CAA News Today

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for March below.

Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI, 1977-82; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Edward R. Broida in honor of David and Renee McKee; © Vija Celmins; photo: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery. On view at SFMoMA through March 31st.

Judith Godwin: An Act of Freedom

February 14 – March 16, 2019
Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

Judith Godwin: An Act of Freedom contributes to the important revisionist history on the women of Abstract Expressionism with the presentation of twenty-three gestural canvases produced from 1954 through 2007. A native of Suffolk, Virginia, Godwin (b. 1930) attended Mary Baldwin College in Staunton (1948-50) and completed her undergraduate degree in 1952 at Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William and Mary (now Virginia Commonwealth University). She moved to New York in 1953, where she was invited to attend frequent dance classes and performances by Martha Graham, with whom she established a lifelong friendship. She also studied briefly with Will Barnet and Vaclav Vytlacil at the Art Students League, followed by classes with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, MA, and in the fall 1954 at 52 West Eighth Street. Inspired by Hofmann’s color principles, Godwin’s emerging abstractions in the mid-1950s, many on view here, display a tightly structured organization of planar elements that develop into expansive and sweeping arcs, angles, and spatial breaks across the painterly surface. An interesting comparison is Japanese painter Kenzo Okada (1902-82), another formative association for Godwin encouraging her investigations in Zen Buddhism. Godwin’s paintings were included in the important traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism that originated at the Denver Art Museum in 2016.

VIJA CELMINS: TO FIX THE IMAGE IN MEMORY

December 15, 2018 – March 31, 2019
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The first retrospective of Vija Clemins in North American in more than 25 years, this exhibition presents over 140 small scale, exquisitely detailed paintings, drawings, and sculptures of the physical world by the American-Latvian artist. Living and working in New York since 1981, Celmins’ early work was inspired by Pop Art, painting realistic depictions of everyday objects, followed by drawings and paintings of newspaper photographs. Her Untitled (Big Sea) series in the 1970s, depicting the ocean texture completely filling the picture plane, unbroken by any horizon or secondary life or object, brought her acclaim as she developed her meticulously thorough technique. Her intention more about the process than the photographic reflection or landscape aesthetic, the works’ texture and character present a fascinating distraction, opposing romantic cliché.

ROSE ENGLISH. FORM, FEMINISMS, FEMININITIES

March 1 – April 13, 2019
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

Since March 2019 Richard Saltoun Gallery in London is dedicating its annual programme to women, as part of their mission to support female artists who are under-recognized and under-represented. This inaugural exhibition celebrating the Gallery’s commitment to protest gender inequality in the art world, showcases Rose English’s works from the earlier stages of her career. The exhibition includes a range of artworks from 1970s and early 1980s demonstrating the richness of English’s unique artistic vocabulary, her curiosity and willingness to experiment with processes and materials, and her versatility as an artist eager to engage with photography, ceramics, collage, film, installation and performance. Her interest in politics, social issues, aesthetics, philosophy and popular culture can be traced in her early works. What is particularly interesting, is the artist’s subversive understanding of feminism and femininity which she explores through challenging and interweaving diverse forms, their conventions and histories. Plato’s Chair (1983) exhibited in the final room of the gallery is one of her most important early monologue performances staged at the Western Front in Vancouver, Canada in 1983.

Erika Verzutti: Mutations / Creations 3

February 20 – April 15, 2019
Centre Pompidou, Paris

Mutations is the first monographic exhibition in Europe of Erika Verzutti, the Brazilian artist (b. 1971, São Paulo) known for her vital exploration of the materialization and facture of sculptural forms in bronze, ceramic, cement and papier-mâché. Occupying the entirety of Gallery 3, Verzutti’s provocative sculptures and reliefs, often animalistic, vegetal, and botanical abstractions, are here conceived as “families” or generative groupings and “conversations,” such as Tarsila, an homage to the brilliant painter and “mother” of Brazilian modernism, Tarsila do Amaral, or The Brasilia Family, a title conjuring the extraordinary industrialization of the new capital city in postwar Brazil. A central object embodying a massive swan’s shapely form evokes matrilineal sources and tribal connectivity. In relationship to the rational, geometric panels of Brazilian Concretism in the 1950s or the gestalt ideals of Neo-Concretist “non-objects,” Verzutti’s playful, sardonic and feminist gestures invite new and welcome readings on texture, materiality, and opticality.

DINOSAUR IN THE DOLLHOUSE

January 31 – April 19, 2019
Carlow University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh

This process and collaborative oriented exhibit includes paintings by artists Sarah Jacobs, Kristen Letts Kovak, and Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann around legacy, possibility and evolving context. One individually completed painting by each artist is complemented by another that was influenced by the paintings by the other two artists. Moreover, the trio will create a collaborative painting in the gallery during the exhibition’s run that will be finished by the end. Katherine Tzu-Mann’s expansive, expressive colorful paintings explore how painting can “capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms” from material, to process to their animated result of shapes, moving lines and colors. Also rich in movement and hue, Kristen Letts Kovak’s paintings seem to take more botanical form, if imagined, as the artist explains her more intuitive approach, her paintings are “both records of my perceptions, and independent objects for observation.” Sarah Jacobs’ process is pattern-driven, meticulously hand-painted, bright and complex work that relates to human vulnerability. The artists share a mentor, who provided impetus for the title reflecting artists’ perhaps seemingly random yet purposely juxtaposed choices.

She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York, 1919-2019

January 22 – December 19, 2019 
Gracie Mansion, New York

What does it mean to make a difference while residing in “The People’s House?” First Lady of New York City Chirlane McCray embodies strident activism in her support of this important exhibition at Grace Mansion, the official residence of the Mayor and his family. This smart installation of 44 modern and contemporary women artists marks a century of persistence since suffrage and shows 60 artworks by women who represent diverse origins and cultural positions intersecting life and culture in New York City. Curator Jessica Bell Brown brings together photographs, objects, archival materials, and artworks documenting diverse forms of political resistance and power struggles (LGBTQ and AIDS awareness, for example) and art historical and proto-feminist interventions in the twentieth-century canon (Abstract Expressionist modern women, for instance), all of which thematically explore ideas contending with “complicated histories, the body as battleground, picturing people, and expanding abstraction.” She Persists presents an extraordinary range of artists: early modernists and social realists Florine Stettheimer, Isabel Bishop, and Theresa Bernstein; photographers Berenice Abbott, Ruth Orkin, Perla de Leon and Consuelo Kanaga; video and performance artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Martha Rosler and Ana Mendieta; and postwar abstractionists Betty Parsons, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, and Carmen Herrera. Kara Walker, Simone Leigh, Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage, and Faith Ringgold represent broad proposals on African-American narratives. Shirley Chisholm, the Brooklyn-born Congresswoman, summarizes the rallying cries for women’s rights in her 1974 speech: “Forget traditions! Forget conventionalisms! Forget what the world will say whether you’re in your place or out of your place Stand up and be counted.”

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for February below.

ROSEMARY MEZA-DESPLAS: JANE ANGER

January 31 – February 24, 2019
Amos Eno Gallery, Brooklyn

“Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth…If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it.”

Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018, Atria Books)

Artist Rosemary Meza-DesPlas explores all of these elements of anger and more through her sinuous lines in hand-sewn human hair drawings, watercolors and onsite installations in her solo show, Jane Anger, the title referencing a 16th century pamphlet published in England titled Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women. She also utilizes art history as inspiration by juxtaposing found art historical imagery along with social media and mass media imagery, exploring how the social movements, Women’s Marches and #MeToo, harnessed anger in order to forefront an array of gender-based burdens, presenting anger as a tool rather than detriment, as media often reflects. Moreover, by using her own gray hair in her drawings, Meza-DesPlas implicates further thought on socio-cultural symbolism, feminism and body issues, and religious symbolism, invoking both contemporary and classical perspectives around anger. Building on the multi-media experience, during the opening reception, the artist will present her piece titled Intervals of Anger, performing a poem every fifteen minutes. Taken altogether and individually, Jane Anger will surely rile and provoke audiences on this timely issue.

HELÈNE AYLON: Elusive Silver: Paintings that Change in Time

January 12 – March 2, 2019
Leslie Tonkonow, New York

The first solo exhibition of Helène Aylon in New York since 1979, Elusive Silver is a great introduction to the perceptual intricacies and feminist intent of the work of this  understudied pioneer  through her eponymous 1969-1973 abstract painting series. Comprising works that reflect and refract an inner glow that changes visually with the viewer’s stance and the light conditions, this first exploration of process-driven painting  made with industrial materials such as sheet metal, acrylic plastic and spray paint is a potent prelude of her signature late-1970s works physically changing, as intended, with the passage of time.

Born in 1931 and raised within the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Boro Park, Brooklyn,  Aylon was married to a rabbi at the age of eighteen and became widowed, with two young children, at the age of thirty. While in her mid-twenties, she enrolled as an art major at Brooklyn College, taking classes with Ad Reinhardt who became her friend, her true mentor who freed her work, while also introduced her to Mark Rothko, with whom she shared the spiritual foundations of their common cultural backgrounds. Refraining from mark-marking, beginning in 1969, however, Aylon experimented with the idea of creating “painting that revealed itself,” in an attempt to introduce an evolving feminist consciousness in painting.

The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain

December 8, 2018 – March 31, 2019
Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden, Germany

Sibylle Bergemann, Heike, Allerleirauh, Berlin, 1988, on view in The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain at the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden, Germany, through March 31st.

