CAA News Today

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

November 2012

Susan Hamburger, detail of a cartouche in the installation of Creeping Ornamentalism, 2012, acrylic-painted collage on paper with foam-board molding, dimensions variable (artwork © Susan Hamburger; photograph provided by the Visual Art Center of New Jersey)

Susan Hamburger: Creeping Ornamentalism
Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Gallery
Visual Art Center of New Jersey, 68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901
September 14–December 2, 2012

In Creeping Ornamentalism, Susan Hamburger creates a Rococo period room complete with faux moldings and intricate hand-painted panels that focus on the destruction caused by Hurricane Irene in 2011. The three states she depicts in the panels—New Jersey, Vermont, and Massachusetts—are all places where the artist has lived in the past. Imagery of flora and fauna suggests growth and destruction, and Hamburger includes likenesses of each state’s endangered animals: the osprey, the vesper sparrow, and the blue-spotted salamander. Like previous period rooms by Hamburger, the installation at Eisenberg Gallery borrows designs from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European decorative and fine arts to address current social, political, and economic issues.

Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
September 14, 2012–February 3, 2013

Superb in its conception and realization, Materializing “Six Years” pays homage to the influential art critic and feminist pioneer, Lucy R. Lippard, by exploring the role that her 1973 book on conceptual art, Six Years, played in the critical construction of the emergent art movement back then and its historical perception today. Organized by Catherine Morris of the museum and Vincent Bonin, an independent curator, the exhibition—itself a prime example of feminist curatorial practice—brings together the work of approximately ninety international artists, including Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, and Richard Serra, to illuminate how Lippard’s curatorial projects, critical writing, and politics contributed to art making, writing, and display in the United States and beyond.

Mickalene Thomas, Origin of the Universe 2, 2012, rhinestone, acrylic paint, and oil enamel on wood panel, 44 x 48 in. Private collection, New York (artwork © Mickalene Thomas; photograph by Christopher Burke Studio and provided by the artist, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, and Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects)

Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
September 28, 2012–January 20, 2013

In her first solo museum exhibition, Origin of the Universe, now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, Mickalene Thomas places her jewel-encrusted paintings in four living-room installations into addition to hanging them traditionally. She also presents, for the first time, a new twenty-three minute biographical film, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, which chronicles the life of the artist’s mother, Sandra Bush, who also serves as a model and muse in other works. Highlights of the show include several versions of the painting Origin of the Universe, a reimagining of Gustave Courbet’s provocative L’Origine du monde (1866) both as an intimate self-portrait and as a portrait of the Thomas’s wife. References to the old masters mix freely with a painted collage aesthetic, bringing together art history, folk art, and mural painting.

Sandra Ramos: Viaje al “Sueno Americano”
Accola Griefen Gallery
547 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001
October 18–November 24, 2012

The Cuban artist Sandra Ramos plays with the motifs of childhood, fantasy, and travel in three series that address life in her native Havana, the wider world of the United States, and the disconnect between fiction and reality in which both countries are complicit. In Collectibles, Ramos has created books and dioramas that depict the artist as a small doll-like figure among silhouettes of famous skyscrapers. In Travel to the American Dream, the artist adds collaged elements and graphite drawing to digital prints of American passports and immigration documents. In Habana Mirage, curved pieces of mirrored Plexiglas pairing depictions of the skylines of Manhattan and Havana hug the corners of the gallery, evoking a self-reflective convergence.

Penny Slinger, Bookworm (An Exorcism), 1977, unique photocollage, 13½ x 20 in. (artwork © Penny Slinger; photograph provided by the artist and Broadway 1602, New York)

Penny Slinger: An Exorcism Revisited, 1977–2012
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
September 11–November 30, 2012

Penny Slinger is one of the few women artists to have gained recognition for her work despite the sexism of the British art world in the 1960s, due partly from the support of her mentor, the poet and Surrealist art historian Sir Roland Penrose. Slinger, still active as an artist today, is known for her employment of Surrealist tropes (collage, self-transgression, sexual symbolism) from a woman’s point of view. She has also enjoyed a varied career outside the art world, as a set designer and director for a radical feminist theater collective in London called Holocaust, and as the author of the popular collage novels 50% – The Visible Woman (1971) and Exorcism (1977). In addition to presenting her mixed-media work, the exhibition at Broadway 1602 will display archival material that illuminates other sides of her art practice, such as an unrealized film project.

Under Pressure
Joslyn Art Museum
2200 Dodge Street, Omaha, NE 68102
October 6, 2012–January 6, 2013

Under Pressure is a group exhibition that includes stellar modern and contemporary prints by Hung Lui, Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, Helen Frankenthaler, Vija Celmins, Ellen Gallagher, Jennifer Bartlett, Barbara Krueger, and Kiki Smith. Organized by Toby Jurovics, chief curator of the Joslyn Art Museum, the show is culled from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation and will travel to Kansas, Utah, and Montana through 2014.

Kiki Kogelnik: I Have Seen the Future
Kunstverein Hamburg
Klosterwall 23, Hamburg, Germany 20095
September 15–December 30, 2012

I Have Seen the Future, an exhibition devoted to the Austrian artist Kiki Kogelnik, is the latest in a series of shows at the Kunstverein that seeks to reevaluate marginalized women artists associated with the male-dominated Pop art movement of the 1960s. Kogelnik, like her peer Evelyne Axell, the subject of a 2011 retrospective at the museum, made work about the female body in assemblage, painting, and sculpture. She is remembered within feminist art circles primarily for her super heroines—silhouettes with caricatured facial features often evoking the artist herself. Kogelnik’s work also addressed the political and cultural changes of the decade with topical paintings such as Heavy Clouds over the Cuba Crisis (1964) and Hit the Moon (1969), and through a series of colorfully painted bomb sculptures.

