La Femme Commode (1969–2012), The Lover’s Wardrobe (1967–70), and The Lips Lamp (1969), and soft sculptures such as The Giant Foot (1967–2013) and Giant Woman Sofa (1970–2012). In 1969 Nicola created The Red Coat for Eleven People or Same Skin for Everyone—whose original is included at Broadway 1602—that was first performed with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. Characterized as her pivotal “collective object of performance,” the work was used for performances around Europe, including one in Barcelona, where she was arrested by Francisco Franco’s army.

In 1974, Nicola participated in the exhibition Grandes Femmes, Petits Formats at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, presenting her provocative multimedia sculpture Woman Pregnant from TV (1970). By 1979, the artist moved definitively to New York, where she witnessed and was inspired by the city’s countercultural movements and vibrantly experimental art milieu. In 1981, she directed a film on Abbie Hoffman, the radical social activist and leader of the Yippie movement, called My Name Is Abbie: Orphan of America. Nicola continues to work on her Penetrable Universe series.

Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation
Bass Museum of Art
2100 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
April 12–November 3, 2013

Featuring the Rape of the Sabine Women (2004) and 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2007) and complemented by an interventional installation of photographic stills from both works alongside historical portraits from Bass Museum’s collection, this exhibition interweaves masterpieces of Eve Sussman’s film productions through Rufus Corporation (which she founded in 2003) that dazzle with their opulent settings. Conventionally screened in a darkened room, the twelve-minute 89 Seconds at Alcázar delights with Sussmann’s enactment of the enigmatic moment of court life captured in Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas (1656).

With its five acts inventively presented as a five-part video installation, Sussman’s celebrated Rape of the Sabine Women is a potent interpretation of the myth of Rome’s founding—filmed in Germany and Greece and set in the Cold War sixties—as ideal vehicle for her critique of utopia, power, and gender relationships in comparable historical settings of hope and decadence. Although Rape of the Sabine Women was made as a feature film, the action of its presentation at the Bass unspools on over thirty screens—including sprawling wall projections, a houselike construction, several tiny video monitors, and a massive installation of television sets piled randomly on the floor—and offers a mesmerizing immersive filmic experience that enhances the visual poetics and the power of Sussman’s reinterpretation of the Roman legend with government agents and Greek butchers’ daughters.

Niki de Saint Phalle, My Monster, 1968 (artwork © Niki de Saint Phalle/BUS 2013)

Niki de Saint Phalle: The Girl, the Monster, and the Goddess
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
April 20–December 1, 2013

Capitalizing mainly on the Moderna Museet’s comprehensive collection of works by Niki de Saint Phalle, largely thanks to Pontus Hulten and a generous donation by the late artist, this exhibition captures the centrality of the figures of the girl, the monster, and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s artistic universe, exploring its autobiographic and feminist underpinnings and advocating the importance of the artist in the twentieth-century postwar avant-garde. Enhanced by archival material that reflects the reception of her Ur-Goddess, She – A Cathedral, constructed for the museum in 1966, the exhibition evokes the meeting of the girl, the monster and the goddess in de Saint Phalle’s film Daddy and is accompanied by a new documentary on the artist.

VALIE EXPORT: Images of Contingence
Żak | Branicka
Lindenstrasse 35, Third Floor, Berlin D-10969 Germany
April 26–June 16, 2013

“For me, contingence is how and where you perceive borders, and how and where and when borders explode,” said VALIE EXPORT, and it is the exploration of a variety of borders that Images of Contingence illuminates by highlighting the artist’s interest in physical contact and its implications in various media, including installation, drawing, photography, film, and archival materials. Along with the installation Fragments of Images of Contingence (1994), in which light bulbs hanging from poles and wires are sensuously yet dangerously immersed into cylinders filled with fundamental-to-our-existence liquids such as milk, used oil, or water, and its rhythmic pendant, The un-ending/-ique melody of cords (1998), a recording of a threadless sewing machine and its sound, the exhibition brings together a selection of videos permeated by issues of contingency, liminality, and sensual experience. The show also includes the artist’s celebrated Touch Cinema, performed in Munich in 1969, for its political activation of touch. A series of drawings from the early 1970s, depicting hands that protect and caress or cause suffering, complements this showcase of EXPORT’s negotiation of borders by illuminating her contradictory exploration of touch and the female body as ciphers of intimacy, sensuality, and carnality, as well as violence and aggression.

