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Who We Are
Feminist Art Coalition (FAC) is a platform for art projects informed by feminisms*. FAC fosters collaborations between arts institutions that aim to make public their commitment to social justice and structural change. It seeks to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action.
Our Mission
Engage. Reflect. Act.
Working collectively, various art museums and nonprofit institutions from across the United States will present a series of concurrent events—including commissions, exhibitions, performances, talks, and symposia—over the course of one year, beginning in the fall of 2020, during the run-up to the next presidential election. This strategic endeavor takes feminist thought and practice as its point of departure and considers art as a catalyst for discourse and civic engagement.
Motivated by the ethical imperative to effect change and promote equality within our institutions and beyond, these collective projects will advocate for inclusive and equitable access to social, cultural, and economic resources for people of all genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, ages, and abilities. This cooperative effort stages a range of projects that together generate a cultural space for engagement, reflection, and action, while recognizing the constellation of differences and multiplicity among feminisms.
The Feminist Art Coalition (FAC) was conceived by Apsara DiQuinzio in early 2017 in response to the 2016 presidential election and was inspired by the Women’s March that took place worldwide on January 21, 2017, a day after the U.S. presidential inauguration. DiQuinzio reached out to colleagues in the field who then began informally meeting to conceptualize a nationwide collective initiative that would highlight feminist practices in the arts.
This later crystallized into a working group that developed the mission of FAC in spring 2018 when the curators convened in Berkeley, facilitated by a grant from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Vic Brooks, Johanna Burton, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Lauren Cornell, Adrienne Edwards, Anne Ellegood, Rita Gonzalez, Henriette Huldisch, Eungie Joo, Tina Kukielski, Kim Nguyen, Solveig Øvstebø, Lucía Sanromán, and Claudia Schmuckli were members of the working group.
The administration of FAC is largely organized by a steering committee that consists of Vic Brooks, Aldeide Delgado, Apsara DiQuinzio, Anne Ellegood, Rita Gonzalez, and Henriette Huldisch. At various points curatorial support for the project has included Val Moon, Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, Claire Frost, and Shaelyn Hanes.
Alongside the steering committee, all FAC participants are encouraged to self-organize working groups around issues they consider urgent, and each project is organized by the originating institution. This grassroots initiative strives to maintain a nonhierarchical working model that questions and seeks to overcome colonial and patriarchal narratives within institutional spaces.
Participating Institutions
Select an organization's name to browse its contributions
516 ARTS
516 ARTS, a non-collecting contemporary art museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, presents Feminisms, in partnership with Southwest Contemporary and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. The exhibition features women artists of various cultures who are broadly from the West, and whose creative possibilities use the theme of feminism in its most expansive meaning. Works are far-reaching from a diasporic experience, the politics of body, resilience, self-determination, and land. These ten artists approach their process and practice in a variety of mediums including video, performance, installation, and two- and three-dimensional works, all of which are connected to current cultural, political, historical, and semiotic climates. The exhibition at 516 ARTS is led by guest curator Andrea R. Hanley (Navajo), chief curator at the Wheelwright Museum, who focuses on both nontraditional and contemporary Native American artwork by artists from the Americas. It will be accompanied by public programs in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, including forums, performances, and education activities.
Women Curate Women
Friday, October 9, 2020, 6 pm
Online • Register in advance: viola@516arts.org
Panel discussion
The public is invited to an online discussion with four New Mexico women curators who have each organized woman-centered art exhibitions in New Mexico in 2020: Andrea R. Hanley (Feminisms, 516 ARTS, Albuquerque); Mary Statzer (Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration, UNM Art Museum, Albuquerque); Marisa Sage (Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020, NMSU Art Museum, Las Cruces); and Lucy Lippard (Feminist Art in the Age of Trump, Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe).
Moderated by Lauren Tresp, publisher and editor at Southwest Contemporary, Santa Fe, this discussion around curating femme and femme-identifying artwork will span multiple feminist themes relating to these exhibitions. Subjects include the value of gender-based art exhibitions; the cultural and economic circumstances negotiated by female artists and curators; how feminist exhibitions serve as platforms that ground conversations about equality, misogyny, and artworld bias; and how art can serve as a departure point for the cause of social justice.
Feminist Border Arts Film Festival: Retrospective in Feminisms
October 24–25, 2020
Curator: M. Catherine Jonet
Film series
Presented in conjunction with the Feminisms exhibition at 516 ARTS (on view through January 2, 2021), the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival (FBAFF) is a series of short films by student, independent, and professional filmmakers, domestic and international. Shakti Bhagchandani, director of LostFound, described FBAFF programming as “nuanced, complex, uplifting jewels that explore issues such as the coming-of-age of transgender identities, the pain and secrecy of sexual violence, the infinite difficulties faced by undocumented immigrants, and the injustice endured by women in societies from all over the world.” Developed on the NMSU campus in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the Feminist Border Arts Film Festival celebrates the power of cinema as a creative tool to reflect upon urgent social issues and thought-provoking representations of identity and difference. The festival emphasizes artistic vision in telling these stories through short film (15 min. and under), including live-action narrative, documentary, essay film, video art, and animation. The festival seeks shorts that explore topics connected to gender identity, sexuality, race, indigeneity, class, dis/ability, transnationality and diaspora, migration, refugees and displaced persons, activisms, the environment, food/water insecurity, and other social justice perspectives and experiences.
516 WORDS: Layli Long Shoulder, Luci Tapahonso, Edie Tsong
Friday, November 6, 2020, 6 pm
Online • Register in advance: viola@516arts.org
Reading
The public is invited to a literary reading in conjunction with the Feminisms exhibition, featuring New Mexico women writers across various cultures: Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), Professor Emerita of English Literature at UNM, inaugural Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation, the recipient of a 2018 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the author of three children’s books and six books of poetry; Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), recipient of a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, and a Whiting Writer’s Award; and Edie Tsong (Taiwanese American), whose interdisciplinary projects explore the functionality and form of language and its relationship to identity, and who is founding director of Snow Poems project, collaborative temporary installations of original poetry on windows.
ARTIST TALKS: Female Mystics, Mythology & Protofeminism
Wednesday, December 2, 2020, 6 pm
Online • Register in advance: viola@516arts.org
Artist talk
The public is invited to a one-hour program of three artists’ talks and Q&A featuring the followings artists in the Feminisms exhibition: Angela Ellsworth, an interdisciplinary artist who works in sculpture, drawing, installation, and performance draw lines of communication between her Mormon ancestry and the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century female mystics; Thais Mather, an installation artist whose work spans sculpture, printmaking, painting, new media, and installation, exploring themes of feminism, authorship, mythology, the objectification of culture, and women’s labor; and Marie Watt (Seneca Nation), whose artwork draws from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings, exploring the intersection of history, community, and storytelling.
Active Cultures
Witch’s Kitchen is a roving cabaret that will unfurl over the next year as a series of conversations, screenings, performances, and culinary experiences. Organized by artist Shana Lutker in conjunction with the Feminist Art Coalition, Witch’s Kitchen expands on the generative intersection of performance, exile, and communal nourishment through the legacy of performer Valeska Gert (1892–1978) and will trace the thread of activist kitchens and exile performance in Los Angeles.
Witch’s Kitchen borrows its name from Hexenküche, a post–World War II restaurant and cabaret run by Gert in Berlin. Gert was a kaleidoscopic creative force from the 1920s to the 1970s, and she is the spirit guide for Witch’s Kitchen. Her underground restaurants and bars in Berlin, New York, Provincetown, Zurich, and the island of Sylt before, during, and after the war provided safe haven to exiles and artists of all sorts.
She was an innovative dancer and acclaimed performer in Weimar Berlin in the early 1920s. “By dancing like a holy terror,” she wanted “to cross every border and violate every boundary in art.” Her dance was described by one critic as the “pathos of protest.” As a Jew, she was declared a degenerate artist and fled Berlin in the early 1930s. Gert was also an actor who, over nearly sixty years, worked with directors ranging from Kurt Weill to Bertolt Brecht to Federico Fellini. In addition to her legacy in dance and film, she served as an inspiration for the punk movement. She blurred the line between work and performance throughout her life.