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 2012

Rineke Dijkstra, Self Portrait, Marnixbad, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 19, 1991, 1991, chromogenic print, 35 x 28 cm (artwork © Rineke Dijkstra; photograph provided by the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
June 29–October 8, 2012

It has been a great year for female photographers exhibiting in New York museums: Cindy Sherman at the Museum of Modern Art, Francesca Woodman at the Guggenheim, and now the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, who has a midcareer survey at the Guggenheim. Active since the early 1990s, Dijkstra works in video and large-format color photography, addressing a diverse range of subjects, from adolescents in Poland, Ukraine, and the United States to new recruits to the Israeli army, juxtaposed in their civilian dress and soldier gear.

Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960–2010
MUSAC: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León
Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses 24, León, Spain 24008
June 23, 2012–January 6, 2013

Curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, this exhibition investigates the underrecognized role that feminist activism and theory has played in Spanish art since the 1960s. Showcasing the work of seventy-seven artists (individuals and artist collectives) and representing several generations, Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960–2010 strives to restore what the museum justifiably refers to as “the erased memory of feminist knowledge, practices, and genealogies” from Spanish art history—from the waning years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship to the current rise of the Indignados (“Indignant”) protest movement.

Ulrike Müller: Raw/Cooked
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
June 29–September 9, 2012

In the fifth installment of the Brooklyn Museum’s Raw/Cooked series, Ulrike Müller asked queer and feminist artists to create drawings based on slogans from historical feminist t-shirts found in the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The resulting one hundred drawings are both a valentine to the work of queer and feminist activists of the past and a testament to the ongoing struggle faced by the contributing artists. In addition, Müller also culled the museum’s permanent collection to find objects that spoke to her project, displaying these alongside the drawings.

Joana Vasconcelos Versailles
Palace, Museum, and National Estate of Versailles
Versailles, France 78646
June 16–September 30, 2012

The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos’s installation of large-scale sculptures in the Palace of Versailles addresses history and politics with a child’s sense of wonder and a master craftsman’s feel for material and form. Starting from the idea that the “world is an opera and Versailles embodies the operatic and aesthetic ideal,” Vasconcelos has installed her work, made from everyday objects and materials, in primary locations throughout the palace and its gardens. Mary Poppins (2010), a colorful creature composed of handmade and industrial fabric, hovers expectantly above a grand staircase. A pair of giant-sized high-heel shoes, made entirely from stainless-steel pots and pans, occupies the Hall of Mirrors, adding an Alice in Wonderland element to the ornate surrounding.

Sharon Hayes, Beyond, 2012, research/ production still (photograph © Sharon Hayes and photograph provided by the artist and provided by the artist, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin, and the Whitney Museum of American Art)

Sharon Hayes: There’s So Much I Want to Say to You
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021
June 21–September 9, 2012

Sharon Hayes uses photography, film, video, sound, and performance to investigate the critical relationships among politics, history, speech, and desire. In her largest museum installation to date, Hayes worked with a collaborator, Andrea Geyer, to build an environment on the Whitney Museum’s third floor for staging a collection of the artist’s “speech acts,” which date from 2000 to today. The radical conceit of the installation calls to mind moments in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, such as Dawn Kasper’s studio residency, while also evoking the contemporary protest culture that the biennial displaced outside the museum.

Burnt Breakfast and Other Works by Su Richardson
Constance Howard Gallery and Women’s Art Library
Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, United Kingdom
July 6–September 9, 2012

Curated by Alexandra Kokoli for the Constance Howard Gallery and Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, Burnt Breakfast and Other Works by Su Richardson is the latest in a string of exhibits and symposia around London that have been dubbed the “Feminist Art Spring.” Richardson’s crocheted plate of a typical English breakfast of sausage, egg, bacon, and tomato was created in 1975 as a transatlantic exchange with other women artists. It has since become an iconic work and been reclaimed as a precursor of the contemporary use of crafts in fine art by artists working in the United Kingdom.

Niki de Saint Phalle on Park Avenue
Park Avenue between 52nd and 60th Street, New York, NY
July 12–November 15, 2012

Ten years after Niki de Saint Phalle’s death and forty-four years since her art was exhibited in Central Park’s Conservatory Garden, residents of and visitors to New York can once again commune with her sculptures of mosaic-bejeweled figures, installed in the traffic islands that line Park Avenue from 52nd to 60th Street. The parade of nine sculptures includes signature de Saint Phalle pieces, such as her everywoman “Nana” figures, as well as work from a series that celebrate African American jazz musicians and athletes. This outdoor exhibition is sponsored by Nohra Haime Gallery.

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–July 2012

Fullmoon Night with Yoko Ono
Djurgården, Stockholm
Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
June 4–5, 2012

On the night of June 4 turning into June 5, art lovers had the chance to experience two early Yoko Ono pieces, Evening till Dawn (1964) and Secret Piece (1953), on the lush island of Djurgården in Stockholm. The event will take place in conjunction with Yoko Ono: Grapefruit at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, a retrospective that showcases early experimental films and a selection of “instructions” published in Ono’s book Grapefruit (1964). The exhibition provides a welcome opportunity to view Ono’s art in the context of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, in which she was a key player, and to see her wide-ranging influence on today’s art scene. Specifically for the Moderna Museet, Ono has created a new instruction, “Search for the Fountain,” that has been interpreted in a variety of mediums by a group of international artists.

Klonaris/Thomadaki: The Angel Ablaze
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 9, 2012

The Angel Ablaze offers a thorough introduction to the work of two avant-garde filmmakers and multimedia pioneers, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, whose holistic approach to filmmaking is called Cinema of the Body. At the Benaki Museum, Klonaris and Thomadaki will teach a master class after a screening of The Angel Cycle, a work inspired by a photograph of a hermaphrodite found in the archives of Klonaris’s gynecologist father in 1985. The film explores the idea of the intersexual body as partially angelic and further explicates this figure as the ideal metaphor for a bodily approach to the cinema.