Curated by Suzanne Altmann, The Medea Insurrection redresses the marginalization of the vanguard women artists working in the German Democratic Republic and their radical female perspective—largely due to the institutional predilection for East Germany’s male figurative painters before and after the Wall’s fall. The Medea Insurrection illuminates the singularly radical idioms of an intergenerational selection of multimedia women artists and rarely shown groups from East Germany and highlights their conceptual and artistic affinities with more recognized artists from other socialist countries in light of their shared provocative turn to mythology and empowering reinterpretation of female figures –such as Medea, Cassandra or Penthesilea—as means to advance contemporary, often punk, images of women, and protest both bourgeois and socialist role models. With this “double refusal” they were exposing themselves often to more risk than their male colleagues, who prior to 1989 often turned to codes of ancient mythology to express their discontent with the communist rule yet in painting. Performance artist Gabriele Stötzer, for instance, was imprisoned as a dissident and faced years of surveillance by the Stasi. Christa Jeitner too was banned from exhibiting in the 1970s, as was Cornelia Schleime who fled to the West in 1981.“From a lack of freedom, a certain freedom emerges,” as put by the curator, who argues that women artists were often more radical in such contexts of artistic unfreedom—perhaps because they were working so far under the official radar that they could take greater risks.

The exhibition brings together the work of rarely shown performance and fashion group Allerleihrauh, the visual dissidence of Dresden artists Angela Hampel, Christine Schlegel, Cornelia Schleime and Karla Woisnitza, the feminist experimentations of the filmmakers’ group Efurt, from Thuringia, an intergenerational mixture of East Berlin photographers such as Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Tina Bara, Evelyn Richter and Sibylle Bergemann, as well as Christa Jeitner and performance artist Gabriele Stötzer  with  Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland), Geta Bratescu (Romania), Katalin Ladik (Hungary), Zofia Rydet (Poland), Zorka Saglova (Czech Republic) and Alina Szapocznikow (Poland), among others,  capturing, their defiant risk taking, talent for improvisation, self-irony, and categorical reinterpretation of classical materials and motifs across their different media. It also draws parallels to the 1980s, when Else Gabriel (Germany) and Hanne Wandtke (Germany) carried out risky performance experiments as part of the Dresden group Autoperforationsartisten.

I Wish to Communicate With You: Corita Kent and Matt Keegan

January 13 – April 14, 2019
Potts Gallery (Los Angeles)

Some conversations are historical-actual—often resulting in the production of treasure troves of personal material (letters and/or gifts exchanged as signs of connection and engagement)—and other conversations must, by dint of our temporal realities, be virtual. When Corita Kent died in 1986, Matt Keegan was only ten years old—yet this did not stop the young artist from finding a point of contact in Kent’s work. On sabbatical in Cape Cod Kent produced a series of work that melded the color-combinations of naval signal flags with a variety of source material (the book of revelation, Winnie the Pooh, and others) to create a vibrant abecedarium. Years later, Keegan has taken Kent’s historical work and created his own series based on the radical juxtapositions offered by the former nun. Bringing the two together in virtual dialogue is a reminder as to how artist’s trajectories extend far past their own lives, and how we might continue to have conversations with the past.

Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico

January 19 – May 12, 2019
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Born in Mexico City in 1942, Graciela Iturbide has spent her career photographing daily life for the variety of indigenous populations that live in Mexico, and Latin America more broadly. A mentee of Manual Álvarez Bravo—who taught at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where Iturbide attended—her work is both a paean to, and departure from Bravo’s exacting formalism. In the late 1970s Iturbide received two important commissions, both to photograph segments of Mexico’s many indigenous communities. These commissions resulted in the publication of Juchitán de las Mujeres, a defining moment in Iturbide’s storied career. Her engagement with matrilineal and matriarchal indigenous communities, not to mention the presence of the Zapotec genderqueer muxe, meant that Iturbide’s photography has necessarily engaged questions of gender, sex, and social cohesion. As Iturbide’s prominence increased, she was invited to devise and complete projects all over the world – yet this exhibition makes a case for Mexico as the near-constant geographic touchstone running throughout her practice.

A work by Skylar Smith on view in Feminist Expressions at Kaviar Gallery through January 19, 2019.

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for January below.

FEMINIST EXPRESSIONS: INVITATIONAL SHOW FEATURING KENTUCKY FOUNDATION FOR WOMEN ARTIST ENRICHMENT GRANTEES

November 30, 2018 – January 19, 2019
Kaviar Gallery, Louisville, KY

Kentucky isn’t exactly thought of as the feminist mecca. But seventeen invited artists from around this Southern state present poignant artwork around highly charged social topics such as immigration, femicide, media and materiality, food and animal abuse, astrology, pollution and more. Whitney Withington’s intimately hand-crafted journals feature vintage vernacular photography from Appalachia, reversing the trend of invisibility of African American women in Appalachian imagery and literature. Dijana Muminovic, an artist who survived the Bosnian War, exhibits a keen and affecting photograph reflecting Bosnian women and their search for separated loved ones. Diane Kahlo pays homage to the disappeared/murdered young women of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s via her small, richly hued portraits with an altar adorned with sequined skulls and ceramic roses.  Through her sensual quilted works, Jennifer Hart combines the warmth of fabric with the brashness of pornography to re-humanize the dehumanized nude female body. The 17 artists exude a stellar combination of aesthetic and the boldness and excellence necessary to make real change, significantly in a lesser recognized area.

Anni Albers

October 11, 2018 – January 27, 2019
Tate Modern

Bringing together more than 350 objects, this retrospective exhibition of the Bauhaus-trained weaver, whose 1965 text On Weaving has been a standard-bearer in the realm of fiber arts. In Open Letter, a wall-hanging from 1958, Albers produced a cacophony of patterns using only black, white, and a minimal amount of copper-colored thread. Mathematically precise the tapestry scintillates with a seemingly improvisatory energy. Each of the works on display merit close and persistent looking—their gifts both readily available and hidden in the warp and weft of Albers’ keen compositional intelligence. Of particular interest is the fact that the curators have gathered together source material that informed Alber’s On Weaving, and thus one also gets the picture of Albers as inveterate magpie, collector, and cultural connector.

In 1939 Albers wrote about material, and the benefits of artistic perseverance: “But most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being. Self-confidence can grow. And a longing for excitement can be satisfied without external means, within oneself; for creating is the most intense excitement one can come to know.” The sagacity that comes with self-sufficiency is on full display here, even if Albers is still only mentioned in surveys of Western Art History as a footnote to her husband’s artistic and teaching career. Hopefully this exhibition and its accompanying catalog go a ways toward changing that.

Let’s Try Listening Again, 13th A.I.R. Biennial

January 9 – February 3, 2019
A.I.R. Gallery

In an attempt to locate empathy as an enactment the curators of the 13^th A.I.R. Biennial, Sarah Demeuse and Prem Krishnamurthy, have gathered twenty-nine works that work to reengage the radical activity of listening. A part of feminist and critical race conversations for decades, listening has been a central focus of cultural forms such as consciousness-raising and witnessing. Placing a premium on this important component of political awakening and action, the curators seek to orient viewers towards “novel forms of communing,” incorporating rest, pause, and reflection. Participating artists include: Angeli, Angie Keefer, Anna Riley, Catalina Viejo López de Roda, Dulce Gómez, Fotini Vurgaropulou, Hagen Verleger, Irene Mohedano, Jane Long, Johanna Unzueta, Julie Nagle, Karen Donnellan, Katie Hector, Katja Mater, Katy Mixon, Keren Benbenisty, Kyoung eun Kang, Library Stack, Lukas Eigler-Harding, Malin Abrahamsson, Maren Henson, Matthew Schrader, Olivia Baldwin, Romily Alice Walden, Sari Carel, Scaleno Collective, Shuyi Cao, Suzanne Mooney, Tselote Holley, and Zhenya Plechkina. Opening events included a performance by Angeli (with Jayoung Yoon); closing events will incorporate a performance by Irene Mohedano and the launch of Romily Alice Walden’s A Primer on Working with Disabled Group Members for Feminist / Activist Groups.

CLAIRE PARTINGTON: TAKING TEA

December 7, 2018 – December 6, 2020
Seattle Art Museum

British ceramicist artist Claire Partinginton’s work flips the typical script of the Seattle Art Museum’s Porcelain Room for a whole two years, demonstrating a strong sense of acknowledgement of institutional limitations. Taking Tea is the first ever installation in the visitor favorite Porcelain Room since its debut in 2007. The Porcelain Room includes more than 1,000 European and Asian porcelain pieces from SAM’s collection grouped to evoke porcelain as a treasured commodity between the East and the West. This is precisely where the artist’s inspiration lies, within the European tradition of appropriation and reinterpretation or misinterpretation of “exotic” styles. She writes, “I like the idea of getting it slightly wrong and the bluffing and ‘cobbling together’ of styles that has resulted in some fantastic historical objects.” The results are familiarly finely crafted ceramics of pristine, richly adorned figures with contemporary details and jolting couplings, an installation referencing Baroque painting and European porcelain factories, as well as a panel mounted with fragments from 17th- and 18th-century shipwrecks.  A group of four in fancy attire pose as if “taking tea” while a single figure lay, stomach down, in the middle of their fine affair, reflecting the troubling aspects of the era they depict, yet resonating with the still continued issues with international trade and economy. It’s sure to be a trip!

Installation view of Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930-1990, on view at the Museum of Sex through March 4, 2019.

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for December below.