Originally conceived as a series of public cabarets staged throughout Los Angeles, Witch’s Kitchen will now unfold over a year in two parts. Launching in October 2020, Part One comprises a series of online conversations and performances hosted by Lutker. The Witch’s Kitchen Archive will be published online as a series of visual poems appearing alongside and mirroring Lutker’s research process and practice. These photos and texts will pay homage to the life and work of Gert and explore the history of underground and exile performance in Los Angeles. The accumulated archive and public programming will set the table and stage for Part Two. In 2022, Lutker’s Witch’s Kitchen will manifest as a “cabaret,” presenting new performance and collaborative culinary experiments that extend the promise of cultivating community through feminist resistance.
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Genesis Belanger: Through the Eye of a Needle
September 21, 2020–May 9, 2021
Curator: Amy Smith-Stewart
Exhibition
Through the Eye of a Needle is the first major solo museum exhibition of New York–based artist Genesis Belanger (b. 1978), whose practice spans sculptures and tableaux, primarily composed of porcelain, stoneware, and upholstery. Belanger’s conceptual methodology blends Surrealism and Pop art with a self-possessed feminism informed by a professional career in the fashion and advertising industries. Staging her sculptural objects on upholstered furnishings of her own invention, Belanger constructs uncanny scenes that perform narratives about our anxiety-afflicted present.
Anthropomorphizing common household objects, Belanger imparts beauty products, design accessories, and food items with feminized attributes: lipsticks with wagging tongues, lamps with ladies’ pearls, and tins with doe-eyed sardines. She fancies gendered motifs—well-manicured fingernails, lipstick-smeared cigarettes, and candy-colored pills—to personify women’s troubles, desires, and addictions. Her dreamlike jumbles invoke Surrealists such as René Magritte and Kay Sage as well as Pop artists like Marisol and Claes Oldenburg, but her inimitable creations are undoubtedly about our image-obsessed moment.
This exhibition will debut a new body of work specially conceived for The Aldrich. The artist’s first museum publication, with an essay by Amy Smith-Stewart, the exhibition’s curator, will accompany the show.
Clarity Haynes: Collective Transmission
April 28–September 6, 2021
Curator: Amy Smith-Stewart
Exhibition
Collective Transmission debuts two new paintings, Birth Altar 2020–2021 (2021) and Altar for Femme Joy (2020), from Clarity Haynes’s Altar series (2000–ongoing). Haynes describes her Altars as feminist spaces liberated from patriarchy. She says: “In a time of toxic masculinity and violence, to put forth joyful feminist principles feels radical. To create one’s own archive, altar, cosmology, autonomous space is an act of taking care.” In Birth Altar 2020–2021, the artist claims crowning and birth imagery as symbols of courage and resistance. Citing the heart-shaped canvases of Miriam Schapiro, the central imagery of the feminist art movement, Haynes honors the legacy of feminist artists before her. Within the composition, artworks by groundbreaking artists—Judy Chicago, Ana Mendieta, and Louise Bourgeois—are “pinned” alongside trompe l’oeil images of anonymous people giving birth. Altar for Femme Joy, Haynes’s pink triangle-shaped canvas—a reclaimed emblem of LGBTQIA power—operates as a tabernacle to pink’s persistent politicization and as a self-portrait, with personal keepsakes emphatically expressing femme power as queer, intimate, independent, and free.
Collective Transmission inaugurates Aldrich Projects, a single-artist series that spotlights a singular work or a focused body of work by an artist every four months on the museum’s campus. Accompanying this project is a 22-by-14-inch broadsheet designed by The Aldrich’s design director Gretchen Kraus. It is available for free as a limited edition on a first-come, first-served basis at the museum.
Lucia Hierro: Marginal Costs
June 7, 2021–January 2, 2022
Curator: Amy Smith-Stewart
Exhibition
Marginal Costs is the first solo museum exhibition of New York–based artist Lucia Hierro (b. 1987). Hierro’s practice, which includes sculpture, digital media, and installation, confronts twenty-first-century capitalism through an intersectional lens. Hierro appropriates imagery ranging from commerce to art history, and her choices manifest her own multidimensional experience as a Dominican American New Yorker. With a studio methodology steeped in Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, and European still life painting, as well as her own biographical circumstance, Hierro creates work that surveys power, individuality, and opportunity specific to the communities she orbits. Lifting visual matter off the street and media outlets, she expresses subjective storylines that speak to the elasticity of identity—a symptom of our hyperkinetic present. Conceived in close collaboration with the artist, Marginal Costs spans work from three distinctive series: recent and new sculptures from the Mercado (Market) series (2014–); the debut of the Gates (2021–); and her most ambitious wall mural to date. Both Gates and the mural were specially commissioned by The Aldrich.
The artist’s first museum publication, with an essay by exhibition curator Amy Smith-Stewart, will accompany the show.
Adrienne Elise Tarver: The Sun, the Moon, and the Truth
September 8, 2021–January 2, 2022
Curator: Caitlin Monachino
Exhibition
The Sun, the Moon, and the Truth is the first solo museum presentation of Brooklyn-based artist Adrienne Elise Tarver (b. 1985) and the second series in the newly established Aldrich Projects. Tarver debuts Manifesting Paradise (2020–ongoing), a suite of twenty-two mixed-media works on paper based on the Major Arcana (major mysteries), the foundational card set of the centuries-old tarot deck, alongside Weary As I Can Be (2021). The vibrant colors and tropical settings that saturate these compositions—a fixture of her overall practice—aim to reclaim the perceptions of the exoticized, tropical seductress imparted on Black and brown women by Western civilization. Here, the faraway temptress meets another long-standing trope: the Black Voodoo priestess, treasury of esoteric wisdom.
Though intimate in scale, the “cards” are packed with personal references, Afrofuturist imagery, and lush vegetation, speaking to the mythologized assumptions of the African diaspora while also citing the folklore and pop culture associations of enigmatic Black women synonymous with the prophetic craft, from Marie Laveau, the infamous “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans, to Miss Cleo of the Psychic Readers Network. An extension of Manifesting Paradise is the large painting Weary As I Can Be. Composed, poised, and self-assured sits Vera Otis, a fictional character who has continuously appeared in Tarver’s work over the years, acting as a surrogate for the artist and all Black women grappling with societal expectations and presumptions. Illuminated and coolly gazing outward, Vera is envisioned by Tarver as watching a plantation burning across the way—the same structure engulfed in flames in Tower, the card that proposes the necessity of destruction before liberation.
Alice Austen House
Powerful and Dangerous: The Words and Images of Audre Lorde
March 22, 2020–February 15, 2021
Curator: Victoria Munro
Exhibition
Powerful and Dangerous: The Words and Images of Audre Lorde engages art and social justice on multiple levels. It highlights the words and activism of Black lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde (whose home, not two miles away from the Alice Austen House on Staten Island, was recently declared a historic landmark), while drawing connections to today’s activist movements targeting the dismantling of racism, misogyny, and homophobia.
Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture
March–June 2021
Curator: Victoria Munro, with Dr. Eliza Steinbock
Exhibition
Timed to coincide with the International Day of Transgender Visibility on March 31, Radical Tenderness: Trans for Trans Portraiture will be curated in partnership with Dr. Eliza Steinbock of Leiden University, the Netherlands. Dr. Steinbock’s work in cultural analysis investigates visual culture mediums like film, digital media, and photography, with a special focus on dimensions of race, gender and sexuality. Though trans portraiture nominally includes a wide swath of gender nonconformity and variance, far more often cisgender artists prefer to depict trans people presenting themselves in costume, like Caitlyn Jenner in a corset, rather than as “authentic” selves, which is to say, like cisgender people would be. For this reason Steinbock will select trans artists working in portraiture whose works redress the ways their lives have been undermined as impossible, nonexistent, or a mere performance. The exhibition will include artists from the United States and Europe.