“How Women Work”
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NGI 2GB, United Kingdom
June 14–19, 2012

In conjunction with Mika Rottenberg’s eponymous exhibition (May 5–July 1, 2012), Nottingham Contemporary is hosting “How Women Work,” a three-part symposium that addresses the relationship of women to labor in postindustrial economies and how feminist thought on the role of women in the workplace has evolved since the 1960s. The first event, on June 14, is a screening of María Ruido’s documentary film, Amphibious Fictions (2005), about the lives of female factory workers in two Spanish cities in the industrial belt surrounding Barcelona. The next day, a symposium titled “Art, Gendered Labor, and Resistance” will engage artists and theorists from the United Kingdom and Europe to explore the issue of art as gendered labor, the relationship between resistance and oppression, and the generational shifts that have affected the feminist dialogue on labor. The featured speakers are Jo Applin, professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of York; Angela Dimitrakaki, professor of modern and contemporary art the University of Edinburgh; Julia Morandeira, professor of Spanish contemporary art at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; Nina Power, a philosophy professor at Roehampton University in London; Maria Ruido, an artist and filmmaker; and Marina Vishmidt, a London-based art writer. The last event, on June 19, is a screening of African director, Ousmene Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966). The fictional film takes place in postcolonial Senegal and tells the story of a young woman from Dakar who faces many trials and tribulations as a live-in nanny working for a family in the French Riviera.

Sigalit Landau: Soil Nursing
Kamel Mennour
47 rue Saint-André des arts, Paris, France 75006
June 2–July 25, 2012

With Soil Nursing, Sigalit Landau brings together a potent combination of sculptures, photographs, and videos that evokes the body in space and its changing relationship to nature. Madonna and Child (2012), a series of twisted marble forms resting on exquisitely carved wooden bases, suggests a larvalike, maternal body crossed with the streamlined effervescence of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1923). The abstract sculptures are complemented by lush, color photographs and videos depicting the dreamy environment of an olive grove in the Negev Desert in southern Israel, the artist’s native country.

Chantal Joffe
Cheim and Read
547 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
May 4–June 22, 2012

For her second solo show at Cheim and Read, the British painter Chantal Joffe continues her investigation of portrayals of woman in art with a selection of large and small paintings. Joffe’s influences extend from fashion photography and personal snapshots to works by contemporary artists such as Alex Katz and Elizabeth Peyton, who similarly address society and subjectivity through portraiture. In this exhibition Joffe also pays explicit homage to Alice Neel with a striking self-portrait of herself, naked on a bed with stripped covers—an image reminiscent of Neel’s 1980 portrait of herself, sitting nude in a stripped armchair.

Wangechi Mutu: blackthrones
Gladstone Gallery
12 Rue de Grand Cerf, Brussels, Belgium 1000
May 15–July 7, 2012

In blackthrones, Wangechi Mutu’s first solo exhibition in Brussels, the artist fills the elegant rooms of Gladstone Gallery with chairs wrapped in black garbage bags, metallic tinsels, and colorful debris and supported by spindly, insectlike legs. Despite this decoration, the wooden chairs are recognizable as being representative of English colonial design, hinting at a critique of Western hegemony while having fun with the transformative possibilities of sculpture.

Jo Spence: Work (Part I)
SPACE
129–131 Mare Street, London, E8 3RH, United Kingdom
June 1–July 15, 2012

Jo Spence: Work (Part II)
Studio Voltaire
1a Nelson’s Row, London, SW4 7JR, United Kingdom
June 12–August 11, 2012

A two-part retrospective of the photographic work of Jo Spence (1934–1992) offers a unique opportunity for the critical reassessment of an often misunderstood and certainly understudied “amateur” photographer. Spence emerged as a pivotal figure in the mid-1970s from the British photographic left, bridging her commitment to feminism, socialism, and education with a hungry, documentary impulse that took in every aspect of her life and those around her. The first part of the exhibition, on view at SPACE, focuses on the 1960s to the 1980s, years in which Spence founded the Hackney Flashers, a collective of women photographers, and organized photography co-ops and workshops. The exhibition continues at Studio Voltaire with her move toward methods of therapy through photography and patient empowerment and through her own struggles with breast cancer.

Edy Ferguson: Selected Works 1993 to the Present
Benaki Museum
138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece 11854
June 1–July 29, 2012

Edy Ferguson’s survey exhibition at the Benaki Museum familiarizes Greek audiences with the multifaceted work of this American artist who now lives and works in Athens and London. Ferguson fuses a Pop art sensibility (her slick painting style is reminiscent of James Rosenquist) into her work that address a host of contemporary issues, such as the recent economic upheavals in Greece. The museum installation does not indicate boundaries in Ferguson’s various practices, opting instead to showcase her drawing, painting, videos, and performances as a “single and articulated Gesamtkunstwerk.”

Doris Salcedo: Plegaria Muda
MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Arts
Via Guido Reni 4A, Rome, Italy 00196
March 15–June 24, 2012

Doris Salcedo’s installation Plegaria Muda (translated as Mute Prayer) is an antimonumental memorial to victims of war and urban violence. Composed of over one hundred pairs of rectangular wooden tables whose tops sandwich a mound of earth that enables clumps of grass to grow through the crevices, the installation is keenly evocative of a graveyard or war memorial. Salcedo researched two specific atrocities when creating the memorial: the brutality of life in the ghettoes of southeast Los Angeles and the murder of numerous impoverished Colombians by factions of the Colombian army from 2003 to 2009. According to the artist, “Plegaria Muda is an attempt to live out this grief, a space demarcated by the radical limit imposed by death. A space that is outside of life, a place apart, that reminds us of our dead.”