CONTRIBUTION TO LIGHT: THE EARLY WORKS OF BARBARA HAMMER

September 13, 2018 – January 31, 2019
Kow Madrid

Barbara Hammer needs no introduction. One of the first filmmakers to openly address and document lesbian sexuality, Hammer is both a feminist pioneer of queer cinema and an influential force  of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. She is also dying.

In a recent talk at the Whitney Museum (The Art of Dying or [Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety]) she frankly, movingly, and inspiringly spoke of death and (her) art, living with cancer and one’s right to die “when she wishes,” advocating terminally ill patients’ right to decide how and when to die. Concentrating instead on works that precede the specter of death in her work, Contribution to Light focuses only on very early films, photographs, and works on paper, including some previously unknown. It seeks to explore the role physical perception of space and relationships play in Hammer’s first steps as an artist, marking the signature combination of physical presence, painterly quality, and sensual expressionism that characterizes much of her work both on celluloid and paper. “Her camera gaze seems to literally touch the environment, inseparable from her body and its experiences, while her paint brush and her pencil are unafraid to discern the surface of the paper as a field of action and mental and formal discovery,” as put in the press release. Touch has been indeed central in Hammer’s vision, and she eloquently speaks about it during the aforementioned talk. While this show in Madrid is only a small homage to Hammer’s beginnings, her illness and own commitment to prepare for the aftermath of her death has already precipitated a wave of much-needed study, preservation, and celebration of her work in the US. A major retrospective will open next summer at the Wexner Center for the Arts. But will she be alive, or conscious to see it? Wishing so, this CWA selection symbolically reciprocates her loving goodbye while she is still in life.

Tomie Ohtake: At Her Fingertips

November 1 – December 22, 2018
Nara Roesler Gallery, New York

This concise exhibition focuses on Tomie Ohtake’s preparatory collages, drawings, and engravings from the 1960s and 1970s and proposes a new dimension to the Japanese-Brazilian artist’s expansive, six-decade career and legacy. Curated by Paulo Miyada, chief curator of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, At Her Fingertips places Ohtake’s “studies” in direct relationship to a few select paintings, arguing for a dynamic reciprocity between media and offering further insight into the eminent artist’s approach to abstract gesturalism, geometry, and spirituality. These small, colorful collages—torn and ripped somewhat haphazardly—are hung directly from the ceiling in double-sided glass frames, highlighting the graphic and material nature of paper cutouts and promoting the dialectics of chance and control underlying Zen Buddhism and Japanese calligraphy. This tidy show further informs the interwoven dialogues on abstraction offered in postwar Brazil from which Ohtake readily drew upon, including those by the Seibi group’s second generation, including Manabu Mabe and Flávio-Shiró, and the Concrete principles of design and color theory by Wyllis de Castro and Hércules Barsotti, for example. In all, this exhibition continues the important historical work on Ohtake, and delivers a morsel of her brilliant career to a new audience in New York.

LINDA VALLEJO: AMERICAN Latinx

September 4 – December 14, 2018
Kean University Karl and Helen Burger Gallery, Union, New Jersey

Linda Vallejo provokes both directly and subtly poignant questions through her “Make ‘Em All Mexican” (MEAM) series of historical figures and contemporary pop personalities painted brown; and extended series, “The Brown Dot Project” of transformations of Latino populations and workforce data into engaging visual representations using brown dots. MEAM sculptures, handmade books and manipulated aluminum sublimation prints began in 2011 when the artist worked out her own query, “I’m a person of the world. What would the world of contemporary images look like from my own personal Mexican-American, Chicano lens?” From the Three Stooges to Jennifer Lawrence to the Statue of Liberty, these iconic works in brown and titled in Spanish, presented in striking fashion, challenge audiences, “Does color and class define our understanding and appreciation of our culture?” “The Brown Dot” series are dotted objects and abstract images on graphed pages with statistics built into the pointillated designs, stats as the titles, such as National Latino Authors and Writers 5.6% dotted to create a typewriter; or National Latino Architects 7.2% into a VW Beetle. The series has traveled in solo and group exhibitions for a few years now, but its relevancy endures.

ANNE BRIGMAN: A VISIONARY IN MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

September 29, 2018 – January 27, 2019
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno

Not enough can be said about the innovative, ethereal and intimate photography of Anne Brigman, though this exhibition, the largest ever undertaken including over 300 works spanning her career, attempts to honor her amazing radical oeuvre. Objectifying her own nude body outside in near desolate wilderness was absolutely revolutionary at the turn of the twentieth century, moreover her well-known landscape photography, poetry and art criticism maintained for her a significant career. Her sinuous figure aligns naturally with the lines of the trees and landscapes of Sierra Nevada. Her powerful poses wreak vulnerability and strength, echoing Francesca Woodman decades after her, but with an inner confidence and strength. Brigman redefined the space through her work as did Judy Chicago, Brigman a feminist artist before the notion.

Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire, 1930-1990

September 28, 2018 – March 4, 2019
Museum of Sex, New York

With an unapologetic dose of theatricality appropriate for its subject, this small but comprehensive survey curated by Lissa Rivera offers a delectable opportunity to discover, re-evaluate and celebrate the art and life of Leonor Fini as well as the rebellious inextricability of both.

Born in Buenos Aires, but raised in Trieste—only by her mother upon her separation of her abusive father whom she escaped by often dressing like a boy—Fini begun to paint at the age of thirteen and by the time she moved to Paris in 1931 had already established herself “as an artist to watch.” While best remembered today as a Surrealist due to her early style, affiliations and her participation in the seminal 1936 MoMA show, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, and her illustrations of Marquis de Sade Juliette, Fini refused membership in any of the contemporary avant-garde movements and pursued a fiercely independent course in life and art, marked by her eccentric disguises, life-long partnership with two men, and a radical exploration of desire, sexuality, and performativity that cuts across all the media she worked as painter, idiosyncratic draughtsman, and prolific theater designer. Spanning two floors and six decades of work, the exhibition brings together fascinating examples of the changing style of this largely self-taught artist’s painting (presided over by her 1940s androgynous male nudes guarded by female lovers), erotic drawings, book illustrations, and samples her work in theater and design, contextualizing her production and theatrically fleshing out her performative person with photographic and filmic documentation,  signature outfits, a projected assortment of select quotes by the artist, and music.

While arrayed along chronological lines, the exhibits are curated in eloquent and eloquently analyzed groupings that capture Fini’s feminism both as an advocate of the feminine and female desire as well as an explorer of a radically boundlessness  sexuality. “Subverting the Muse,” “Empowering the Feminine,” “Metamorphosis and Sexual Sorcery,” “Intellectual Explorations of Sexuality,” and “The Corporeal” are a few of such groupings’ titles that speak volumes of both the timeliness of Fini’s sexual politics and the earliness of her revolt, and are convincingly illustrated by her representations of both men and women, her empowering evocation of sorcery, mythology and nature, her work’s unrestricted erotics, ranging from androgynous objects of female desire to homoeroticism and Sadean sadomasochism, and the fluidity of gender and sexuality emanating from her images, disguises, and words.

Bridget Riley

November 16, 2018 – January 26, 2019
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

“The curve is a frozen moment,” said Bridget Riley in an interview with The Telegraph, “This side contracts. That side extends. When we see a painted curve we somehow recognize that.” This gathering of work from across Riley’s rigorous and focused career gives a viewer an opportunity to test that observation. From Riley’s early experiments with pointillism, Pink Landscape (1960), to her recent paintings and wall murals consisting of subtly-modulated, colored discs, this show is arranged by “conceptual and compositional affinity rather than chronology.” Seen in this way, what emerges is a set of related concerns—the stripe, for instance—which can then be traced across the artist’s career. More than a survey-text example of Op Art, Riley’s work asks for the perceptual and bodily investment of the viewer; a recognition, a frozen moment, a curve, a line.

Visitors activate Tania Bruguera’s commission at the Tate Modern in London. Photo: Benedict Johnson

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for November below.

TAMMIE RUBIN: Solo Exhibition

November 17, 2018 – January 10, 2019
Women and Their Work (Austin)

Tammie Rubin’s handcrafted objects depict explorations of African American migration stories, particularly her own parents in the 1950s and 1960s, from the rural South to the Midwest. Timely in their haunting aura, the objects made of lab glass and sculptural material are made from found objects, appropriating familiar shapes like funnels, eggs, vases, candle holders, and, notably, cones. The artist then paints a series of 17-26 and intricately hand-etches a flask to emit a visual timeline of her parent’s journey, when the Civil Rights Movement was prominent and the Civil Rights Act was effective in 1960. Many of the objects are flanked with two holes that resemble eye holes, further indicating racial tension, unfortunately relevant still. Other elaborate adornments on the objects include pointillated maps or trails, lines and patterns. Grouped together the works release the nature of such moves; discomfort, uncertainty, but also auras of surreal and sensuality. This is a new body of work shown at the Women and Their Work Gallery in Austin, where Rubin currently resides, being raised in the Midwest.