Kelli Connell: Double Life, 2o Years
June–August 31, 2021
Curator: Victoria Munro
Exhibition
Lesbian photographer Kelli Connell’s twenty-year project with one model represents an autobiographical questioning of sexuality and gender roles that shape the identity of the self in intimate relationships. The project’s multiyear span opens up new dialogues on women and aging and explores polarities of identity such as the masculine and feminine psyche, the irrational and rational self, the exterior and interior self, and the motivated and resigned. By combining multiple photographic negatives of the same model in each image, the dualities of the self are defined by body language and clothing. The importance of these images lies in the representation of interior dilemmas portrayed as an external object: a photograph. Through these images, the audience is presented with “constructed realities.”
Anchorage Museum
Extra Tough: Women of the North
November 6, 2020–September 6, 2021
Curator: Francesca DuBrock
Exhibition
Alaska and the circumpolar region have been shaped for centuries by Indigenous women’s creativity, labor, and love. With colonization and the arrival of Western cultures, the North came to be seen as a masculine testing ground, a place to be explored, exploited, and developed. Artists, mothers, scientists, and makers included in this exhibition confront and dismantle this myth, testifying to the vital roles that both Indigenous and newcomer women have held, and continue to hold, in Northern communities. From ceremony to social critique, the artworks, historical objects, and archival images on display capture and communicate their maker’s experiences of landscape and place, gender roles and social norms, work, and child-rearing. In a North being shaped at unprecedented rates by the forces of climate change and globalization, women’s voices and visions provide rich ground for imagining a future guided by principles of gender equity, sustainability, and strength.
Arcadia Exhibitions, Glenside, Pennsylvania
During the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of American women artists gravitated toward making prints, partly because the medium provided forms of access and agency not as readily available within painting and sculpture. Working in a range of styles, they studied at various print studios—including independent outfits and university classrooms—and exhibited their work in the era’s countless print annuals. At a time when women struggled against structural sexism to earn solo exhibitions at top-tier galleries, these group print shows offered women artists a rare opportunity to garner critical notice. Women’s participation in the midcentury printmaking community also had significant collective impact. Through these networks, women met others with professional ambitions, compared notes about their struggles, and formed a sense of solidarity as marginalized members of the art community. In this way, women’s involvement with printmaking at midcentury fostered a range of proto-feminist attitudes and practices, such as collaboration, network building, and collegial support. Proto-Feminism in the Print Studio centers primarily around the women artists who were members of Atelier 17, the avant-garde printmaking studio located in New York City between 1940 and 1955. Featuring artists—well known and un(der)known—such as Minna Citron, Worden Day, Jean Francksen, Alice Trumbull Mason, Louise Nevelson, and Miriam Schapiro, the exhibition draws on visual and archival material to suggest how these women made technical advances within the graphic arts while simultaneously contributing to the growth of feminist networks and practices of collective action and collaboration.
Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe
Look to Nature: Toshiko Takaezu
August 20, 2020–February 28, 2021
Curator: Mary-Beth Buesgen
Exhibition
Drawn from ASU Art Museum’s permanent collection, Look to Nature presents the work of internationally known artist Toshiko Takaezu. Growing up in Hawaii infused Takaezu with a deep sense of nature in her that never left. Takaezu worked actively in clay, fiber, and bronze for more than six decades using a combination of Eastern and Western techniques and aesthetics. In the late 1950s, she developed her signature style of closed form vessels, containers that held air and space. They conveyed a sense of tranquility from the simplicity of the forms and subtle brush decoration. Takaezu started working in bronze toward the end of her career and created a series of bells, which explore the relationship between sculpture and sound. Look to Nature: Toshiko Takaezu is supported by the Windgate Charitable Foundation as part of the Windgate Contemporary Craft Initiative, and Peter Russo. The exhibition is at the ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center.
Arizona State University Art Museum presents the work of Liz Cohen, weighing both the investigative and voyeuristic aspects of documentary photography and involving both performance and the production of objects and video. Her works typically embrace exhibitionism, radical self-expression, and countercultures. She pushes against fixed moral positions judging the use of familiar tropes (like the car bikini model) that have emerged within the context of patriarchy—arguing that tropes can have different utilities. In Cohen’s world, scripts written under oppressive pressures can be co-opted to serve new narratives. We do not invent new worlds from scratch. The power of self-determination comes from the fact that it exists in the face of something.
The exhibition will focus on the works Cohen generated around her Trabantimino car, including the car itself. For this decade-long undertaking, Cohen immersed herself in the lowrider culture of custom cars as a builder (she built the Trabantimino from the ground up) and bikini model. The Trabantimino traveled from the wide-open spaces of the American West to a decaying factory in the former East Germany, where Cohen photographed the Trabantimino at various stages of completion, inserting herself as a character in the story, a fabrication as well as a fabricator. The work is indirectly autobiographical, an examination of Cohen’s in-betweenness as a first-generation Latina and a child of the Cold War, the daughter of Colombian parents who tended to favor Warsaw Pact countries over Disneyland for summer vacations.
The Armory Center for the Arts
The Armory Center for the Arts and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College (formerly Pomona College Museum of Art) are partnering to present Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, an exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Saar’s work connected to myths and archetypes, invisible bodies and hidden histories, and timeless paradigms of grounding and transformation. Highlighting the dualities that are woven throughout her art, Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe explores and complicates the binaries of body, spirit, earth, and air. For Saar, this title suggests esoteric, alchemical transformations of elemental properties: with aether representing the spiritual and non-material, and earthe—with the archaic spelling—suggesting a rootedness to physical materials.
Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe—one exhibition at two venues—surveys Saar’s sculptures and installations. With her use of distinctive forms and materials, Saar creates powerful figurative sculptures that activate histories and legacies of survival. The Armory will showcase Saar’s female figures that suggest elements of fire, air, and aether, while the Benton will highlight work that emphasizes grounded, earthly, and watery qualities.
A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. The Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA) awarded the 2020 Curator’s Award to Rebecca McGrew at the Benton at Pomona College and Irene Tsatsos at the Armory as co-curators. The book is edited by McGrew and Tsatsos and includes an essay by Christina Sharpe, professor in the Department of Humanities at York University; an introduction by McGrew; a conversation with Alison Saar and Tsatsos; an in-depth personal artist timeline authored by Saar and including never-before-published early photographs of Saar's childhood; and poems by Camille Dungy, Harryette Mullen, and Evie Shockley. Kimberly Varella of Content Object, Los Angeles, designed the 164-page book.
Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe
July 16–December 12, 2021
Curators: Rebecca McGrew and Irene Tsatsos
Exhibition
ArtCenter College of Design, Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery
Kim Schoenstadt: Enter Slowly, The Legacy of an Idea
September 23–December 18, 2021
Curators: Julie Joyce and Christina Valentine
Installation
This site-specific installation features a new series of work by Kim Schoenstadt examining the interventions, violations and interpretations that have coalesced as a historical narrative concerning Eileen Gray’s architectural masterwork, E-1027, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. Since its completion in 1929, the modernist villa has undergone various acts of intrusion, destruction, and reinterpretation—largely by male protagonists—that parallel the dynamics of iteration and erasure of Gray’s creative articulations as a bisexual female designer and architect.
Schoenstadt’s installation aims to reinstate Gray’s voice and highlight the dynamics of historic narratives that serve to alter her original voice. Schoenstadt’s project is not a re-creation of Gray’s work but a meditation on the architect’s original space and objectives. By investigating areas of the home that were violated, regardless of intention, Schoenstadt’s adaptation aims to restore justice to Gray, a visionary yet overlooked figure of twentieth-century modernist architecture and design. Designed specifically for the Mullin Gallery at ArtCenter’s South Campus, Schoenstadt’s installation consists of several large-scale wall murals, sculptures, and floor treatments inspired by the original and the subsequently misinterpreted architecture and color-block motifs of Gray’s interior. Integral to the exhibition will be an assemblage of images and texts regarding the history of E-1027. Additionally, continuing the social-engagement aspect of Schoenstadt’s practice, a salon area within the installation will serve as a site for various programs and community forums to be staged during the course of the exhibition—several in partnership with Now Be Here (NBH), an initiative founded and nurtured by Schoenstadt.
Artpace San Antonio
Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace
January 9–December 27, 2020
Curator: Erin Murphy
Exhibition
For its twenty-fifth anniversary year, Artpace has committed to focusing all non-residency exhibition programming to women artists in 2020. With this in mind we will celebrate our twenty-fifth year with the exhibition Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace.