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 2012

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–80, chromogenic print, 3⅜ x 3½ in. (photograph © George and Betty Woodman)

Francesca Woodman
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128
March 16–June 13, 2012

Francesca Woodman, only twenty-two years old when she committed suicide in 1981, was already an accomplished young artist breaking new ground with her stunning black-and-white photographs, primarily of herself, in dreamlike interior spaces. Her images are a palimpsest of Surrealism, fashion photography, literature, and daily ritual. This Guggenheim retrospective features 120 photographs that cover her teenage years in Boulder, Colorado, her time as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the late 1970s, a meaningful year spent in Rome on a study-abroad program, and her last work, produced in New York.The exhibition also features two artist’s journals and recently unearthed videos made while Woodman was a student.

Malia Jensen: Stuff and Things
Cristin Tierney
546 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001
April 19–June 2, 2012

Malia Jensen’s first solo show in New York, Stuff and Things, features sculptures of animals and other natural phenomena made from an often-deceiving variety of materials, such as bronze, wood, glass, porcelain, and salt. A dark, lyrical humor runs through Jensen’s work, and her animals are a study in opposites, simultaneously sensuous and funny, grotesque and formally beautiful. Each object has a punchy joke that gives way to pathos and contemplation. In the exhibition essay, John S. Weber describes the world that Jensen evokes as one in which “Everything is beautiful, puzzling, and inconclusive.”

FRAMEWORK: Activism, Memory, and the Social Landscape
A Proposition by LaToya Ruby Frazier
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 17 and 19, 2012

Each month the New Museum’s public-seminar series, titled Propositions, focuses on a new artist and set of issues. For May, LaToya Ruby Frazier, a photographer and participant in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, will lead a two-day seminar based on her ongoing documentation of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the struggling steel-mill town where she was born. Frazier’s work makes the political deeply personal: she is concerned with salvaging the stories of her family and neighbors while archly exposing media exploitation, such as an ad campaign for Levi’s jeans that packaged the complex social reality of her hometown into a hip destination.

Evelyne Axell: The Great Journey into Space
Broadway 1602
1181 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10001
April 30–August 25, 2012

Evelyne Axell (1935–1972), a prominent Belgian actress and television personality in the 1950s, changed her course to become a visual artist with the encouragement of a family friend, René Magritte. Axell’s paintings are bold pictorial statements, often featuring nude female figures, assemblages with found objects à la Robert Rauschenberg, and the graphic, hallucinatory colors of Pop art and advertising. Like other artists from the 1960s who worked with figurative motifs—John Wesley and Rosalyn Drexler come to mind—Axell plays with the political implications of “erotic art,” feminism, and consumer culture. The Great Journey into Space, her second solo appearance at Broadway 1602, features paintings, drawings, sculpture, exhibition archives, and documentation of a wild Happening that the artist organized in 1969 at the Foncke Gallery in Ghent, Belgium.

Mona Hatoum: You Are Still Here
Arter, Vehbi Koç Foundation
Istiklal Cad. No 211, Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey, 34433
March 17–May 27, 2012

You Are Still Here, Mona Hatoum’s first solo show in Turkey, showcases work made since the 1990s. Hatoum’s art exists between the poetic and the political, exile and homecoming, exquisite craftsmanship and everyday objects. She works in a wide range of materials and forms, from singular sculptural objects to room-sized installations, as well as video, photograph, and work on paper. A 2012 installation comprising human-sized steel cages containing delicate hand-blown glass, titled Kapan (translated as “trap” in Turkish), was created specifically for the exhibition. Another new work, Shift (2012), is a wool carpet map of the world divided into danger zones by drawn-on yellow seismic waves.

Ellen Altfest: Head and Plant
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
May 6–June 24, 2012

Ellen Alfest is a New York–based artist who makes precisely detailed oil paintings of humans and vegetation on a one-to-one scale. Her subjects are often men in states of unaware repose, sometimes rendered completely abstract as a zoomed-in landscape of hair, veins, and flesh. Altfest’s vision of the living human body as painted matter has its precedent in the work of Philip Pearlstein and Lucian Freud. Head and Plant is her first solo museum exhibition.

Maro Michalakakos: I Would Prefer Not To
Ileana Tounta Contemporary Arts Centre
48 Armatolon-Klephton Street, Athens, Greece, 114 71
March 29–May 26, 2012

Literary references abound in the work of the Greek artist Maro Michalakakos. She takes the title of her exhibition, I Would Prefer Not To, from a line favored by the protagonist of Herman Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” Happy Days, a heaping pile of red velvet fluff that hugs the gallery’s columns, nods to a Samuel Beckett play with the same name. A second installation using seductive velvet, Red Carpet, consists of a carpet unfurled from floor to ceiling, bearing the imprints of animal claw marks. The glamour of the “red-carpet” event here becomes a gateway to a predatory world of abuse, power, and victimization.

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 2012

Kate Gilmore: Rock, Hard, Place
David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW Second Avenue, Miami, FL 33127
April 14–May 31, 2012

Kate Gilmore’s work has drawn comparisons with numerous pioneers of performance art, such as Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono. Captured in video, photography, and sculpture, Gilmore’s actions are visually compelling statements in which the artist play-acts different female stereotypes, while also referencing the materials and processes of manual labor and art-making. In Rock, Hard, Place (2012), hot-pink paint is wedged into a gridded structure of bowls, overflowing and leaving a unique mark, as a rock is smashed into each unit. For her show at David Castillo Gallery, the artist debuts two new videos, Pot Kettle Black and Break of Day. Each depicts Gilmore as an actor engaged in Sisyphean tasks that call into question the role of women in society; the works also forward the idea of the artist as a free-willed magician.

Sturtevant: Image over Image
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
March 17–August 26 2012

Elaine Sturtevant, an American-born artist based in Paris, creates masterful handmade replicas of artwork by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Beuys that challenge narratives of authenticity and originality, while also speaking to the artistic possibilities that arise from cloning and cybernetics. More recently she has made “cover versions” of noted works by Paul McCarthy, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and Robert Gober. Sturtevant: Image over Image showcases thirty works of art, including four recent video installations, and new pieces that were produced specifically with the Moderna Museet’s collection in mind, such as a copy of Marcel Duchamp’s freestanding sculpture Fresh Widow (1920/1964). Sturtevant’s mode of production, bemusing to audiences and critics when it first appeared in the mid-1960s, has now assumed the mantel of a postmodern feminist critique, albeit one that still leaves room for analysis, debate, and pleasure.