Self-Confessed! The Inappropriately Intimate Comics of Alison Bechdel

September 1 – December 30, 2018
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers 

Zimmerli Art Museum exhibits MacArthur Foundation “genius” grantee and author/illustrator of the renowned Dykes to Watch Out For comic (1983-2008, syndicated in over fifty alternative newspapers), Alison Bechdel’s primary bodies of work including original drawings and sketches, activist ephemera, large-scale self-portraits, and even a reconstructed model of the set for the musical Fun Home. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) is a graphic memoir Bechdel created exploring her relationship with her father, coming out, and his possible suicide. This New York Times bestseller was also the basis of the Tony-award winning musical of the same name from which the Fun Home model set was made. Dykes to Watch Out For precluded that, which explored the lives of a group of lesbian friends. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama (2012) follows her relationship with her mother, girlfriends, and therapists, and examines psychoanalytic theory. All of her work is created with humor and style via universally relatable and personable stories on love, acceptance, community, and social justice. Her solo exhibit is complemented by a selection of work by contemporary graphic memoirists Thi Bui (The Best We Could Do) documenting immigration and assimilation; Ellen Forney (Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir), managing bipolar disorder while retaining passion and creativity; and Iraq veteran Maximilian Uraiarte (White Donkey: Terminal Lance), satirizing daily life in the United States Marine Corps. This unique juxtaposition of work resembles both the variety of timely topics explored in the medium with a breadth of relatable style, but also the ability of these artists to connect to broad audiences by bringing print to paper to the contemporary.

Deana Lawson: Planes

October 13, 2017 – February 17, 2019
The Underground Museum (Los Angeles)

A rare thunderstorm marked the occasion of Deana Lawson’s October opening at Los Angeles’s Underground Museum. A flash and a bang and the power in the galleries went suddenly out. Soon, people were holding up their cell phones and turning on their flashlight apps. It was like a scene out of a movie—each person’s sightline illuminated, as they swept and focused their glances on Lawson’s photographs. Primarily Lawson photographs black individuals in a range of interiors and exteriors, singly and in groups. A pictorial sharpness and a meticulous attention to the psychodynamics of everyday life circumscribe the boundaries of her engrossing practice. The people and props that appear in her photographs are often posed and placed with great care; the resulting effect is a studied naturalism, which might entrap an otherwise lazy viewer with its claims to “reality.” The title of the exhibition is “planes” which might suggest an altogether other reading of these photos, as spatial constructions wherein the social is imprinted. Eventually, the lights came back on, but Lawson’s photographs continued their troubling of photographic practice.

Marcia Hafif: A Place Apart

September 4 – December 22, 2018
Pomona College Museum of Art 

Rigorous eclecticism links the 100+ works running throughout this (now sadly posthumous) retrospective of the West Coast conceptual painter Marcia Hafif. Entitled A Place Apart, the artist’s solitary and meditative drawings are put into coordination with ephemera from her archive (notebooks and writings) and a few choice paintings. Building models, planting schedules, reflections on Chinese poetry, constellations of the zodiac, and spirals and mazes; these are but a few of the elements of Hafif’s practice as reflected in the retrospective’s organization. Throughout the survey there is an insistent focus on the creation and maintenance of the spaces for contemplation and retreat. In addition to shedding further light on this understudied artist, Pomona College honors one of its alumni—Hafif enrolled in 1947. The exhibition is accompanied by a handsome catalogue, and includes a new site-specific wall writing work, entitled Cooking Fish.

Liliana Porter: Other Situations

September 13, 2018 – January 27, 2019
El Museo del Barrio 

Liliana Porter moved from Buenos Aires (b. 1941) to New York in 1964 where she confounded the avant-garde New York Graphic Workshop and participated in its conceptualist reformation of printmaking. A still understudied yet highly acclaimed artist—recently hailed as one of Latin American Art’s “radical women”—Porter has worked in variety of media including works on canvas, photography, sculpture, installation, video and more recently theater, and has become widely known for her playful poetic mixture of the absurd with the lyrical and the dramatic through whimsical “theatrical vignettes,” enlivened by mass produced figurines, that variously comment on the fragility and brutality of the human condition with humor, compassion, philosophical and existential profundity. Collected from flee markets around the world, these figurines, says the artist, “are mere appearance, insubstantial ornaments, but, at the same time, have a gaze that can be animated by the viewer, who, through it, can project the inclination to endow things with an interiority and identity.”

Her first major museum survey in New York in 25 years, organized by SCAD Museum of Art, Other Situations brings together a variety of Liliana Porter’s works from 1973 to 2018 and focuses on the artist’s exploration of the conflicting line between reality and fiction, and the ways in which images are circulated and consumed. The exhibition highlights the fundamental distinction that Porter creates between the notions of “narrative” and “situation,” while bringing to the foreground the timely relevance of her provocation of representation, image dissemination and public life and recent series, such as Forced Labor.

Tania Bruguera:

October 1, 2018 – February 24, 2019
Tate Modern

Under a changing numerical title that is stamped on the visitors’ hands and reveals the ever-increasing figure of people who migrated from one country to another last year, added to the changing number of migrant deaths recorded this year—10,142,926 on October 1—Tate Modern unveiled the series of interventions by the Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera at the Turbine Hall and the institution around it comprising the 4^th annual Hyundai Commission. An ambitious multifaceted project, this work not only thematizes migration but exceeds the boundaries of Tate to mobilize community in line with the artist’s sociopolitical concerns and ongoing honing of “useful art.” In response to the extent and crisis of migration, not to mention Britain’s changing relationship with its neighbors, Bruguera variously focuses on the meaning and role of the neighbor. The work invites visitors to take part in symbolic actions in the Turbine Hall, from revealing the portrait of a migrant’s face hidden beneath a heat-sensitive floor, to crying under the influence of an organic compound, in an enforcement of empathy critical of its lack and failures. An essential part of this work is her collaboration with a team of Tate Modern’s real neighbors to whom she has resorted in order to teach the museum how to adapt to its local community’s needs and to create direct action and institutional changes. One of the first actions ensuing from this multi-month interaction, whose results are expected to outlast the duration of the project, has resulted in the renaming of Tate Modern’s north building the Boiler House after local activist Natalie Bell, paradigmatically honoring her community work and positive contribution to the lives of others in SE1. Chosen in fact by Bell, the face to be revealed from the heat of the visitors’ lying bodies is of Yousef, a young man who left Syria in 2011 and found emotional and practical support through SE1 United, a local charity that Bell helps to run. Bruguera sees this image as a hidden ‘horizontal mural’ that can be made visible only by those within touching distance and collective action. Read CAA’s recent interview with Tania Bruguera.

Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler, The Scar, 2017. Film still. Courtesy the artists and Delfina Foundation.

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for October below.

Liliane Lijn: Cosmic Dramas

September 13 – December 7, 2018
Rodeo Gallery (Piraeus, Greece)

For its first show of the season in its new venue in Athens, Rodeo introduces the work of still understudied “un-feminist feminist” and kinetic-art pioneer, Liliane Lijn. The show includes a suite of drawings and a multimedia sculptural installation comprising two of the 1980s “goddesses” that exemplify Lijn’s multidisciplinary practice, interests, and radical exploration of the feminine, and resonates with the cultural background of Athens (a city where Liliane Lijn also lived in the early 1960s).

Conjunction of Opposites combines two figures The Lady of the Wild Things (1983) and The Woman of War (1986) made separately, when, in the 1980s, Lijn turned to an exploration of the feminine through apparitions of feminine energy and power. Ahead of their time, but in line with Lijn’s interests in science, technology, language, light, movement, mythology, and eastern philosophies characterizing her pioneering contribution to the 1960s avant-garde, they are computer controlled, combining LED lights and laser beams with an array of traditional and everyday materials, such as smoke and brush fibers. The Lady of the Wild Things is a bird goddess representing the lunar archetype and a machine activated by sound. The Woman of War is a singing goddess, the embodiment of an angry song that the artist felt came straight through the earth to her mouth. Their hybrid (mechanic and organic) bodies, as described by the artist—were combined in 1986 in an interactive installation that created a mesmerizing spiritual and sensual drama, staging an exchange of poetry and light in a cloud of artificial fog. When together, a laser light connects these “performative sculptures” through a disembodied beam of red light bouncing between their heads, activated by the six minute drama unraveling in Lijn’s voice.

These figures are “drawing together our mythological past for an imagined future, ” the artist has eloquently reminisced about their making.  Underpinning her statement is a connection between the sacred and modern industry important to this work and Lijn who observes that many of the holiest places consecrated to the Goddess in ancient times, like Eleusis near Athens, are now transformed into oil refineries and power stations, wondering what archetypes might be hidden in the “bowels of steel mills or the endless intestines of oil refineries?” But while each sculpture distills symbolic references to female archetypes and mythological beings, embodying elements of seduction, power and spirituality, interacting in Conjunction of Opposites they shatter binary notions of gender “evoking femininity as a fluid cosmic fact,” conveying the radicalness and timeliness of Lijn’s exploration of the feminine that this show tries to show, and that variously connects the lasting manifestations of her feminist concerns with her “un-feminist” feminist turn away from fixed understanding of femininity through her turn to science and technology in the 1960s.

Liliane Lijn has lived and worked in London since the late sixties, after straddling the most radical and unexpected contexts and milieus of the postwar avant-garde—Paris, where she studied archeology, New York, and even Athens, where she lived with her then-partner Takis. She was born in New York to parents of Jewish Russian origins who escaped World War II through Cuban passports, and she grew up in various US cities and Switzerland.

RONNI KOMAROW: TENDER MERCIES

October 3-28, 2018
Galatea Fine Art (Boston)

Artist Ronni Komarow’s solo show is centered on an interactive installation, Diary of a Bake Sale Diva, comprised of 400 hand-made papier-mâché cupcakes juxtaposed against the walls lined with 120 feet of hand-written, multi-hued script of comments, queries and inner musings around her experience as bake-sale coordinator for her son’s middle school. The visual display emits a playful vibe, with a relevant examination of public school funding today. Visitors are also invited to write with chalk on a blackboard their own bake sale experiences, exuding the artist’s community-driven ideals.