A fair number of exhibitions in recent years have focused on the work of female artists, but none has focused on those coming out of Artpace’s International Artist-in-Residency program. With an eye to equity, the exhibition seeks to highlight and amplify global voices of a bold and powerful female-identifying artistic community. As Artpace founder Linda Pace once said, “As an artist, I realized artists must work in environments in which they can be understood and respected. Later, as a patron, I tried to put this lesson into practice, creating a climate that encouraged individual experimentation in the way I had experienced it in that course.”
The project focuses keenly on presenting a diverse group of work addressing issues of identity, femininity, gender, feminism, and womanhood (in whatever form that may take) in an age when Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” still resonates.
Organized by Erin K. Murphy, director of residencies and exhibitions, Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace includes a wide array of mediums brought together in an exhibition with an astounding voice. Among the featured artists are Laura Aguilar, Jenelle Esparza, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Janet Flohr, Regina José Galindo, Mona Hatoum, Koo Jeong-a, Autumn Knight, Margaret Meehan, Katrina Moorhead, Wangechi Mutu, Lorraine O’Grady, Linda Pace, Joyce J. Scott, Wu Tsang, Martha Wilson, and Kathy Vargas.
Art21
As part of the Feminist Art Coalition initiative, Art21 will present a series of new films featuring contemporary artists who consider and complicate feminist thought and practice. This series—part of Art21’s Extended Play and New York Close Up digital series—will include new artists and artists who have been previously featured in Art21 films. In some cases, the diverse group of artists will be placed in conversation with one another, to create a dynamic group portrait that illuminates what it means to be an artist working at the dawn of a new wave.
The Arts Club of Chicago
Upkeep: Everyday Strategies of Care
October 16, 2020–March 20, 2021
Curators: Janine Mileaf and H. Daly Arnett
Exhibition
In a moment when the formerly radical act of “self-care” as it was imagined by the poet Audre Lorde has become an obvious marketing strategy deployed to capture the disposable income of yet one more generation of femme-identifying, self-objectifying subjects, this exhibition proposes that daily acts of care should be understood as quietly, yet decisively, disruptive of the status quo. Historically linked to the feminine, caring for others—either in personal or professional capacities—has garnered scant social capital. Yet increasingly, artists have turned to subtle and overt means of encoding alternatives to the sanctioned brutality of interpersonal interaction that has become ordinary in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Following the thinking of writer Maggie Nelson, who reminds us that an “aesthetics of care” should not seek for the work of art to care for us, this exhibition gathers works that approach care as a complicated nexus of generosity and coercion. Caregiving, Nelson tells us further, has yet to be socialized beyond the maternal, even though its capacities have been valorized in other guises—when the very acts associated with conventional maternity are dissociated from gender but proposed as a form of freedom. In this exhibition, we seek to consider how slight gestures, open questions, repetitive acts, distant memories, and subtle refusals register alternate value systems. Co-curated by Janine Mileaf and H. Daly Arnett, the exhibition features works by Elliott Jerome Brown, Jr., Lenka Clayton, Sara Cwynar, Bronwyn Katz, Chancellor Maxwell, and Lily van der Stokker.
Axle Contemporary
Feminist Art in the Trump Era is an exhibition of works by twenty-six New Mexico–based artists that explore various feminist realities and rants. The works—chosen by juror Lucy R. Lippard—resonate with the hopefully soon-to-be-extinct Trump era. The exhibition will take place on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, and the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the Axle Contemporary mobile artspace. For this exhibition, prints of the artworks will be wheat-pasted on the exterior of the Axle Contemporary mobile artspace in various locations across Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Artists include Sally Blakemore, Michael Darmody, Kaylee Dunnigan, Nika Feldman, Alex Fischer, The Furies (Kristin Barendsen, Patti Levey, and Lauren Ayer), Lisa Freeman, Alexis Graff, Miranda Gray, Cheri Ibes, Kathamann, Isolde Kille, Shirley Klinghoffer, Rica Maestas, Kathleen McCloud, Ashley Miller, Dana Newmann, Ravenna Osgood, Liz Patterson, Susie Protiva, Nicole Sullivan, Charlotte Thurman, Isabel Winson-Sagan, Greta Young, Bette Yozell, and Jasmin Zorlu.
Baltimore Museum of Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) is presenting a year of special exhibitions and programs called 2020 Vision highlighting the achievements of female-identifying artists and leaders. Inspired by the centennial of the U.S. Constitution’s 19th Amendment giving many women the right to vote, 2020 Vision builds on the museum’s recent efforts to expand its presentations of women and minority artists and become more engaged with the community in which it exists. Due to the global pandemic, the BMA’s 2020 Vision initiative is being extended into 2021.
Candice Breitz: Too Long, Didn’t Read
March 15, 2020–January 10, 2021
Curator: Asma Naeem
Video installations
Two powerful multichannel video installations by acclaimed South African–born artist Candice Breitz reflect on privilege, visibility, and shrinking attention spans in an information economy that fetishizes celebrity and thrives on entertainment. Love Story (2016) recounts the experiences of six refugees as told by themselves and by Hollywood actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin. TLDR (2017), conceived and produced in dialogue with the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce in Cape Town, South Africa, features interviews that use alluring visual tactics and the vernacular of the Internet to examine power disparities and the rights of sex workers in South Africa.
Katharina Grosse: Is It You?
March 1, 2020–January 3 / September 19, 2021
Curator: Virginia Anderson
Exhibition
Internationally acclaimed German artist Katharina Grosse will create a new site-related environment. The central gallery in the BMA’s Contemporary Wing will be transformed with an expansive fabric installation that is partially suspended from the ceiling, creating an enveloping “room” with undulating walls. Grosse will then spray-paint onto the fabric, allowing the paint colors and the shape of the fabric to combine to form a vibrant and immersive experience for visitors to explore. The presentation of paintings closes January 3, 2021; the installation of Is It You? remains on view through September 19, 2021.
This exhibition weaves together two semi-intertwined personal narratives, juxtaposing newly created self-portrait photographs of the artist, activist, and producer Zackary Drucker with her recent portraits of Rosalyne Blumenstein, LCSW, who directed the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center’s pioneering Gender Identity Project in the 1990s. Depicting two women of different ages and experience and the scars they bear, Drucker’s work interrogates assumptions about transformation, beauty, aging, and mortality. Her images of muse and mentor Blumenstein capture the cinematic flavor of the artist’s ongoing project to chronicle the trans community, while a vinyl wallpaper collage of snapshots drawn from Blumenstein’s personal archives underlines the importance of Blumenstein’s role as mentor and advocate.
Valerie Maynard: Lost and Found
March 1, 2020–January 3, 2021
Curators: Asma Naeem and Leslie Cozzi
Exhibition
This mini-retrospective celebrates the six-decade career of Baltimore-based printmaker and sculptor Valerie Maynard. The exhibition features a range of works drawn largely from her studio, including the landmark No Apartheid series from the 1980s and 1990s, which embodies her unique ability to combine diverse techniques (assemblage, pochoir, and monotype) into both deeply personal and profoundly political new forms of art on paper. A rarely exhibited selection of Maynard’s early sculpture is also on view. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Bill Gaskins, Edward Spriggs, Nikky Finney, and Alexis DeVeaux.
Howardena Pindell: Free, White and 21
March 1, 2020–January 3, 2021
Curator: Katy Siegel
Exhibition
Howardena Pindell’s influential video Free, White and 21 (1980) voices complex and conflicting perspectives on race and gender. The twelve-minute work was created in 1979, after a car accident that left the artist with partial memory loss. Eight months later, she set up a video camera in her apartment, focused it on herself, and created a deadpan account of the racism she experienced coming of age as a Black woman in America. This video was recently added to the BMA’s collection.
Jo Smail: Flying with Remnant Wings
March 1, 2020–January 3, 2021
Curator: Kristen Hileman
Exhibition
Using a poignant language of charged colors and abstract forms, South African–born, Baltimore-based artist Jo Smail conveys the strangeness, vulnerability, and complicated beauty of contemporary life. The exhibition features fifty paintings and works on paper by Smail, as well as collages produced with fellow South African artist William Kentridge. The earliest works date to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Smail overcame a studio fire that destroyed all her previous paintings and a stroke that inhibited her movement and speech. Her profound and unique works, accompanied by poetic and irreverent titles, reflect an irrepressible joy and optimism, and capture the ways in which Smail never shied away from a world that is always on the brink of destabilization.