Zoe Leonard: Observation Point
Camden Arts Centre
Arkwright Road, London, NW3 6DG, United Kingdom
March 31–June 24, 2012

Zoe Leonard has transformed one gallery of the Camden Arts Centre into a room-sized camera obscura, creating a live, inhabitable photographic image that is time based and always changing. In two other rooms, she exhibits a series of photographs taken with the lens pointed directly at the sun and presents a wall installation of found postcards of Niagara Falls. All three installations stretch the limits of photography and ask, what exactly constitutes a “photograph”? The exhibition also considers how we experience and shape the world through accumulation and manipulation of photographs.

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Landscapes of an American Modernist
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
217 Johnson Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501
January 27–April 29, 2012

An exhibition of oil paintings and works on paper by Juane Quick-To-See Smith, a New Mexico–based artist and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, evokes the Southwestern landscape and recalls certain modernist masters, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, and Marsden Hartley, who joined symbolism to abstraction. Quick-To-See Smith’s work also deals with political and ecological themes in the Petroglyph Park Series (1985) and in a group of paintings from the late 1980s created in honor of Chief Seattle, a nineteenth-century Native American leader who prophesized the environmental damage of the twentieth century.

Dara Friedman: Dancer
CAM Raleigh
409 West Martin Street, Raleigh, NC 27603
January 28–May 14, 2012

CAM Raleigh is screening Dancer, the latest film by the German-born artist Dara Friedman, which she created in Miami in 2011. Originally filmed in 16mm and transferred to high-definition digital video, Dancer captures sixty-six performers in forty separate segments representing all forms of movement and dance, from hip-hop to modern, flamenco to skateboarding, and classical ballet to skipping down the street. Dancer is the third installment in an unofficial trilogy that includes Musical (2007–8) and Frankfurt Song (2010). All three films explore spontaneous actions and synchronized performances in international urban settings.

Sarah Braman: These Days
International Art Objects Galleries
6086 Comey Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90034
March 31–May 5, 2012

Sarah Braman works in painting and sculpture, frequently creating mash-ups of the two media. These Days presents playful and wide-ranging work in oil and spray paint on wood boards, shipping crates, and cardboard. Freestanding Plexiglas chambers, resembling sci-fi coffins of pleasure, are paired with the occasional found object (like a 1980s boombox) in works such as Time Machine, TV in bed, andDawn Dog. Braman’s art is without a predetermined conceptual underpinning; instead it is “engineered entirely to fulfill the dream of desire,” according to Rupert Winkelsnap, the author of the gallery’s press release.

Jacqueline Humphries
Greene Naftali Gallery
508 West 26 Street, Eighth Floor, New York, NY 10001
March 28–April 28, 2012

The New York–based painter Jacqueline Humphries is known for her large-scale canvases and expressionistic mark-making, as well as the frequent use of metallic silver paint evocative of industrial coloring, gelatin-silver photographs, and the cinema’s fanciful silver screen. The new paintings from her seventh solo show at the Greene Naftali Gallery continue these formal investigations while introducing an exploration of the push–pull between abstract flatness and pictorial space, framing within the picture plane, and the immense variety found in the repetition of painterly motifs.

Yayoi Kusama
Tate Modern
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, United Kingdom
February 9–June 5, 2012

In New York in the early 1960s, the Japanese-born Yayoi Kusama often performed her art in public as a staged “happening,” exploring a newfound territory between theater and visual art that Claes Oldenburg was charting at the same time. Yet she stood out against the male-dominated Pop and Fluxus scenes. Active as an artist for over four decades, and a voluntarily inmate in a mental institution since 1977, Kusama has created work that remains as arrestingly obsessive, spontaneous, and unabashedly colorful as ever. The Tate Modern retrospective includes a cinema series, Kusama on Film, which runs from April 15 to May 27, 2012. Screenings include landmark records of the artist’s rarely seen performances, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration and Love-In Festival (both 1968), which provide a window onto this artist’s unique, hybrid art practice.

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 2012

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #183, 1988, chromogenic color print, 38 x 22¾ in. (artwork © Cindy Sherman; photograph provided by the artist, Metro Pictures, and the Museum of Modern Art)

Cindy Sherman
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
February 26–June 11, 2012

Featuring over 170 photographs, Cindy Sherman—only the fifth career survey by a woman in the Museum of Modern Art’s history—begins with the artist’s groundbreaking series of Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and continues to her recent Society Portraits that address the unreality of aging in contemporary culture. Soaking up influences far beyond the art world, Sherman has created a body of work that has in turn inspired fashion, film, performance, and music. A film series, Carte Blanche: Cindy Sherman, runs from April 2 to 10 and features films personally selected by the artist from the museum’s collection.

Rosemarie Trockel: Flagrant Delight
WIELS
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, 1190 Brussels, Belgium
February 18–May 27, 2012

Rosemarie Trockel: Flagrant Delight is the first large-scale survey in Belgium of work by this German artist. Trockel often deals with the aesthetic legacies of Surrealism and Dada, and the WIELS show highlights her connection to the Belgian artists René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers. Flagrant Delight features work produced since the early 1980s and debuts pieces created specifically for the exhibition. The cornerstone of the show is a new series of forty mixed-media collages that trace Trockel’s distinct sensibility through the juxtaposition of recognizable images and abstract motifs.