Exploring motherhood in art isn’t new but certainly the narratives explored often involve early parenthood and pregnancy; Komarow, rather, looks captivatingly at raising adolescents and the maneuvering and intermixing of motherhood, community service, school activities and artmaking. The exhibit title reflects the “tender mercies that have enriched her life, even if given inadvertently,” as so many aspects of motherhood, relatably, are. The exhibit includes artist books related these themes, also combining imagery and text, an accessible, refreshing element of the entire exhibit, in contrast to the oft-highbrow conceptual exhibitions reserved for the few.

Contemporary Muslim Fashions

September 22, 2018 – January 6, 2019
de Young Museum (San Francisco)

From the abaya to the hijab to the ‘burkini’—this wide-ranging exhibition explores the dynamism of Muslim fashion—at a moment when social and political hostilities towards muslims is at an all time high. For this reason alone the exhibition should be required viewing. Following on the heels of other travelling ‘blockbuster’ fashion exhibitions at the de Young (Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood are two recent monographic examples), this show feels constituitively different, with its emphasis on religious life, culture, and expression. Curated by Reina Lewis, who teaches cultural studies at the University of the Arts London and the London College of Fashion, an in consultation with muslim fashion leaders in the Bay Area, the show is careful never to spectacularize the fashion on display (a mainstay of blockbuster fashion shows), but uses the garments as a jumping off point to consider religious life, Orientalism, subjugation and liberation (many of the mannequins wear hijabs, but some do not—reflecting the diversity of opinion as to whether or not the enforcement of the wearing of the hijab is an oppressive religious dictat).

Dian Pelangi is a recurring and innovative presence in the exhibition. One ensemble (pants, skirt, jacket, top, headscarf and cap) plays with different familiar Islamic forms—patterning commonly found in tiling and screens (mashribiyas). Pelangi’s designs as well as many others in the exhibition make the point with clarity that Muslim communities are not homogenous or monolithic.

Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler: The Scar

September 27 – December 1, 2018
Delfina Foundation (London)

“Inhaling patriarchy and exhaling wo(fem)inism,” is how Noor Afshan Mirza captures the importance and the gender revolution ignited in The Scar, the film she and Brad Butler produced during their Delfina Foundation residency in London in 2015. In this installation the film appears in the form of an immersive five-screen video installation.

Inspired by a true event and comprising three chapters (The State of the State, The Mouth of the Shark and The Gossip), The Scar combines conspiracy, gangster, noir, politics, crash theory, fantasy and reality into a disrupted and disruptive narrative. Chapter one features four passengers on a journey in a black Mercedes, unaware of their significance as state archetypes. The fourth passenger is Yenge, the only female traveller, silenced by the genre conventions of women in film. Yenge’s noir voiceover begins to interrupt the male characters’ forced bravado in chapter two, as they are haunted by the Resistant Dead – the residual movements created from stories of people refusing to be forgotten. Tales of female emancipation and empowerment, are addressed in the last chapter, where a group of female activists transcend time, geographical borders and linguistic barriers to gather in a neutral nether-realm of conversation and mutual support. Like most of the work of this radical collaborative duo based The Scar takes on, and deconstructs, urgent and complex narratives around our relationship to state power engaging issues of inequality and corruption, while proposing a post-patriarchal near future.

Founders of the London-based center for artist film production no.w.here, and known for their fictional construct The Museum of Non Participation, (2008-20016) Mirza and Butler create work which spans the moving image, installation, sound, text and performed actions and explores themes of resistance, inequality, power and privilege, and (non) participation while questioning the deep state, narration, neoliberalism and investigating the use of women’s bodies as sites of resistance.

Suellen Rocca: Drawings

September 14 – October 27, 2018
Matthew Marks Gallery (New York)

“Suellen Rocca is one of the original members of the Hairy Who, the influential group of six Chicago artists who exhibited together for five years in the 1960s. This show, the first to concentrate on Rocca’s works on paper, presents thirty drawings she made between 1981 and 2017. Building on the unique graphic vocabulary and innovative compositions of her 1960s work, these drawings represent a turn toward imagery she describes as ‘more internal.’ Animals, trees, and unclassifiable creature are placed in densely patterned settings that carry a genuine emotional charge.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. In the essay, Cat Kron notes Rocca’s “increased attention to the unconscious,” tracing parallels between the artist’s ‘anxious imaginings’ and the automatic drawing of the Surrealists. As Rocca puts it, ‘I just begin, and the drawing is a journey between me and the marks on the paper.’” (Matthew Marks; Press Release)

Alexandra Bachzetsis: An Ideal for Living

September 8 – December 9, 2018
Centre Culturel Suisse (Paris)

A choreographer and visual artist based in Zürich, Alexandra Bachzetsis is known for works in space that radically cut across the boundaries between dance, performance art, visual arts and theater and use the body as an artistic and critical apparatus. Her work investigates the choreographies of the body and how culture provides source material for its gestures. Through an interdisciplinary approach that often explores the role of popular culture and art play in the way in which bodies are inhabited and performed through choice and cliché, her works open emancipatory possibilities of transformation and communication.

An Ideal for Living, an exhibition specially conceived for Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, focuses on Bachzetsis’ exploration of the subject of bodies over time and its subversive potential. Using various garments and accessories in a process of constructing imagination and desire, the artist explores ways in which bodies and objects are reversible, drawing inspiration from vogue culture. The exhibition comprises an installation of three simultaneous video projections in which a pair of teenagers, a boy and a girl with an uncanny resemblance, act out real-life situations and sing songs. It also includes low platforms that invite the visitors to strike poses or sing out loud, along with various gym equipment on which to warm up and shape up one’s body. Suggesting the potentially subversive ambiguities of body language, An Ideal for Living keeps posing the rather crucial question for efficient body politics, in the words of Paul B. Preciado: “Are you a Platonist of political anatomy or a Nietzschean of bodily movement? Are you more object or subject? How do you select your gestures? Have you ever stolen a gesture? Will you ever invent one?”

From the exhibition She – A Cathedral, Moderna Museet, 1966 Photo: Hans Hammarskiöld / Moderna Museet © Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt / Bildupphovsrätt 2018

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for September below.

THE UN-HEROIC ACT: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the US

September 4 – November 2, 2018
Shiva Gallery (New York)

The representation of women’s rape by women artists in the US is the theme of this groundbreaking exhibition curated by independent curator Monika Fabijanska. The exhibition’s title, THE UN-HEROIC ACT, is an ironic evocation of Susan Brownmiller’s characterization of the rape scenes underpinning historic masterpieces by male artists as “heroic acts.” The exhibition puts the subject under a different feminist art-historical lens, while its subtitle redresses the lasting avoidance of the word rape in favor of all kinds of euphemisms, the most prominent  being “sexual abuse.”

Fabijanska claims rape as an understudied but central theme in women’s art. With this exhibition she seems to only begin sharing the results of her extensive research by illustrating and analyzing its rich iconography in light of works by a select roster of three generations of artists: Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Suzanne Lacy, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Carolee Thea, Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Kathleen Gilje, Angela Fraleigh, Natalie Frank, Jennifer Karady, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Andrea Bowers, Ada Trillo, Kara Walker, Roya Amigh, Naima Ramos-Chapman, Bang Geul Han, and Guerrilla Girls Broadband.

What makes women’s works radically different, says the curator, is the focus not on the action but on the lasting psychological devastation of the victim: her suffering, silence, shame, loneliness, as well as regaining control over the victim’s sexuality and psyche, thereby reclaiming the cultural narrative manifested in the most recent works. The exhibition presents subjects specific to American culture, rather than the artists’ countries of origin, and explores key themes underpinning their representation of rape, such as fairy tales, art history, war, military culture, slavery, gendered violence in Indian reservations, trafficking, college rape culture, domestic violence, criminal trials, the role of social media, etc. While its focus is on iconography, THE UN-HEROIC ACT showcases the variety of media and visual languages employed by artists addressing rape and their different effects. Redressing an art historical gap, it also timely advances a much-needed conversation about one of the most detrimental threats and traumas of women’s lives across time and space.

For details on the upcoming symposium scheduled on October 3, and other educational events see the exhibition’s website.

Hayv Kahraman: Silence is Gold

September 8 – October 27, 2018
Susanne Vielmetter Gallery (Los Angeles)

In 1991, in response to a sequence of uprisings by Kurdish nationalists within Iraq, Saddam Hussein began a brutal bombing and chemical weapons campaign of majority Kurdish towns and settlements within his country. Almost a year after the atrocities began, Human Rights Watch issued a report that reported the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, “as security forces crushed the most serious internal threat of Saddam’s 12-year rule, and thousands more subsequently perished during one of the largest and most precipitous flights of refugees in modern times.” Hayv Kahraman was one of those refugees.

In Kahraman’s large canvases she grapples with the profoundly counterproductive ways in which rape and sexual violence survivorship is scripted into international appeals for asylum-seekers. What they reveal are the continuing violences of white colonial narratives concerning saving brown women from brown men (as per Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and miriam cooke) and the need for verifiable, “reliable” data so central to NGO human rights operations. The paintings in Silence is Gold deliver a scathing critique of such do-gooderism that nevertheless reinscribes these fundamental inequalities.