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

May 2013

Hung Liu, Avant-Garde, 1993, oil on shaped canvas and on wood, 116 x 43 in. Collection of Hung Liu and Jeff Kelley (artwork © Hung Liu)

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

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

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

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

Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale, 1973, seven color photographs on wood panel, 48¼ x 40⅛ in. (artwork © Gina Pane; photograph by Francoise Masson and provided by ADAGP, Anne Marchand, and Kamel Mennour, Paris)

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

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

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

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

Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, I’M DESPERATE, 1992–93, c-type print mounted on aluminium, 44.5 x 29.7 cm (artwork © Gillian Wearing)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Installation view of As it were … So to speak at the Jewish Museum (photograph by David Heald)

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

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

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

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

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005, gelatin silver photograph, 15½ x 18½ in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2011.63.1 (artwork © LaToya Ruby Frazier)

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

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

Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship. The following exhibitions and events should not be missed. Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.

April 2013

Hilma af Klint, Altarpiece, No. 1, Group X, Altarpiece Series, 1915 (artwork © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk; photograph by Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The artist Cristina Iglesias at the opening of her exhibition at the Reina Sofía in 2013 (photograph by Joaquín Cortés/Román Lores)

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

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

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

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

Catalogue cover of Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt

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

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

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

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

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 2013

Jay DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960 (photograph by Burt Glinn and © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos)

Jay Defeo: A Retrospective
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021
February 28–June 2, 2013

Organized by Dana Miller, this exhibition is the first major retrospective of the work of an important yet overlooked figure of American postwar art. Best known for her monumental painting The Rose, on which she labored from 1958 to 1966, Jay DeFeo (1929–1989) experimented wildly with collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and jewelry. Bringing together more than 130 objects, the presentation illuminates the idiosyncratic production of another neglected female artist of American art while shedding further light on her relationship with San Francisco’s beat scene. The exhibition was previously on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012–13.

Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For
Maryland Institute College of Art
Decker Gallery, Fox Building, 1303 West Mount Royal Avenue; and Leidy Atrium, Brown Center, 1301 West Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21217
January 17, 2013–March 2, 2013


Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For
University of the Arts
Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, 333 South Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
December 7, 2012–March 17, 2013

Wholly Unlooked For is a multivenue survey of the work of Lenore Tawney (1907–2007), illuminating her pioneering exploration of fiber art and her working methods. At the artist’s alma mater, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), an exhibition organized by Piper Shepard and Susie Brandt focuses on line-based objects that exemplify the artist’s loom production through nine weavings. At University of the Arts in Philadelphia, the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery focuses on paper work, curated by Sid Sachs. Together, the two shows contextualize Tawney’s work with studio materials and personal belongings, shown in public for the first time.

The Leidy Atrium of MICA’s Brown Center showcases Tawney’s monumental Scripture in Stone, a fourteen-foot-square piece made of black canvas and white linen threads, and the Cloud Sculpture series of hanging works, each comprising of thousands of individually knotted threads. Distinguished for its circle-in-the-square design—a favorite motif of the artist—Scripture in Stone is exhibited for the first time in over two decades.

Joan Semmel: A Lucid Eye

Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, New York 10456
January 24–June 9, 2013


The camera has been an integral part of Joan Semmel’s artistic process since the 1970s. For the oil paintings in this exhibition, she turns the device on herself. Several large canvases show the artist nude, photographing herself through a mirror, the bold yet intimate works depicting not just her own image, but also how the image for the painting is constructed. In a series of smaller self-portraits, she focuses on her face. Beautifully rendered and hauntingly real, these paintings reveal Semmel’s strong character as well as the passage of time. The works in this exhibition—all made after 2001—are being shown publicly for the first time.

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.

December 2012–January 2013

Mickalene Thomas: How to Organize a Room around a Striking Piece of Art
Lehman Maupin Gallery
540 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001; and 201 Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002
November 14, 2012–January 5, 2013

The two-part Mickalene Thomas: How to Organize a Room around a Striking Piece of Art is a the artist’s third solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. The Lower East Side space will present new large-scale paintings depicting landscapes and interior scenes and a series of short films created during her recent travels in Europe. In Chelsea, Thomas’s first documentary film, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, will be shown alongside photographs of her mother and long-time muse, Sandra Bush. The film is an emotionally raw and loving portrait of Bush as she reflects on her life experiences, including her personal struggles and battle with chronic illness. Thomas will also re-create one of her tableau environments in the gallery, allowing viewers to fully immerse themselves in the artist’s world while watching the film.

Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, 1991, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 60 in. (artwork © Deborah Kass)

Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After
Andy Warhol Museum
117 Sandusky Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15212
October 27, 2012–January 6, 2012

Before and Happily Ever After is the first midcareer retrospective of Deborah Kass at the temple of the artist who unleashed her potent turn to pop culture in order to explore first her “absence” and then her “presence” in it as a lesbian Jewish woman, as she has recently said. Consisting of seventy-five works, the exhibition unites the abstraction of her early and most recent work, unravels the development of Kass’s audiovisual mining of art history and pop culture through breakthrough painting series (such as The Warhol Project, The Jewish Jackie, and her latest, feel good paintings for feel bad times), and offers an incredible opportunity to be marveled by the variety of politics—and pleasures—that underpin her affective yet multilayered dialogue with pop culture and the exploration of (her) identity through it. As Kass sheds her own light on Andy Warhol through her work, and as her work continues to defend the potent ways in which women artists have engaged pop culture, the show promises to pave the way for other dialogues between women (neo-Pop or Pop) artists with (American) Pop or Warhol at his museum.

Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065
December 5, 2012–January 6, 2013

Ann Hamilton’s enchanting installation, the event of a thread, conducts a powerful, affective weaving of sounds, words, textures, and motions that shrouds the visitors with the intimacy of touch—the hand of cloth as the artist puts it—while translating the bodily intimacy of the “lap” and the daydream-like state of mind of “being read” into architectural scale and public experience. A multisensorial site-specific piece that is titled after a line from a definition of weaving by Anni Albers, the event of a thread is reminiscent of the artist’s childhood memories of daydreaming while being read in her grandma’s lap. Comprised of a field of swings, the installation is divided by an enormous silk glacial curtain whose motion is determined by the move of the swings and bracketed by a textile metaphorically being woven by the sonic threads of reading, writing, and live and recorded song. At the front of the installation two actors, covered with textured capes, read to caged birds, improvising combinations of Aristotelian excerpts that further elaborate on the role of touch in our self-awareness, weaving a tapestry of whispers that reach the visitors through separate speakers packaged in paper bags throughout the installation space. At the other end, rotating authors respond to the world outside and behind, weaving words into letters addressed to Far, to Near, to Time, to Sadness, and so on. In effect, the event of a thread reinstills belief in the viability and power of “relational” art as art literalizing its political claim to restoring the social bond by creating proximities through a strikingly intimate and poetic manner.

Caroline Burton: Prey
Accola Griefen Gallery
547 West 27th Street, No. 634, New York, NY 10001
December 7, 2012–January 12, 2013

In her first solo exhibition at Accola Griefen Gallery, Caroline Burton is exhibiting sculpture, painting, and drawing inspired by objects left behind or discarded. Her sculptural pillows in neutral tones allude to rest but render that impossible by the Hydrocal, wire, and canvas forms. Two rabbit’s feet cast in bronze hang on one wall and refer to the exhibition title. The exhibition also includes oil paintings on canvas, which depict discarded papers and rags.

Doing What You Want: Marie-Louise Ekman Accompanied by Sister Corita Kent, Mladen Stilinovic, and Martha Wilson
Tensta Konsthall
Taxingegränd 10, Box 4001, 163 04 Spånga, Stockholm, Sweden
October 18, 2012–January 13, 2013

Maria Lind, director of Tensta Konsthall, has interestingly used the work of a variety of artists, including Corita Kent and Martha Wilson, to flesh out the rebellious politics and feminist strategies of the work of Marie Louise Ekman, a fascinating and at times controversial figure of the Swedish art scene since the 1960s. Though a prominent artist who has worked in various media, celebrated in her home country mostly for her films, Ekman has not yet received the attention she deserves for her multifarious work that bridges Pop art and feminism from an idiosyncratic and often absurdist “girlie” point of view, radically exploring feminine identity and attacking bourgeois conventions. The exhibition focuses on her work from the 1960s to the 1980s, bringing together her transgressive objects that range from environments of Disney dolls and doll-occupied canvases, sewn silk, and pink fur objects to paintings on silk that straddle a variety of themes with her characteristic childish cartoony style.