Kimsooja
Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole
Rue Fernand Léger, 42270 Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France
February 25–March 28, 2012

Known for large-scale, filmed performances and multichannel videos, the Korean artist Kimsooja makes work that questions global culture and the role of the artist in the world. As the main actor in her videos, often filmed from behind, she engages in repetitive tasks that evoke ritual practice and Zen Buddhist philosophy. In A Needle Woman (1999–2001), comprising eight simultaneously projected videos, Kimsooja stands motionless in the middle of busy city streets—in Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing, Mumbai, Jerusalem, and more—as people walk around, ignore, or interact with her.

R(ad)ical Love: Sister Mary Corita
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20005
March 9–July 15, 2012

R(ad)ical Love: Sister Mary Corita surveys the work of the nun, artist, social activist, and influential teacher, Sister Mary Corita (later known as Corita Kent). The exhibition features sixty-five prints created between 1963 and 1967, when Corita taught art at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles; the works combine the eye-catching graphics of pop with the sincere messages of protest signs and buttons that were synonymous with youth culture in the sixties. Highlighting her role as a political activist, R(ad)ical Love foregrounds the agitprop quality of the work and distances it from the commercial art that it may superficially resemble.

Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238
January 27–August 12, 2012

Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin pairs the porcelain sculptures of the British artist Rachel Kneebone with fifteen sculptures by the nineteenth-century master Auguste Rodin, chosen by Kneebone from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. A highlight of the exhibition, Kneebone’s first major museum show in the United States, features The Descent (2008), her work inspired by Dante’s Inferno, presiding over nine large-scale pieces by Rodin. Juxtaposing the emphatic figures of Kneebone and Rodin highlights a shared interest in the “representation of mourning, ecstasy, death, and vitality in figurative sculpture,” while contrasting the differences of their processes and materials.

Postcard for Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond.

Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond
Glass Curtain Gallery
Columbia College Chicago, 1104 South Wabash Avenue, First Floor, Chicago, IL 60605
March 1–April 21, 2012

Not Ready to Make Nice: Guerrilla Girls in the Artworld and Beyond
Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery
Columbia College Chicago, 619 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60605
March 1–April 21, 2012

This two-part exhibition, devoted to the art world’s resident feminist activists, contextualizes the unruly group’s activism and art. The Glass Curtain Gallery features material related to the Guerrilla Girls’ work in museums and galleries, while the A+D Gallery stressess their political activities outside the art world and features a selection of films. Both presentations combine never-before-seen documentation and samples of fan and hate mail, as well as the opportunity for visitors to contribute their own voice through several interactive installations.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Parallel Worlds
Moderna Museet
Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Sweden
February 11–May 6, 2012

This exhibition brings together recent work by the Helsinki-based artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila such as Horizontal (2011), The Annunciation (2010), and Where is Where (2008), with an iconic video from the early 1990s, Me/We, Okay, Gray. Bridging film, video, and installation, the artist’s work is lushly cinematic and strangely subversive, touching on themes of biopolitics and posthumanism. The selection highlights Ahtila’s exploration of human perception, tragedy, and the play between inner and outer worlds.

SHORT BIG DRAMA: Angela Bulloch
Witte de With
Witte de Withstraat 50, 3012 BR Rotterdam, Netherlands
January 21–April 9, 2012

This solo exhibition of the Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist Angela Bulloch collects three separate bodies of work: large-scale wall paintings, pixel installations, and interactive drawing machines. Bulloch’s interdisciplinary and theatrical approach invites viewer participation, and some works can even be “programmed” anew each time they are shown. Bold graphics, vibrant color, and references to the strategies of twentieth-century avant-garde movements—Constructivism, Minimalism, and the Situationists’ use of détournement—call into question the “informational status” of a given artwork.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Witte de With will host a book launch on April 3 for Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch, a monographic collection of critical essays and collaborations with other artists.

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

February 2012

Alina Szapocznikow, Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I), 1970–71, colored polyester resin and glass, 3 3/16 x 4 5/16 x 5⅛ in. Kravis Collection (artwork © Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski/ADAGP, Paris; photograph by Thomas Mueller and provided by Broadway 1602, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne)

Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972
Hammer Museum
University of California, Los Angeles, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024
February 5–April 29, 2012
Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972 is the inaugural United States museum survey for this underrepresented Polish artist. A Holocaust survivor who died in 1973 at the age of forty-seven, Szapocznikow is widely acknowledged by her artist peers as one of the most significant sculptors of the twentieth century. She pioneered the use of unconventional sculptural materials, such as polyester and polyurethane, and constructed a visual language that addressed the body’s pain and regeneration. The exhibition includes approximately sixty sculptures, fifty works on paper, and numerous photographic works, demonstrating the tremendous range of Szapocznikow’s vision and continuing influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists.

Maya Lin
Heinz Architectural Center
Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
February 11–May 13, 2012
An exhibition of work by Maya Lin explores her diverse career as architect, artist, and dedicated environmentalist. The twenty-one sculptures and drawings on view range from room-sized installations evocative of geological topography to intricately designed wall installations. Lin has made one new work inspired by Pittsburgh’s three rivers, Pin River – Ohio (Allegheny & Monongahela), specifically for the Carnegie Museum, and her new memorial video project, What is Missing?, will be screened in the museum’s Scaife Lobby.

Shares and Stakeholders: The Feminist Art Project Day of Panels
Abramson Auditorium
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
February 25, 2012
This year’s Feminist Art Project Day of Panels, organized by the artists Audrey Chan and Elana Mann and held in conjunction with the CAA Annual Conference, asks the question: What are the stakes—and who are the stakeholders—of the feminist future? The conversations will address the greater inclusivity of a contemporary feminist art that embraces a multiplicity of identities and philosophies. Topics of discussion will include: feminist art educational models, the roles of men in feminist art, interventionist art strategies, radical queer art making, and feminism as a daily humanist practice. This event is free and open to the public.