As Dr. Miriam Ticktin writes of Kahraman’s work: “Is there a way to represent suffering respectfully, to call people into solidarity with those in need on the basis of equality? The United States government clearly does not think so, as they refuse to allow their soldiers to be photographed dead or dying: there is no dignity in this. To me, Kahraman’s haunting work confirms this; she suggests that humanitarian imagery requires commodification, sexualization, hierarchy. But thanks to her, we can see this directly, stare it in the face; she exposes humanitarianism as both compelling and corrupt, beautiful in theory and dependent on racialized, non-innocent desires. But in so doing, she creates an opening, giving us a chance to take a different type of responsibility.”

Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on

July 13 – November 4, 2018
Miami Institute of Contemporary Art

Sondra Perry (b. 1986, Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, and performance. Her innovative work foregrounds the tools of digital production to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and remobilize their potential. She is known for multifaceted narratives that explore the imagining and imaging of blackness, black femininity, and African American experience as well as the ways in which technology and identities are entangled.  “I’m interested in thinking about how blackness shifts, morphs, and embodies technology to combat oppression and surveillance throughout the diaspora. Blackness is agile,” as put by the artist.

All the above surface in this exhibition—the first solo Museum exhibition of the artist in the US—initially installed at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The title work Typhoon coming on, 2018, is an immersive large-scale video and sound installation visually referencing the J. M. W. Turner painting The Slave Ship, 1840, which depicts the drowning of 133 slaves by the captain of the British slave ship, Zong, to claim compensation for these ‘goods’ under the salvage clause of the ship’s insurance policy. The exhibition also includes great examples of Perry’s idiosyncratic approach to sculpture, such as Graft and Ash for a Three-Monitor Workstation (2016), an interactive exercise machine mounted with monitors displaying renderings of the artist’s 3-D avatar as she questions the current productivity and efficiency culture. The video installation TK (Suspicious Glorious Absence), 2018, features Perry’s iconic Chroma key blue walls along a large video projection of an extreme close-up of the artist’s skin. Found footage of the artist’s family, protests, and body cams mingle in the accompanying video, interlacing the artists’ sources and concerns.

Remembering “She—A Cathedral”

June 3, 2018 – February 3, 2019
Moderna Museet (Stockholm)

In 1966 Niki de Saint Phalle, along with her collaborators Jean Tinguely, P.O. Ultvedt, and Pontus Hultén (the director of the still-young Moderna Museet), installed a colossal, architecturally-scaled sculpture of a reclining female figure. Viewers were invited to enter the body of the woman through her vagina—collapsing reproductive birth and recreational penetration. Inside viewers could watch a Greta Garbo movie, sidle up to a bar, view a small exhibition of paintings, and enjoy a panoramic view from the top of the figure’s pregnant belly. Hon–Kathedraal (trans. “She—a Cathedral”) remains an icon of de Saint Phalle’s output, and an enduring touchstone for the institution that showed it. Now, a little over fifty years after its original installation, the Moderna Museet dedicates an exhibition to the archival materials related to the installation’s making and reception.

All that remains of Hon is her head, and this is the exhibition’s point of departure, which explores collaboration, experience, and labor. Models, artifacts, film footage, and original works are brought to bear on one another to evince a critical-visual history of an iconic work.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Sunset, Sunrise

August 10 – November 25, 2018
Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin)

Titled after the eponymous first and last work of the show, Sunset, 2015 and Sunrise, 2015—in a poetic curatorial evocation of the sky that conjoins and separates West and East, the two cultures bridged through the artist’s life and career—this is the first major retrospective of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in Ireland. Bringing together great examples of the nonagenarian artist’s practice ranging from painting, sculpture, jewelry, and embroidery to collages and works on paper, some previously unseen, it tracks a multifaceted multi-decade course punctuated by volunteer and forced exile in the US and several returns to Iran, including the loss of many of her works confiscated and destroyed during the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. It is presided over by Farmanfarmaian’s signature mirror-mosaic pieces that best encapsulate the idiosyncratic merging of traditional Persian techniques with Western geometric abstraction that characterizes her work, eloquently contextualized and framed by the diverse sources that have inspired her practice in the show and accompanying catalogue. While her early involvement with graphic design and experimental modern abstraction in New York City gave way to a period of intense research into traditional craftsmanship and folk art in Iran’s more remote regions, Western avant-garde principles were maintained when she delved into Persian mysticism, the socio-political Islamic landscape and the signature geometry of Iran’s artistic and architectural heritage.

Farmanfarmaian was born in Qazvin, Iran in 1924. One of the first Iranians to study in the US after the Second World War, she went to Cornel University and Parsons School of Design, joined the Art Students League of New York and befriended artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol whom she met during her early career as a fashion illustrator. In 1957 she returned to Iran, only to be forced leave during the 1979 revolution. While one of the most important living artists today in Iran, where she returned in 2004, acknowledged with a museum dedicated to her in Tehran last year, Farmanfarmaian has remained an understudied female pioneer and contributor to global modernism, and only in 2015 she had her first US museum exhibition at the Guggenheim.

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System

August 25, 2018 – January 6, 2019
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

Evincing its title from the sage words of author and activist Angela Davis—“walls turned sideways are bridges”—the work in this wide-ranging exhibition addresses the justice system and its support and continuance of racist and classist ideologies. The artists included in the exhibition leverage strategies of institutional critique and social practice to illuminate, critique, and offer alternatives to a judicial system that inscribes those it contains as inhuman and unworthy. As guest curator Risa Puleo puts it, “Walls Turned Sideways asks if the museum is the repository for all that society values, how is the prison the repository for all society seeks to disown?”

Artists included: Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Josh Begley, Zach Blas, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, Luis Camnitzer, Jamal Cyrus, James Drake, The Estate of Chris Burden, The Estate of Martin Wong, Tirtza Even, Andrea Fraser, Maria Gaspar, Danny Giles, Sam Gould, Michelle Handelman, Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, Suzanne Lacy with Julio Morales and Unique Holland, Alexa Hoyer, Ashley Hunt, Improvers, Richard Kamler, Titus Kaphar, Kapwani Kiwanga, Autumn Knight, Deana Lawson, Shaun Leonardo, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Ross and Damon Locks, Lucky Pierre, Mark Menjivar, Trevor Paglen, Anthony Papa, Mary Patten, Jenny Polak, Carl Pope, Jr., Laurie Jo Reynolds, Sherrill Roland, Gregory Sale, Dread Scott, Sable Elyse Smith, and Rodrigo Valenzuela.

Bouchra Khalili, The Tempest Society, 2017. Video. © Bouchra Khalili / ADAGP, Paris, 2018. Courtesy Bouchra Khalili and Galerie Polaris, Paris.

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for August below.

Pussy, King of the Pirates

July 14–September 8, 2018
Maccarone Gallery
300 S. Mission Road
Los Angeles, CA

By now the summer gallery group show is a well-worn and fairly stale exhibitionary trope. Guest curators are brought in to align artworks from the gallery’s roster of artists alongside a few choice loans. Pussy, King of the Pirates is perhaps the most vibrant example of the summer group show—one that attempts to put politics into coordination with a summer holiday.

The show, which gets its moniker from the Kathy Acker novel of the same name, is a collection of twenty “non-male” artists. That distinction is important as not all the artists share in an embrace of “womanhood” (whatever that may be), but each interrogates feminism’s expansive boundaries from their own conceptual and material practices. Highlights include the sublime, small, dark Monica Majoli painting of an ex-girlfriend (Black Mirror (Judie), 2012) and Laura Schnitger’s spangled pantyhose processional totems. Eleanor Antin’s sculptural portraits are brilliant, evocative, and alive; while Alison Saar’s sculptures hold the stoic center of the installation.

This vacation, for all its noise, is a respite for the politically engaged—a life-giving show full of possibility.

Banu Cennetoğlu

June 29–August 26, 2018
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road
London E3 5QZ

If you visited Kassel during documenta 14, you will remember the insightful warning “Being Safe is Scary” on the Fridericianum by the Istanbul-based artist Banu Cennetoğlu.  The quote comes from the posthumously published diary of a female Kurdish fighter that was the subject of the artist’s other documenta—this one shown in Athens—that better captured her interest in collecting, classifying, archiving and the politics of memory and knowledge. Idiosyncratically summing up the major concerns of her practice, along with their underlying obsession with “speaking for the others,” as recently described by the artist, her current exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery comprises Cennetoğlu’s first commission by a UK Institution in the form of a major two-fold solo exhibition.

For her commission, Cennetoğlu has produced a new moving-image installation consisting of the artist’s own archive of digital images and videos sourced from various devices, such as mobile phones, computers, cameras and external hard drives. The work presents a continuous stream of unedited content, ordered in a chronological format from 2006 to 2018, and lasting 128 hours and 22 minutes. It is presented as a different six hour-long file each time the gallery is open. Tracing over a decade of personal, social and political change from the banality of life’s inconspicuous and conspicuous moments to salient moments of recent history, it comprises an important archive of our times marked by linearity and circularity that captures both the intersection of self and history as well the changes in image production and circulation. In conjunction with her installation Cennetoğlu also facilitated the distribution of The List in The Guardian newspaper on June 20, 2018, World Refugee Day. Compiled each year by UNITED for Intercultural Action, The List traces information relating to the deaths of 34,361 refugees and migrants who have lost their lives within, or on the borders of Europe since 1993. Since 2007, in collaboration with art workers and institutions, Cennetoğlu has facilitated updated versions of The List using public spaces such as billboards, transport networks, and newspapers. As a whole the exhibition thus effectively shows the impossibility of a complete separation of one’s own life from that of the other’s, and this drives Cennetoglu’s artistic explorations and its politics.