SHAN Wallace: 410
March 1, 2020–January 3, 2021
Curator: Leslie Cozzi and Cecilia Wichmann
Exhibition
Baltimore-born artist SHAN Wallace’s exhibition is, in the photographer’s words, a love letter to the beauty, complexity, and resilience of her hometown. Representing highlights of her evolving practice of the past five years, Wallace crafted an immersive environment that engages her newfound interest in collage, the connective possibilities of different museum spaces, and the expressive potential of portrait photography.
Mickalene Thomas: A Moment’s Pleasure
November 24, 2019–May 29, 2022
Curator: Christopher Bedford
New commission/exhibition/installation
The inaugural Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission debuts an immersive installation by internationally renowned artist Mickalene Thomas. For this commission, the artist’s most ambitious project to date, Thomas has completely transformed the BMA’s two-floor East Lobby into a living room for Baltimore with vivid geometric patterns, prints, and textures that reference the creativity of Black culture in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s. Thomas also created a new exterior facade for the Zamoiski East Entrance that resembles the city’s traditional row houses, and she curated a selection of works by artists with ties to Baltimore for the newly enclosed Terrace Gallery.
Stripes and Stars: Reclaiming Lakota Independence
October 11, 2020–March 28, 2021
Curator: Darienne Turner
Exhibition
This exhibition explores the multifaceted and evolving meaning of American flag imagery through nine beaded artworks created by Lakota women in the late nineteenth century. While the American flag was a symbol of oppression for Native Americans, Lakota women incorporated it and other patriotic iconography into traditional Native American designs so tribal members could participate in cultural activities that had been previously outlawed. It also served as a protective talisman for Lakota youth.
Stephanie Syjuco: Vanishing Point (Overlay)
February 17–May 16, 2021
Curator: Leila Grothe
Exhibition
Filipino-American artist Stephanie Syjuco has created a three-part exhibition that examines how image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. To the Person Sitting in Darkness (2019) is a reproduction of a flag described in Mark Twain’s 1901 essay for the North American Review: “And as for a flag for the Philippine Province,... [w]e can just have our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.” For Vanishing Point (2020), Syjuco draped five historically charged nineteenth-century sculptures from the BMA’s collection in a semi-sheer pixelated cloth, denying the power of display previously afforded to these objects identified only as Founding Father, Collaborator, Confederate, Sympathizer, and Secessionist. Rogue States (2018) is a group of fictional flags re-created from film and television programs that depicted countries outside of the U.S. and Western Europe as terrorist, backward, or unstable. The flags are hung vertically from the ceiling in a grid, as a United Nations–style convention of collective anxiety.
Tschabalala Self: By My Self
March 28–September 19, 2021
Curator: Cecilia Wichmann
Exhibition
The BMA presents approximately twelve new and recent paintings alongside related sculpture and an animation that together capture the depth, intricacy, and singularity of Self’s formal approaches and techniques. These include a suite of three new paintings of a female couple created in response to Henri Matisse’s sculpture Two Women (1907–8), originally titled Two Negresses. Each work in the exhibition explores how the compositional process generates meaning in her work. The artist uses a variety of reproductive techniques—stencils, tracings, textures transferred by frottage, intaglio, and screen-printed elements, and mechanically stitched-in lines of thread—to structure artworks that are ultimately singular and unique. The resulting works offer an analogy for the artist’s theory of selfhood—a consciousness at once produced by external images and capable of reworking and evolving forms of its own.
Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness
March 28–September 19, 2021
Curator: Christopher Bedford
Exhibition
Co-organized by the BMA and Aspen Art Museum, this exhibition explores how American artist Lisa Yuskavage has used landscape in her paintings since the early 1990s. Yuskavage uses classical painting techniques for her brightly colored canvases of contemporary nude female figures, which are often set within surreal landscapes and dramatically lit interiors.
Examples from American artist Sharon Lockhart’s ten-year project of enormous artistic and social ambition include recent video and photography of a group of Polish girls moving from adolescence into adulthood. The works explore the social dimension of creating art—the need to notice and listen to the voice of young people—and is the result of a long-term collaboration with the Youth Center for Sociotherapy Rudzienko.
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: The Perpetual Sense of Redness
June 6–October 3, 2021
Curator: Leila Grothe
Exhibition
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico City) creates strange, seductive paintings about cars and the female body that collapse traditional depictions of hyper-sexualized femininity—often employed to market the masculine appeal of a vehicle—and reclaims the latent power of the car as a site for unrestrained female sexuality. Toranzo Jaeger has transformed the central rotunda of the museum’s European art galleries into a kind of fuselage by fabricating a car/spaceship hybrid. For this new multi-panel work formed by hinged and folded canvases, Toranzo Jaeger has combined oil paint with an embroidery style particular to her Indigenous community in Mexico and crafted by her family members.
More than 75 prints, photographs, and books from the Renaissance to the early twentieth-century feature depictions of women who have acted in ways deemed contrary to the moral and social standards established by patriarchal authority. The exhibition begins with powerful women from the past shown alongside archetypal imagery that presents female agency in a negative light, such as witches, vampires, and femme fatales. The second section is devoted to the modern era—from circa 1800 to the period of first-wave feminism in the early twentieth century—when women actively engaged with rectifying centuries of disenfranchisement and oppression, achieving the passage of the 19th Amendment in the United States. It includes representations of formidable women who broke with traditionally domestic designations of wife and mother, expanding their presence into the public sphere as performers, authors, artists, and activists.
Bellevue Arts Museum
Anna Mlasowsky: Never Odd or Even
September 11, 2020–January 17, 2021
Curator: Ben Heywood
Exhibition
Never Odd or Even is an exhibition of recent work from Seattle-based glass artist Anna Mlasowsky. This new body of work expands on the latest development in her artistic practice, which leans on collaboration between still objects and moving bodies. Based on the three stages of womanhood, the work tells a story about fluid boundaries and cyclical processes. The exhibition’s title, Never Odd or Even, a palindrome, speaks to various themes, ranging from the longing for the hermaphroditic, the neutral and circular, the intangible presence of recurring cycles—be it through history, seasons, or animal migration—to the ocean currents and the female cycle.
Through this collaborative effort connecting the disciplines of performing arts and sculpture, Mlasowsky and the performers on “stage” aim to reclaim and uphold the female body as a main actor, staging the objects on view on both the spatial and performative planes. Choreography explores the crafted object’s purely operative function by enabling the wearer to perform a series of gestures that define space for social interaction. In other words, the objects are no longer confined to their autonomous, still form, but rather become movable anchors for the performance to unfold on the floor of the gallery.
Yellow No. 5 examines the transactional relationship between culture and consumerism and how they often work in tandem to conceal their connection. Tariqa Waters’s project-based, multidisciplinary exhibit will see her collaborate with regional artists to explore the habitual grab-and-go nature of material consumer goods and other worldly products that serve as the armor needed to shield intrinsic codependency using artificial flavors and additives.
Waters aims to challenge Bellevue Arts Museum to have a conversation that extends outward into a predominantly white-led arts ecology that a Black woman can head significant exhibitions—and institutions—at the same time as engaging audiences in the conversation in an approachable and humorous way.
Forum Featured Objects Program: Holly Martz, Danger of nostalgia in wallpaper form (in utero)
August 2020–Winter 2021
Curator: Ben Heywood
Installation
Danger of nostalgia in wallpaper form (in utero) by Holly Ballard Martz appears, at first, to be a lovely and innocuously patterned wall. In fact, the installation features dozens of wire coat hangers shaped and soldered by hand to display the repeated form of the female reproductive system. By installing her piece in the style of ornate wallpaper, Martz manipulates the symbol of self-induced abortions into something fit to adorn even the most elegant dining room, thus hiding a taboo in plain sight. Martz bends and forms each piece of wire herself—a slow and painful process that is an exercise in endurance for her hands and is also representative of the slow and painful trudge toward full reproductive rights for women in America. Martz presents a vivid reminder of the gory reality that remains under wraps in the absence of women’s rights, and the artist encourages us to question what else might lurk beneath the surface, be it in history, in society, or in ourselves.