Katharine Pyle, “He knocked against a tin pan that clattered down with a tremendous din,” from Three Little Kittens by Katharine Pyle (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920), 1920, graphite, ink, and gouache on illustration board, 7⅞ x 6⅜ in. Lent by David and Sarah Wyeth (photograph provided by the Delaware Art Museum)

Tales of Folk and Fairies: The Life and Work of Katharine Pyle
Delaware Art Museum
2301 Kentmare Parkway, Wilmington, DE 19806
February 18–September 9, 2012
This exhibition presents seventy-one works by the celebrated children’s book author and illustrator Katharine Pyle (1863–1938). A native of Wilmington, Katherine Pyle was encouraged from a young age to pursue poetry and illustration by her older brother, the famed illustrator Howard Pyle. She studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and at the Drexel Institute of Art and Science, also in Philadelphia. Her work was stylistically aligned with her brother, and also with Beatrix Potter, Walter Crane, and Aubrey Beardsley. Pyle’s subjects were taken from Norse and Greek mythology, fairy tales, and animal stories, and her 1923 illustrations for Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty are among her best-known work.

A Complex Weave: Women and Identity in Contemporary Art
Perlman Teaching Museum
Weitz Center for Creativity, Carleton College, 320 Third Street East, Northfield, MN 55057
January 13–March 11, 2012
This exhibition, curated by Martin Rosenberg and J. Susan Isaacs, looks at the current state of feminist art practices and the range of materials and theories used by contemporary artists. Personal and political identity is explored in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and needlework. The roster of artists include: Blanka Amezkua, Sarah Amos, Helene Aylon, Siona Benjamin, Zoe Charlton, Sonya Clark, Annet Couwenberg, Lalla A. Essaydi, Judy Gelles, Sharon Harper, Julie Harris, Fujiko Isomura, Tatiana Parcero, Philemona Williamson, April Wood, and Flo Oy Wong.

Kathryn Spence, Short sharp notes, a long whistled trill on one pitch, clear phrases (detail), 2010–11 (artwork © Kathryn Spence; photograph by Rick Schwab and provided by Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco)

Kathryn Spence: Dirty and Clean
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877
January 29, 2011–June 10, 2012
The German-born, San Francisco-based artist Kathryn Spence uses found, dirty, and discarded materials to explore the complexities of humanity’s relationship to garbage and its place in our ecosystem. Spence, an avid bird-watcher and nature enthusiast, creates life-sized animal models from scraps of paper, fabric, string, and wire. Her work plays with the idea of dirt and dirtiness as both a purifying source and as a by-product of human waste and greed.

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

January 2012

Jenny Saville, Bleach, 2008, oil on canvas, 99 5/16 x 73 11/16 in. Collection of Lisa and Steven Tananbaum (artwork © Jenny Saville)

Jenny Saville
Norton Museum of Art
1451 South Olive Avenue, West Palm Beach, FL 33401
November 30, 2011–March 4, 2012

Jenny Saville is the inaugural exhibition of the Norton Museum of Art’s Recognition of Art by Women (RAW) series, and the first solo American museum exhibition of the British figurative artist. This exhibition will bring together her most recognizable monumental figure and portrait paintings along with drawings from her recent series Reproduction drawing (based on the Leonardo cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist from the National Gallery, London) depicting mother and child images. The presentation will include twenty-eight canvases and drawings dating from 1992 to 2011 and smaller studies, not previously shown, from the artist’s studio.

In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
January 29–May 6, 2012

The Surrealist movement in art is most often identified with male artists, many of whom objectified women in their paintings. Numerous female artists at the time, however, developed their own identity-based imagery. This exhibition looks at female Surrealists working in the United States and Mexico and contains 175 works in a variety of media that were created between 1931 and 1968 by artists such as Lee Miller, Yayoi Kusama, and Frida Kahlo.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels: Sunset, 1976, Great Basin Desert, Utah, 1976, detail of composite of four photographs reproduced from original 35mm transparencies, (artwork © Nancy Holt)

Nancy Holt: Sightlines
Tufts University Art Gallery
Aidekman Arts Center, Tufts University, 40 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA 02155
January 19–April 1, 2012

Since the late 1960s, Nancy Holt has created a far-reaching body of work, including Land Art, films, videos, site-specific installations, artist’s books, concrete poetry and major sculpture commissions. Nancy Holt: Sightlines showcases the artist’s transformation from the perception of the landscape through the use of different observational modes in her early films, videos, and related works from 1966–80.

Cathy Wilkes
Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213
November 12, 2011–February 26, 2012

Carnegie Museum of Art presents the first solo American museum exhibition to combine the painting and sculptural installations of the Irish artist Cathy Wilkes. Often examining personal experiences, including motherhood, Wilkes is best known for vulnerable, haunting sculptures and installations in which sculpted and found objects are altered and arranged into humanistic—if sometimes disturbing—domestic scenes. Including nine paintings, a recent sculpture, and a newly commissioned installation, this exhibition provides a comprehensive view of Wilkes’s practice.

Margaret Murphy, Reclining Woman (after Kurosawa), 2007, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 20 x 14 in. (artwork © Margaret Murphy)

Margaret Murphy, A Ten-Year Survey; Decoding the Marketplace: coupons, dollar stores, and eBay
Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery
New Jersey City University, Hepburn Hall, Room 323, 2039 Kennedy Boulevard, Jersey City, NJ 07305
January 30–March 7, 2012

This exhibition highlights varied bodies of work created during the last decade by the artist Margaret Murphy. Included in the exhibition are the Tarot Cards series (1997–2000), the Sweet 16 series (2005–7), and the Parlor Paintings (2006–7). Seen together for the first time, these paintings and collages demonstrate Murphy’s insightful feminist critique of the American consumer culture and misrepresentation of women as seen through commodity objects such as porcelain figurines and product packaging.