Huma Bhabha: We Come in Peace

April 17–October 28, 2018
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY

On the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art two monumental figures face off. One, a janus-faced twelve-foot-tall alien, and the other, one of the artist’s signature Benaam—a prostrate, crumpled figure which she often uses to stand in for the nameless dead in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Although the works look like they’re made from plastic, Styrofoam, and earth, they are cast in bronze to withstand the elements.

Other artists have approached the Met’s rooftop with bombastic aplomb, topping its paving stones with flashy trinkets (Jeff Koons) or complex structures (Doug and Mike Starn). Bhabha is spare, restrained, and as a result leaves the space—which otherwise serves as a picturesque lookout onto Central Park—charged with the lingering inhumanity of the United States’s protracted international incursions.

Walking around and between the figures one feels caught in a crossfire—between recognition and strangeness, life and death, possibility, and certitude.

Laure Prouvost: Ring, Sing and Drink for Trespassing

June 22–September 9, 2018
Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du Président Wilson
Paris

The French, and now Antwerp-based, winner of the 2013 Turner Prize, Laure Prouvost has continued to do what she was originally distinguished for: the awesome, often seductive, complexity with which she enjoins objects, multimedia images, and sound with language, in surreal combinations of life- and art-inspired story telling, often directly addressing the viewer. Prouvost’s work adopts the form of independent stories where action mixes with reality in immersive installations that invite escapism through an evocative combination of films, sculptures, paintings, tapestries, and performances. Imaginative, sensuous and full of humor, her work examines the relationships between language, image and perception, trapping the visitors in situations of pleasure, doubt and incomprehension evincing a delectably intense—both intellectual and multisensorial—wonder underpinned from a radically feminine excess.

For this typically exuberant return home, her first solo show in a Parisian institution, Prouvost responds to global warming and transforms Palais de Tokyo into a space where nature is purported to have taken over from humanity. Inviting both intimate and expansive exploration and a polyvalent meeting of paradise and wasteland, the exhibition begins through a curved corridor covered in woven tapestries that lures the viewer into an unknown territory. This eventually evolves into a metallic network of manufactured objects, interwoven with branches, car mirrors, her signature raspberries, collages, newspaper clips as well as vases in the shapes of bottoms. Flowers indicate that nature has annexed the building’s architecture and the outside world has broken in. At the center of the exhibition, a large fountain of breasts is waiting to feed the viewer, a respite where one can reflect after discovering the atypical panoramas conceived by the artist. There, a new video reflexively incorporates some of the physical elements present in the exhibition, complementing the multifaceted confounding that the rest of her works achieve, and inviting the viewer to question her/his preconceptions of the world at large.

Bouchra Khalili: Blackboard

June 5–September 23, 2018
Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris

Bringing a large selection of her work from the past ten years, this extensive survey introduces the radically experimental multimedia and documentary practice of French-Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili (born in Casablanca, 1975 and now living in Berlin). Khalili is known for films, video installations, photographs and silkscreens that enable members of minorities to perform strategies of resistance against power, while systematically seeking for a new collective voice by articulating subjectivity and collective history.

The exhibition premiers Twenty-Two Hours, a new film that investigates Jean Genet’s commitment to the Black Panther Party, reflecting on the essential connection between poetry and collective emancipation, as well as The Tempest Society a work produced for documenta 14 in Athens, illuminating the artist’s long term reflection on radical equality and art as a civic platform. It also brings together older works that capture a variety of central topics underpinning her critical exploration of past and present, marked by all kinds of borders and their crossing, a critique of history and the present condition of civic society and the rescuing of all kinds of silenced voices. Among them stands out her look at globalized trade from the perspective of migrant laborers (The Seaman, 2012); displacement and forced journeys whether in the Mediterranean (The Mapping Journey Project, 2008-2011 and the “Constellation” series, 2011) or from the Caribbean to the US (as in the photographic series “Wet Feet,” 2012), as well as different modes of belonging (the
“Speeches”, 2012-3), and in the multimedia installation Foreign Office, 2015, unexpected contexts of liberation movements, such as Algiers.

Pia Camil: Telón de Boca

August 11, 2018–
Museo Universitario del Chopo
Dr. Enrique González Martínez no. 10
Mexico City, Mexico

For years now Mexican artist Pia Camil has employed used t-shirts as a primary material in her practice—elegantly tying together nostalgia, global capital, and architectural intervention. For her installation at the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art (Bara Bara Bara, 2017) the shirts were sewn together into large quilts and floated from the museum’s cavernous ceiling Viewers could poke their heads through these colorful “clouds,” effectively separating their heads from their bodies, and becoming the inhabitants of a surreal topography.

In this installation Camil has sewn together hundreds of black concert t-shirts, obtained through a sequence of events at the museum and the nearby tianguis. Markets, formal and informal, thus structure the creation and display of the piece—as value is exchanged both through the activity of trade and the transformation of the humble t-shirt into a large-scale work of art. That the t-shirts “speak” their own message (the “mouth” of the exhibition’s title) is a necessary complication to the artist’s gesture. In this way the work exists somewhere, as per the exhibition’s press release, between “the fetish, the ritual, and the everyday.”

Otobong Nkanga, In Pursuit of Bling, 2014, on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through September 2nd. Photo: Eva Broekema

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for July below.

Teresa Burga: Aleatory Structures

May 26—August 18, 2018
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270
CH-8005 Zurich

Teresa Burga: Aleatory Structures, is the first retrospective in Switzerland of this arguably feminist Peruvian conceptualist –a central figure of the 1960s Peruvian avant-garde– whose recent rediscovery has gained her both international recognition and a second wind after a three-decade hiatus from art making.  The exhibition brings together a large number of works that range from early paintings, modular sculptures and  Pop environments to the drawings and multimedia, often cybernetic, installations which mark the complexity of her conceptualist practice, as well as its silent unfolding while working as a Customs employee when the dictatorship limited the exhibition possibilities of her vanguard proposals. In effect the show captures not only the diversity of her practice but of the ways in which it records and challenges the social realities and power structures of her changing times in Peru both as an artist and a woman.

Burga’s gendered concerns and depersonalized aesthetics coalesced through Pop experimentation with painting collages, objects and environments in a  milieu of anti-modernist rebellion that breached the gap of Limanese art and life with ephemeral art environments and happenings. Indeed she positioned herself as a female Pop artist in 1967, devoting her solo exhibition at Cultura y Libertad Gallery to a critical representation of middle-class womanhood—both a testament as well as a feminist critique of  the developmentalist euphoria of 1960s Peru. The situation of women in patriarchal society surfaces at another brief moment of hope in Peru, the return to democracy after General Alvarado’s military regime, through her collaboration with psychotherapist Marie-France Cathelat for the radical research-based work for the Perfil de la Mujer Peruana (Profile of the Peruvian Woman), 1980-1 that  surveyed anonymously  the living conditions of 129 middle-class women living Lima in their twenties about a wide assortment of issues structured along twelve “profiles” (physiological, psychological, social, educational, cultural, religious, professional, economic, etc). Between these two landmarks, Burga’s representation of women underwent transformations textured by the conceptualist turn of her work before and after her graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1968-1970), as manifested by her now celebrated multimedia self-representation Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe. 9.6.72. (Self-Portrait, Structure, Report, 9.6.72), 1972 through which  Burga combined her critique of subjectivity and systems of representation, making the body matter for a critical exposure and ground for escaping its biopolitical control.

Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma

April 6—August 11, 2018
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
3716 Washington Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63108

Originating from the Menil Foundation and bringing more than 30 major works from European and US collection, this is the first large-scale solo exhibition in the US in 20 years of the celebrated London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum.

Merging the languages of Minimalism and Surrealism, through a feminist lens, while having experimented with a variety of media that range from performance to film, Hatoum is  istinguished for a potent sculptural and installation vocabulary that–drawing often from everyday domestic objects and engendering conflicting emotions of fear/revulsion and attraction/fascination–critically investigates ideas of home and displacement, while engaging with conditions of timely global instability and political upheaval, as well as timeless human questions.

Nairy Baghramian: Breathing Spell

May 17—October 14, 2018
Reina Sofia, Palacio de Cristal
Paseo República de Cuba,
Madrid, Spain

Large forms remeniscent of prosthetics and cartilagenous body parts lie scattered inside Madrid’s Crystal Palace, a 19^th century iron and glass paean to industrialized progress. Made by Nary Baghramian, these sculptures complement the rigid organicism and transparency of their architectural setting. Trussed to columns and hugging the walls, Baghramian’s installation emphasizes contingency—the body supported, and molded by its surrounds. Born in Isfahan, Iran, the artist’s work has, in the past, focused on “the political implications of interior design,” pointing out that both women and gay men were made to culturally demur from the realm of architecture proper in favor of design and the domestic sphere. Semi-transparent tubular structures abound here—some quietly take up residence by the curving walls like banquettes of seating, and others crawl over the top of the Palacio de Cristal’s roof, like skeletal grubs.