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Maria Antelman: Soft Interface
December 10, 2020–April 24, 2021
Curator: Rachel Adams
Exhibition
With references to classical sculpture and archeology, Maria Antelman’s work in Soft Interface acknowledges the line between permanence and impermanence. Intimately photographing herself and her family and then splicing these with imagery from the natural landscape—referencing bodies as historic sculptures—Antelman intertwines the human form (humanity) with the porous stones of the earth. Creating formal connections through diagrammatic framing techniques, Antelman’s photographs and closed loops (GIFs) are transformative. Her process includes photographing primarily with 35mm film, printed, scanned, sometimes animated, and, finally, edited. While previous works have focused on the intersection of humanity with computer technology, the work in Soft Interface is rooted in stone, the base element for all future technological development. As a native of Greece, Antelman culls deeply from history while imagining the future.
Maria Antelman (b. 1971, Athens) is a visual artist based in New York. She works mainly with 35mm film photography and she holds an MFA in New Genres from Columbia University. Recent exhibitions include Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Mechanisms of Affection at the Visual Arts Center, University of Texas at Austin (solo, 2019); and Disassembler at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (solo, 2018). She has been awarded production grants by the Onassis Foundation USA, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation.
Joey Fauerso: Inside the Spider’s Body
December 10, 2020–April 24, 2021
Curator: Rachel Adams
Exhibition
Treading the thin line between creation and destruction, Joey Fauerso’s work explores dualities of the human condition, interweaving personal experiences with the current sociopolitical climate. Through painting, sculpture, performance, and film, Fauerso’s graphic works lean heavily on humor and tragedy, speaking to both fragility and resilience. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Fauerso’s work shifted, opening the door for her personal life and anxieties to influence and exist within her practice. As a mother and an artist, she is inspired by the temporality and impermanence of childhood and the (almost) tragic theatricality of growth, which she marries with historical references, mythology, and the relationship between the body and the landscape. Experiencing her work means stepping behind the curtain and encountering layers of complexity that surround the current moment. Forever in transition, oscillating between harmony and discord, Fauerso explores how humanity always plays multiple roles.
Joey Fauerso (b. 1976, San Antonio, Texas) is a San Antonio–based artist and professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. Recently her work has been included in exhibitions at Blue Star Contemporary (BSC), MASS MoCA, The Drawing Center in New York, the David Shelton Gallery in Houston, and Antenna Gallery in New Orleans. Fauerso received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 2001, and a BFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in 1998. She is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies, including BSC’s Berlin Residency Program with Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, Germany), and The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Residency in New York (2014–15). She lives in San Antonio with her husband, Riley Robinson, and their two sons.
Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College
The Armory Center for the Arts and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College (formerly Pomona College Museum of Art) are partnering to present Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, an exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Saar’s work connected to myths and archetypes, invisible bodies and hidden histories, and timeless paradigms of grounding and transformation. Highlighting the dualities that are woven throughout her art, Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe explores and complicates the binaries of body, spirit, earth, and air. For Saar, this title suggests esoteric, alchemical transformations of elemental properties: with aether representing the spiritual and non-material, and earthe—with the archaic spelling—suggesting a rootedness to physical materials.
Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe—one exhibition at two venues—surveys Saar’s sculptures and installations. With her use of distinctive forms and materials, Saar creates powerful figurative sculptures that activate histories and legacies of survival. The Armory will showcase Saar’s female figures that suggest elements of fire, air, and aether, while the Benton will highlight work that emphasizes grounded, earthly, and watery qualities.
A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. The Fellows of Contemporary Art (FOCA) awarded the 2020 Curator’s Award to Rebecca McGrew at the Benton at Pomona College and Irene Tsatsos at the Armory as co-curators. The book is edited by McGrew and Tsatsos and includes an essay by Christina Sharpe, professor in the Department of Humanities at York University; an introduction by McGrew; a conversation with Alison Saar and Tsatsos; an in-depth personal artist timeline authored by Saar and including never-before-published early photographs of Saar’s childhood; and poems by Camille Dungy, Harryette Mullen, and Evie Shockley. Kimberly Varella of Content Object, Los Angeles, designed the 164-page book.
Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe
September 1, 2020–December 19, 2021
Curators: Rebecca McGrew and Irene Tsatsos
Exhibition
Alia Ali is a Yemeni-Bosnian-American multimedia artist. In her work, she reflects on the politics and poetics of contested topics such as identity, physical borders, universality, mental/physical spaces of confinement, and the dualism inherent in the lived experience. Her work explores cultural binaries and challenges culturally sanctioned oppression. Working primarily with photography, Ali addresses histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism in projects that take patterns and textiles as their primary motif.
In Cast No Evil (2015–16), Ali addresses how the ubiquity of the veil as a cultural marker can be a statement of devotion, sign of oppression, or expression of power. The images portray life-size, fully veiled figures. In Ali’s Borderland series (2017–ongoing), she depicts textile artisans wrapped in their own fabrics. To communicate their cultural identities through their craftsmanship, Ali covers their bodies and faces in their textiles.
The artist developed a site-specific installation for the Benton lobby, Alia Ali: حب / Love (2020), which will be on view through May 15, 2022. Alia Ali: Project Series 53 will be the first installment of the series in Pomona College’s new museum and will be accompanied by a publication and programming.
Ali holds a BA in studio art and Middle Eastern studies from Wellesley College and an MFA in photography and media from California Institute of the Arts. Ali is currently based in Los Angeles.
Alia Ali: Project Series 53
September 1, 2020–May 29, 2021
Curator: Rebecca McGrew with Hannah Grossman
Exhibition
Helen Pashgian (b. 1934, Pasadena, California; lives and works in Pasadena) is a pioneer of the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California. Over the course of her career, Pashgian has produced a significant series of sculptures composed of vibrantly colored columns, disks, and spheres that often feature an isolated element appearing suspended, embedded, or encased within. Using an innovative application of industrial epoxies, plastics, and resins, Pashgian’s works are characterized by their semitranslucent surfaces that appear to filter and somehow contain illumination. Pashgian thinks of her works as “presences” in space—presences that do not reveal everything at once.
Pashgian received her BA from Pomona College, Claremont, California (1956) and MA from Boston University (1958), and also attended Columbia University, New York (1956–57). Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014), the Pomona College Museum of Art (2010), and the Palm Springs Art Museum (2007).
Berkeley Art Center
First and foremost an exhibition exploring what it means to be human, We have teeth too serves to disrupt Western notions of purity by focusing on various intersections of identity. In the face of incredible pushback, women of color have often been the backbone of historical movements and important change. Artists such as those featured in this exhibition have undeniably been instrumental in the progression toward justice. This show reminds everyone that—despite both past and present circumstances—Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) possess the right to smile when we are victorious and bite back when our future depends on it.
Berkeley Art Center presents a series of newly commissioned projects by artists working in video, animation, writing, textiles, photography, and interactive media. As we continue to navigate a world of limited interaction, we invited five artists to make pieces that we could present online in some way. There was no thematic requirement, no overarching curatorial framework—just an opportunity to respond to our new shared reality with an idea that they saw as relevant to the continuation or expansion of their practice. For us, the value of these works is in the process of their making as much as in the things that are made. New projects will be released online every few weeks beginning in November.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1961, Catherine Opie has lived in California for over three decades, and the Golden State has been integral to the artistic vision pictured in her prolific body of photo-based work. Her early photographs garnered her both infamy and high praise, as she portrayed a world that patriarchal culture hoped to render unseen: queer communities and subcultures, including the lesbian leather and sadomasochism scenes. Opie later produced methodical studies of urban environments that documented cultural phenomena as well as the potential to produce counternarratives, as in her California Freeways (1994–95) and Mini-Malls (1997–98) series.