Brooke Moyse, Mount, 2011, oil on canvas, 72 x 80 in. (artwork © Brooke Moyse; photograph by Jason Mandella)

To Be a Lady: Forty-Five Women in the Arts
1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery
1285 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019
September 24, 2012–January 18, 2013

Curated by Jason Andrew and organized by Norte Maar, this cross-disciplinary, cross-generational exhibition includes work by forty-five artists born over the last century “who happen to be women.” Those included are: Alma Thomas, Charmion von Wiegand, Louise Nevelson, Alice Neel, Barbara Morgan, Irene Rice Pereira, Janice Biala, May Wilson, Lenore Tawney, Louise Bourgeois, Edith Schloss, Grace Hartigan, Ruth Asawa, Betye Saar, Pat Passlof, Jay DeFeo, Susan Weil, Lee Bontecou, Viola Frey, Judy Dolnick, Kathleen Fraser, Hermine Ford, Mimi Gross, Nancy Grossman, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Mira Schor, Mary Judge, Nancy Bowen, Lindsay Walt, Michelle Jaffé, Elisabeth Condon, Tamara Gonzales, Jessica Stockholder, Brece Honeycutt, Ellie Murphy, Julia K. Gleich, Austin Thomas, Ellen Letcher, Rachel Beach, Vanessa German, Kirsten Jensen, Brooke Moyse, and Nathlie Provosty.

Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
October 24, 2012–January 20, 2013

Curated by Lynne Cooke, A Cosmos is a truly remarkable exhibition, both as a survey of Rosemarie Trockel’s work and as a combination of different curatorial and museum-display models that pertinently structure, interweave, and contextualize the artist’s signature themes and media, illuminating her multifarious work in a productive and enchanting way.

Kate Davis: Not Just the Perfect Moments
Drawing Room
Tannery Arts, 12 Rich Estate, Crimscott Street, London SE1 5TE, United Kingdom
December 4, 2012–February 2, 2013

Kate Davis, a New Zealand–born artist based in Glasgow, has produced a new body of commissioned work for her solo exhibition at Drawing Room. Questioning how to bear witness to the complexities of the past, her artwork is an attempt to reconsider, reclaim, and reinvent what certain histories could look, sound, and feel like. This has often involved responding to the aesthetic and political ambiguities of historical artworks and their reception. Working across a range of media, Davis has kept drawing at the critical core of her visual vocabulary, and this exhibition is the first time she addresses her relationship to the medium, its activity, and its history so directly. Focusing on ideologies perpetuated through certain approaches to the teaching of drawing, Not Just the Perfect Moments will attempt to stand alongside the late artist, Jo Spence, to reexamine and unpick some of the ways in which a representational practice, such as drawing, has constructed perceptions of the individual. Spence’s groundbreaking photographic works often asked who owns images—especially images of the body. In this exhibition, as with much of Davis’s practice, photography and drawing are brought into close relation and questioned as techniques for challenging, and caring for, a past and future.

The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum
118–128 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102
November 17, 2012–April 7, 2013

With great treasures and many surprises, The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World consists of works from the museum’s recently acquired Linda Lee Adler Collection of Art by Women, which boasts close to five hundred works of art (including paintings, photographs, drawings, watercolors, pastels, collage, prints, fabric pieces, ceramics, bronze, wood, and sculpture in other media) by over 150 artists. The gift includes works by artists not previously represented in the museum, such as Louise Bourgeois, Joan Brown, Viola Frey, Ana Mendieta, Christina Ramberg, Kiki Smith, and Beatrice Wood, as well as complementary works by artists already in the collection, including Gertrude Abercrombie, Edna Andrade, Diane Burko, Sue Coe, Janet Fish, Sarah McEneaney, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Gladys Nilsson, Elizabeth Osborne, Betye Saar, and Nancy Spero. A fully illustrated catalogue, with contributions from Glenn Adamson, Anna C. Chave, Robert Cozzolino, Joanna Gardner-Huggett, Melanie Herzog, Janine Mileaf, Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Jodi Throckmorton, and Michele Wallace, is something to covet.