Kim Zumpfe: outside the length of a room | or | dividing into the blue sun

May 5—September 9, 2018
Grand Central Art Center
125 N. Broadway
Santa Ana, CA

In the heart of Santa Ana’s arts district, Kim Zumpfe has created a bifurcated space evoking both shelter and disaster site. Upstairs the vision is bleak—a couch, stripped of all its plush, offers the only seating; photographs of discarded fruits are pinned to stacks of plywood, and a video monitor plays a loop of a seemingly bucolic lake view. Below, bedrolls made of fabric featuring rejected objects designed for prisons are spread about—small monitors play a blue, slow-motion video of what appears to be the sun’s surface. A tea kettle and a stash of bottled water serves as a welcome convivial gesture in this tunnel-like space. Recently Zumpfe enacted a performance, reminiscent of the anarchitectural gestures of Gordon Matta-Clark, in which she “drew” a linoleum bisecting the space vertically. Using a yellow crowbar to make her marks in plywood, drywall, plaster, and linoleum—this seemingly simple task proved herculean. The remaining marks from this performance remind us that space can be transformed, but only with great effort.

Penny Siopis: This is a True Story, Six Films (1997-2017)

February 14—July 15, 2018
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa
Silo District, S. Arm Road
Cape Town, South Africa

Best known for her “cake” and history paintings of the 1980s and 1990s, over the past twenty years Penny Siopis has also made films. Strung together from many bits of found footage, My Lovely Day, 1997, Obscure White Messenger, 2010 and The Master is Drowning, 2012, emphasize how cultural and political realities (such as apartheid in South Africa), shape personal narratives. Siopis subtitles her videos with the voices of a variety of characters; whether these people are real or imagined, it might not matter much, for each has a complicated relationship with their context. This exhibition, at the newly built Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, provides the first opportunity to view the artist’s video output at once.

Otobong Nkanga: To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again

March 31—September 2, 2018
Museum of Contemporary Art
220 E. Chicago Ave.
Chicago, IL

Interrogating how a raw material or natural resource is made into a product, for example soap or makeup, is at the heart of Otobong Nkanga’s artistic efforts. In her work, which is by turns sculptural, performative, olfactory, and wall-based, Nkanga opens out the histories of manufacture and production (and thus the extended legacies of colonialism and imperialism) so that we might determine the human and environmental costs of such processes. The body is the primary metaphor through which invasive incursion and extraction are imagined in this collection of wide-ranging works. In large-scale tapestries like Infinite Yield, 2015, glittery minerals cover the breast, face, and genitals of an androgynous, brown figure, who stands in the midst of a draining funnel. In the center of this exhibition, black soap is stacked in circular constructions—it is manufactured by the Carved to Flow Foundation (which Nkanga founded) in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. Performers on hand describe the process of the soap’s creation, thereby amplifying the themes running throughout the show. Available for purchase in the exhibition, the circuits of capitalism serve to support the artist’s social practice.

Sophia Narrett, Right Before (detail), 2017-18, on view at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY, through June 17, 2018.

CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts selects the best in feminist art and scholarship to share with CAA members on a monthly basis. See the picks for June below.

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg

June 6–September 9, 2018
Moderna Museet
Exercisplan 4, 111 49
Stockholm, Sweden

This retrospective exhibition brings together the large-scale film, sculpture, and sound installations created by Nathalie Djurberg and her frequent collaborator, the composer and musician Hans Berg. Djurberg’s work—by turns comical and horrifying—demands close attention: power is exchanged unevenly, humans (and animals) preen, beat, and eat one another. In this situation a feminist politics may be difficult to discern, but it is there. At the heart of Djurberg’s endeavors is the uncompromising questioning of systemic power structures—whether that be religion, the state, or gender hegemony. In The Parade (2011), Djurberg populates five synced videos with birds who flock, fight, and mate; meanwhile, on the ground, dozens of free-standing bird sculptures are lined up in a procession that recalls both biblical fable and ritualistic pageantry.

New work will accompany this presentation, and it marks the first major exhibition for the artists, who were both born in Sweden.

A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Egypt

Ongoing
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Access to the afterlife in the Egyptian ancient world was limited to those believed to have reproductive capacities—and astonishingly this trait was assigned solely to men. It was believed that men gestated a fetus and then, through sex, transferred it to a woman’s womb. When women died, they were depicted with male traits (red skin), and had protective spells (meant for men) incanted above their corpse and written on their coffins. This exhibition explores these gender transformative practices and more, through the choice of twenty-seven objects from the museum’s collections. As Kathlyn M. Cooney related in a recent lecture associated with the exhibition, it is not enough to consider how one of the most “totalitarian” societies treated gender and sexual difference, but to also reflect on how Egyptology is methodologically wrestling with a similar set of concerns: “Feminism in Egyptology is a strange thing, because women are encroaching to take over the field. Females are on the forefront […] What I find is often missing […] is we look for the women who had power and highlight them, in a way to make ourselves feel better about women not having power, without asking the question, more systematically, why are women excluded from power so regularly and what are the mechanisms in place?”

Décor: Barbara Bloom, Andrea Fraser, Louise Lawler

April 28—July 15, 2018
MoCA Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue
West Hollywood, CA 90069

The centerpiece of this exhibition is the reinstallation of Barbara Bloom’s The Reign of Narcissism (1988-89), a faux period room decorated all over with the artist’s likeness. But for Bloom this was not an entrée to self-aggrandizement, but a way to work through what Mieke Bal has termed “biographism” alongside the meaning, content, and politics of design. Three tombstones, set comically in a glass vitrine, memorialize the artist before she’s dead, and chairs are upholstered with designs derived from the Bloom’s dental X-rays.

Supporting the themes of the installation (which, is also about the politics of museological display), are works by Andrea Fraser and Louise Lawler. Fraser’s Little Frank and His Carp, finds the artist sensually humping the walls of the Guggenheim Bilbao’s atrium, a response to a sycophantic audio guide. Photos by Lawler highlight the conflation of the aesthetics, display, and markets of art.

Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016

April 9– July 22, 2018
The Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53rd St
New York, NY 10019

Adrian Piper’s (b. 1948) first museum retrospective in the US in a decade, and the first living artist’s show to occupy MoMA’s entire sixth floor, Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016 is a timely and moving feat for a female artist of color, even though of Piper’s caliber.

Bringing together over 290 works, including drawings, paintings, photographs, mutlimedia intallations, videos and performances, it offers a powerful and exhaustive exploration of Piper’s multifaceted contribution to contemporary art, illuminating the nuances of her Conceptualism and the intricacies of her combined critique of sexism, racism and xenophobia.

The show begins twice.The installation Vote/Emote (1990), comprising a row of voting booths where museumgoers are invited to respond to various prompts—like listing “the fears of how we might treat you”—precedes its chronological unfolding, highlighting both the centrality of the audience and emotions in the artist’s conceptual and often performative critical practice. A neo-realist self portrait, featuring a black girl with a white doll from 1966, stands out among the earliest works of the first room of the exhibition that focuses on her early experimentations with painting, poignantly marking the origins of the identity politics underpinning her work. Together they make a timely statement about the little changed state of race in America in the age of Trump, and initiate a several-hours worth familiarization with the development of Piper’s multimedia practice in the past forty years that leaves the viewer mesmerized by its profound complexity, sensitivity and acumen, as well as confronted with his/er complicity with the injustices and prejudices of the world we live in.

Eija-Liija Ahtila

May 18 – June 19, 2018
M Museum Leuven
Leopold Vanderkelenstraat 28, 3000
Leuven, Belgium

Bringing together 7 major works by Eija-Liisa Ahtila (b. 1959) in multiscreen configurations especially reconceived for the M Museum in Leuven, along with several series of drawings, this exhibition surveys the filmic work of the acclaimed Finnish master of cinematic installation.

Known for her experimentation with narrative story telling,  begun with unsettling human dramas at the center of human relations, in her recent works Ahtila questions the processes of perception and attribution of meaning under the light of larger cultural and existential thematics like colonialism, faith and ecological or humanitarian crisis. Encouraging us to explore how the film might enable us to narrate the very life of the planet as well as our own, a timely eco-cinematic question underpins several of her more recent works: how and with what kind of technology, drama and expressive devices can we build the image of our world in this present moment of ecological crisis?

Along with signature works produced since 2001, the exhibition includes her latest sculptural filmic masterpiece, Potentiality for Love, 2018. With a floating maternal body as its epicenter, the work questions, from a feminist posthumanist perspective, the potential for empathy and love towards other living beings, turning attention to those human emotions that could serve as a foundation for dismantling the hierarchical structures between living things, thereby engendering a turn towards non-humans and the recognition of others.

Sophia Narrett: Certain Magic

May 12- June 17, 2018
Project Room at BRIC House
647 Fulton Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Recipient of the 2017-8 ArtFP—an open call for Brooklyn-based visual artists to exhibit at BRIC House—and the 2018 Krasner Pollock Foundation Grant, Sophia Narrett is a recent graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, distinguished already for her mesmerizing, quite painterly and often quite tiny, embroideries and the complexities of her story telling.

Not to miss, her solo exhibition in New York at BRIC House brings together examples that thematize the power of intimacy and desire in the digital age, by casting figures culled from the Internet into lusciously embroidered scenes, in response to a world of immediate, often treacherous media. Through undulating embroidered surfaces, and edges that dissolve into loose threads or sculptural flora, Certain Magic tells a disconcerting narrative of modern longing that layers the surreal with the mundane in a manner characteristic of the artist’s story telling intricacies. While her practice exceeds the traditional parameters of embroidery, the traditional and gendered associations of the medium are crucial to its content, and feminist fragility. As put recently by the artist “Embroidery and its implicit history help specify the tone of my stories, one characterized by obsession, desire and both the freedoms and restraints of femininity.”