Individuals and their relationship to the landscape, whether urban or natural, have been an abiding interest that spans Opie’s diverse bodies of work. In the series Political Landscapes, Opie turns her incisive gaze on political protest marches that have taken place in Los Angeles since the early 2000s, in which she has actively participated. For this special presentation, Opie has compiled a selection of photographs that provide a glimpse into civic and social engagement and affirm the collective and individual right to freedom of speech and expression. The subjects range from protests against the war in Iraq and demonstrations for immigration and labor rights to the Women’s March in 2017 and more recent Black Lives Matter events. Originally scheduled to screen as part of the exhibition New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, which because of the pandemic now opens August 28, 2021, Political Landscapes instead serves as a vital prologue to New Time. The compilation screens on the hour on BAMPFA’s outdoor screen through the end of November.
Catherine Opie: Political Landscapes
September 2–November 29, 2020
Curator: Apsara DiQuinzio
Exhibition
New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century
August 28, 2021–January 30, 2022
Curator: Apsara DiQuinzio
Exhibition
New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century is a major survey exploring recent feminist practices in contemporary art. The exhibition will illuminate a diverse range of art across all mediums by artists of all genders who are integrating feminist thought into innovative artistic approaches across a wide array of themes. In 1980 Lucy R. Lippard argued that feminist art is “neither a style nor a movement” but rather “a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life.” New Time takes Lippard’s statement as a point of departure, examining some of the values, strategies, and ways of life reflected in recent feminist art. It will include works spanning from 2000 to 2020, with a few key historical exceptions, and will be organized around eight themes that foreground subjects such as hysteria, labor and activism, the fragmented body, gender fluidity, female anger, and the gaze, among others. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, with an introductory essay by DiQuinzio; essays by Jamieson Webster, Lyn Hejinian, and Leigh Raiford; a conversation between Judith Butler and Mel Y. Chen on gender; a conversation between Julia Bryan-Wilson and Natalia Brizuela on recent feminist art practices; and individual essays on the seventy-five artists and collectives included in the exhibition.
Ulrike Ottinger (b. 1942) resides in Berlin, where she works as a filmmaker, visual artist, and director of theater and opera. She became interested in photography at the age of nine and it has remained (along with cinematography) one of her primary pursuits as a visual artist. Over the course of her career, she has created a body of work that is deeply informed by her encounters with fellow artists and intellectuals as well as different world cultures.
MATRIX 276 is BAMPFA’s first exhibition of Ottinger’s photographs. The images on view were made over a period of decades and display Ottinger’s abiding interest in portraiture and landscape. Often, but not always, Ottinger’s photographic work runs parallel to her film projects. Held in common across both media are her talent as a cameraperson—her eye for detail, frame composition, color, and light—and her worldview.
As a photographer, Ottinger is witness to a world in transition. She documents places and settings that are imbued with a sense of history and cultural customs. This is especially true of her photographs taken in China in 1985, in which an old world and old ways are memorialized in time. By contrast, Ottinger’s expeditions to remote reaches of the world are where she finds an atmosphere of serenity and wonder. Her epic-length documentaries Taiga (1991, filmed in Mongolia) and Chamisso’s Shadow (2016, logging a voyage to the Bering Sea region) will be shown in the film retrospective, and photographs from Taiga figure as part of the gallery exhibition. The overall character of Ottinger’s photographs is at once intimate and direct. The portraits of people she encounters on her travels offer a sense of the subjects in dialogue with the photographer through their gaze at the camera.
Boston Center for the Arts
Combahee’s Radical Call: Black Feminisms (re)Awaken Boston
July 2020–Summer 2021
Curators: Arielle Gray, Cierra Michele Peters, and Jen Mergel
Combahee’s Radical Call: Black Feminisms (re)Awaken Boston is a yearlong, multi-platform curatorial project inspired by and developed in direct dialogue with Demita Frazier, co-founder of Boston’s Combahee River Collective—the group of radical, socialist, Black feminists and lesbians active in community organizing and publishing in Boston from 1974 to 1980. In that spirit, through summer 2021, a broad range of Black Femme artists were commissioned to occupy public spaces with installations, design, and digital resources. Their works served to amplify the voices (and counter the erasure) of Black Femme cultural leaders across the city. Combahee’s Radical Call invited audiences to engage with the following public installations and programs to re-center the vital legacy of Black feminism(s), archives, and the written word in Boston:
Mithsuca Berry’s Protect Your Seedlings (November 2020–April 2021): a vibrant display across BCA’s Mills Gallery windows of a line from the Combahee River Collective Statement: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
Arielle Gray’s The Roots that Bind (December 2020–August 2021): a series of hand-illustrated banners with Black feminist texts installed at numerous sites significant to Boston’s Black feminist movement, each with a QR code call to action: “How would you visualize this idea?”
Zoë Pulley’s design of a free zine (February 2021) of the complete annotated text of the Combahee River Collective Statement, available as newsprint takeaways and as a downloadable PDF. The printed zine unfolds as a poster with key call-out quotes.
Cierra Michele Peters’s Our Mothers’ Gardens (July–December 2021): a virtual anthology of links to over 100 texts, interviews, and video clips gathered into fifteen thematic collections of Black feminist thought.
Mercedes Loving-Manley’s #PrideExtended Fest (July 2021), a benefit festival highlighting Black trans and non-binary talent with performances and film screenings to advocate for Boston’s Black TLGBQ+ community.
FeministFuturist Instructions Vault
Ongoing, Mills Gallery
Curators: Karen Meninno and Carolyn Wirth
Participatory installation
Interdisciplinary artist Freedom Baird is a sculptor, designer, writer, and creator of installation environments in which she sometimes appears as a performer and facilitator. Freedom has adapted her installation in the FeministFuturist exhibition for online participation and invites you to contribute your instructions.
BronxArtSpace
Beasts Like Me: Feminism and Fantasy
October 22–November 21, 2020
Curator: Deborah Yasinsky
Exhibition
Beasts Like Me: Feminism and Fantasy presents works investigating animals, anthropomorphism, and the dance between representations of self and animalistic notions. It looks at the way women’s bodies are politicized and how artists incorporate the body, animals, and beasts into their work. Bodies morph and undergo transformation, part human and part beast in subversive fictionalized imagery. The works elucidate the transformative effect of fantasy, revealing mythical imagery of animals, and imagined beasts in a new light of empowerment. The exhibition encompasses painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, installation, and film.
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And
March 5–July 18, 2021
Curators: Catherine Morris and Aruna D’Souza
Exhibition
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And will be the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Lorraine O’Grady, one of the most significant figures in contemporary performance, conceptual, and feminist art. While the artist’s work has often been difficult to categorize—ranging from live performance to film to photography and photomontage to concrete poetry to early manifestations of what may well be called social practice art—the issues with which she grapples are remarkably consistent: the representational possibilities afforded to Black subjectivity (especially Black female subjectivity); the political, psychic, and aesthetic possibilities of hybridity; the experience of diaspora; the questioning of art’s guiding concepts and institutions (from modernism to the museum); and the intersection of self and history. Her work, no matter the medium, is conceived as a diptych. A deceptively simple form that yields a conceptual complexity, it replaces the “either/or” of Western thought with a productive, open-ended “both/and.” O’Grady’s work sets complex ideas into play, but in a way forecloses the possibility of resolution or even of hierarchy. It is perhaps for this reason that her work is being newly embraced by a younger generation of artists working across a range of disciplines, who find much to learn from a practice that upends the fixed positions of self and other, here and there, now and then—all while bringing into focus the poignancy of the lives that have been lived within these frameworks.
Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
Kate Rhoades: Propaganda of the Deed
October 9–December 20, 2020
Curators: Emily Ebba Reynolds and Nando Alvarez-Perez
Exhibition
In Propaganda of the Deed, Kate Rhoades presents new experimental videos, paintings, and comics based on the assassination of President William McKinley by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 in Buffalo, New York. The project incorporates deeply researched historical re-creation, slapstick comedy, and queer fantasy, putting focus on an often-overlooked but sharply relevant part of American history. Rhoades anchors the show’s narrative on feminist radical Emma Goldman, whom Czolgosz said inspired his violence with her anarchist speeches and writings. The first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, referred to Goldman as the “most dangerous woman in America.” Rhoades portrays the assassination, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath as both farce and fable.