Andrea Fraser, Men on the Line, KPFK
National Center for the Preservation of Democracy
111 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
January 23, 2012

Vaginal Davis, My Pussy is Still in Los Angeles (I Only Live in Berlin)
Bullock Department Store Wilshire
3050 Wilshire Boulevard, Fifth Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90010
January 29, 2012

In late January, West of Rome Public Art will host performances by two legendary and controversial feminist artists as part of Pacific Standard Time’s Performance and Public Art Festival. Both works are part of a series inspired by the Los Angeles–based Woman’s Building (1973–81), whose history and influence is currently explored in the PST exhibition Doin’ It in Public.

Zoe Strauss, South Philly (Mattress Flip Front), 2001/2003 (negative/print), chromogenic print, image: 6⅞ x 10⅛ in./sheet: 8 x 10⅜ in. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with funds contributed by Theodore T. Newbold and Helen Cunningham, 2003 (artwork © Zoe Strauss)

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years
Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130
January 14–April 22, 2012

This midcareer survey of the work of Zoe Strauss, a resident of south Philadelphia, focuses on her decade-long public art project in which each year on the first Sunday in May she exhibited more than two hundred of her photographs in a space beneath a section of Interstate 95 in south Philadelphia. Most of her subjects are disenfranchised people or places.

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 2011

Henrietta de Beaulieu Dering Johnston, Henriette Charlotte Chastaigner (Mrs. Nathaniel Broughton), 1711, pastel on paper; 14 2/5 x 11 3/5 in. Gibbes Museum of Art, Gift of Victor A. Morawetz (artwork in the public domain)

Breaking Down Barriers: 300 Years of Women in Art
Gibbes Museum of Art
135 Meeting Street, Charlestown, SC 29401
October 28, 2011–January 8, 2012

This exhibition, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, examines the challenges that women artists have faced over the past three hundred years. The oldest works are by Henrietta de Beaulieu Dering Johnston (ca. 1674–1729), who is considered the first female professional artist in America. Among the most recent contributions are those by artists who work in Charleston today.

Nan Goldin: Scopophilia
Matthew Marks Gallery
522 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
October 29–December 23, 2011

Scopophilia (“the love of looking”) combines Nan Goldin’s autobiographical photographs with those taken in the Louvre Museum after hours. A video, complete with the artist’s commentary and soaring choral music, is shown in a darkened viewing room. Both the photographs and video deal with themes of love and desire.

Sarah Sze: Infinite Line
Asia Society
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021
December 16, 2011–March 25, 2012

Sarah Sze: Infinite Line comprises two-dimensional works on paper and a new large-scale, site-specific installation. Sze uses everyday objects such as milk cartons, takeout cups, bars of soap, feathers, lamps, ladders, pebbles, potted plants, pens, plastic bottles, tools, and twigs, which are transformed in her installations by their associations.

Sanja Iverković: Sweet Violence
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019
December 18, 2011–March 25, 2012

This first US museum exhibition of the Croatian feminist, activist, and video and performance artist Sanja Iverković covers four decades of her career. Roxana Marcoci, curator in the Department of Photography, has brought together a group of videos and media installations, including Sweet Violence (1974), Personal Cuts (1982), Practice Makes a Master (1982/2009), General Alert (Soap Opera) (1995), and Rohrbach Living Memorial (2005), along with one hundred photomontages.

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 2011

Patti Smith, Walt Whitman’s Tomb, Camden, NJ, 2007, unique Polaroid, 4¼ x 3¼ in. (artwork © Patti Smith; photograph provided by the artist, Robert Miller Gallery, and the Wadsworth Atheneum)

Patti Smith: Camera Solo
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street, Hartford, CT 06103
October 21, 2011–February 19, 2012

With seventy photographs, one multimedia installation, and a video, Patti Smith: Camera Solo is the largest presentation of this artist, poet, and performer’s visual work in the United States in nearly ten years. The exhibition highlights the connection between Smith’s photography and her interest in poetry and literature. Actual objects that appear in the many black-and-white Polaroids will also be on view.

Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue
Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
Hunter College, City University of New York, East 68th Street at Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10065
September 8–December 3, 2011

Mounted in conjunction with the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center, Patti Smith: 9.11 Babelogue comprises twenty-six works on paper created between 2001 and 2002 as a response to the tragic event in New York. Organized by Michelle Yun, curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries, the exhibition is the first presentation of the entire series.

Second Annual Feminist Art History Conference
Katzen Arts Center
American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016
November 4–6, 2011

Following the success of last year’s inaugural event, the Art History Program in the Department of Art at American University has organized the second annual Feminist Art History Conference. Speakers in twelve sessions will deliver fifty-one papers that span a broad range of topics and time periods, from the medieval era to contemporary art. The presentations will also demonstrate the ways in which feminist research and interpretation have spread across the spectrum of art-historical analysis and scholarship. In her keynote address, Mary D. Sheriff, a distinguished professor of art history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century French art and culture, will speak on “The Future of Feminist Art History: Where Have We Come From, Where Are We Going?” The conference is free and open to the public; online registration (by October 28) is recommended.

Francesca Woodman, Untitled, New York, 1979–80, chromogenic print, 3⅜ x 3½ in. (photograph © George and Betty Woodman)

Francesca Woodman
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
November 5, 2011–February 20, 2012

This survey of works by the photographer Francesca Woodman, known for her black-and-white self-portraits from the late 1970s, is the first in more than two decades and comes thirty years after her death at age twenty-two. Organized by Corey Keller, associate curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition includes prints, artist’s books, and videos.

Sherrie Levine: Mayhem
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021
November 10, 2011–January 29, 2012

Sherrie Levine has been the subject of much critical discourse for the past thirty years. This exhibition, developed as a project by the artist, includes works ranging from her well-known 1981 photograph, After Walker Evans: 1-22, to recently created objects, such as Crystal Skull: 1-12, from 2010. Levine and the curators—Johanna Burton, Elisabeth Sussman, and Carrie Springer—will juxtapose old and new works in order to provoke fresh associations and responses.