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University
The Carpenter Center’s exhibition of work by B. Ingrid Olson will debut a suite of ambitious new commissions alongside select works from the past decade. Olson will create two simultaneous exhibitions: History Mother and Little Sister. Each will feature site-specific installations for both indoor and outdoor spaces, informed by notions of doubling and mirroring, the functions of footnotes and architectural fixtures, and the work of figures like Madeline Gins and Eileen Gray.
In her feminist-informed practice, Olson uses photography, sculpture, drawing, and architectural installation to explore how her body and each viewer’s body relate to boundaries and space. With her photographic works, she turns to her own body as subject matter, and connects the ways architecture and the strictures of photography act upon it. Bent knees, limbs, hands, and feet press up against mirrors and photographic surfaces, confusing the sense of interior space and its points of contact between the figure and the picture plane.
Meanwhile, Olson uses a number of sculptural processes including carving and casting sculptural reliefs that evoke fragments of the human form in their measurements and assumed symmetries. Her carved and cast objects convey both intimacy and distance, as their physicality proposes a correspondence with the artist’s body or contact with a machine. The objects themselves are distanced from an original or idea through a process of abstraction as details are softened and forms are reduced. The occasional addition of found objects adds sharply dissonant or suggestive elements to these processed forms.
The interrelationships and slippages between photographic and sculptural elements are central to Olson’s works that braid together architectural space and bodily experience. At the heart of this network of procedures and media is Olson’s investment in a sense of bodily and object specificity, even as her blurred documentation and sculptural distancing poetically reconfigure hierarchies of knowledge and relationships.
The artist’s first monograph will be published to coincide with the exhibition and will feature newly commissioned texts and a selection of reprinted poetry, literary criticism, and architectural history.
B. Ingrid Olson was born in 1987 in Denver, Colorado. She lives and works in Chicago.
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985
June 26–November 28, 2021
Curator: Anna Katz with Rebecca Lowery
Exhibition
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based, and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. Pattern and Decoration artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs. Their work across mediums pointedly evokes a pluralistic array of sources from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper, Persian carpets, and domestic embroidery. Pattern and Decoration artists practiced a postmodernist art of appropriation borne of love for its sources rather than the cynical detachment that became de rigueur in the international art world of the 1980s. This exhibition traces the movement’s broad reach in postwar American art by including artists widely regarded as comprising the core of the movement, such as Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, and Miriam Schapiro; artists whose contributions to Pattern and Decoration have been under-recognized, such as Merion Estes, Dee Shapiro, Kendall Shaw, and Takako Yamaguchi; and artists who are not normally considered in the context of Pattern and Decoration, such as Emma Amos, Billy Al Bengston, Al Loving, and Betty Woodman. Though little studied today, the Pattern and Decoration movement was institutionally recognized, critically received, and commercially successful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The overwhelming preponderance of craft-based practices and the unabashedly decorative sensibilities in art of the present-day point to an influential Pattern and Decoration legacy that is ripe for consideration.
Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco
Presented by Chinese Culture Center (CCC), WOMEN我們: From Her to Here is the third iteration of WOMEN我們 to explore queer spaces/spaceless-ness for communities of color, pushing the boundaries of discourse on place and belonging. WOMEN我們 launched in 2012 to focus on feminism, and gender and sexual equality.
Using the Women’s Suffrage Centennial as a launching point, WOMEN我們 is a three-part project comprising a major group exhibition, a mentorship program for emerging neighborhood artists, and a symposium—exploring the artistic dialogues advanced by women, feminists, and the LGBT+/Queer community, particularly within and between San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood and artists from across the Asian diaspora. The continuing growth of artistic dialogues through the lens of female/non-binary artists impacts our largely immigrant community and asks us to question how we fit into national and international social and artistic movements.
The project will examine how feminist and Queer identities locally, nationally, and transnationally continue to evolve as both important political positions in the struggle for equity and as conceptual lenses that complicate and deepen our understandings of visual culture.
Like CCC’s core signature series Present Tense and XianRui, WOMEN我們 challenges the dominant narrative by presenting risk-taking contemporary art while balancing a commitment to a legacy of social justice.
Artists: Chen Han Sheng, Huang Meng Wen, Heesoo Kwon, Madeleine Lim, Nicole Pun, Queer Reads Library x Mixed Rice Zines, Tina Takemoto, Brad Walrond, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Luka Yuanyuan Yang + Carlo Nasisse, and Yao Hong.
Rooted in San Francisco’s Chinatown, CCC emerged out of the civil rights movements to be the cultural and art anchor for the community. CCC’s mission is to elevate underserved communities and give voice to equality through contemporary art and education.
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves
February 24–May 16, 2021
Curator: Rebecca Matalon
Exhibition
Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves brings together the paintings of Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007) and the work of New York–based artist Jessi Reaves (b. 1986, Portland, Oregon). It sets up a dialogue between works by Murray—including the monumental, fractured canvases depicting splintering cups, tables, and fragmented body parts for which she is best known—and Reaves’s sculptural assemblages of the last five years, such as her signature ottomans, chairs, and lamps.
Although Murray and Reaves are generations apart, Wild Life highlights their shared use of decorative, domestic, and bodily imagery. Simultaneously playful and serious, irreverent and sincere, their works offer up a series of contradictions in form and content. They impolitely allude to internal and external body parts, and aggressively question so-called good taste through thick and uneven surface textures, and ungainly shapes. Yet, they are just as likely to marry the muck with bright, childlike colors, cartoonish shapes, and historically feminine motifs such as patchwork compositions.
Murray was a prominent and critically praised artist in her lifetime, and her work avoids easy categorization and resists affiliation with a singular movement or style. Her influence on recent generations of artists, as well as her significant contributions to art historical discourse on the values of the daily and domestic, remain underexamined. Wild Life reconsiders the implications of Murray’s more than four decades of depicting psychologically charged interiors by juxtaposing it with Reaves’s equally idiosyncratic and raucous approach to art making at the intersection of painting, sculpture, and furniture design. Murray and Reaves refuse rigid categorization to embrace ambiguous conceptions of the body and the home, where each continuously comes together and falls apart. Seen together, their works offer up the domestic as untamed and calamitous, revealing and reveling in the wildness of everyday life.
The Contemporary Austin
Deborah Roberts (American, b. 1962 in Austin, Texas) critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of African American children. Her mixed-media works on paper and on canvas combine found materials—from photographs, magazines, literature, and the Internet—with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on African American children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences growing up in this country, as well as how others perceive them. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex, occasionally based on actual living or historical persons. Roberts has long created images featuring young, African American, female subjects, and more recently, she began depicting young African American males, exposing the specific burdens and traumas facing both populations. For her exhibition at The Contemporary Austin, Roberts presents a selection of new collages and paintings, as well as two new interactive sound, text, and video sculptures on the first floor of the museum. In tandem, the museum has commissioned the artist to create a new figurative mural on the exterior of its downtown building. Deborah Roberts: I’m represents the first solo museum exhibition in Texas of Roberts’s work.
Crosstown Arts
Two Ways to Be Strong
September 4–November 1, 2020
Curators: Lacy Mitcham and Katie Maish
Exhibition
Two Ways to Be Strong is an exhibition exploring and dismantling binary experiences in motherhood featuring artwork by womxn artists living and working in the American South. Selected works question cultural norms, maternal taboos, and language limitations that perpetuate binary thought processes: good/bad, natural/fake, Madonna/whore. Other works address ambivalence toward motherhood, tension between art making and day-to-day caretaking, invisible power dynamics arising from shifting needs between mother and child, and understanding that we will ultimately lose what we have created and loved. The exhibition disrupts binary confinements by intentionally blurring lines and complicating the conversation about motherhood. In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a public participatory event that considers how parenthood can enhance creative thinking. This event will encourage connection and conversation, inviting the maternal experience into the framework of critical artistic discourse.
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
PLATFORM 27: Rachel Mica Weiss, The Wild Within
July 17, 2020–July 4, 2021
Curator: Sam Adams
New commission
PLATFORM 27: Rachel Mica Weiss, The Wild Within is a newly commissioned work by Pittsburgh- and Brooklyn-based artist Weiss. An undulating slab of concrete poses atop a reflective steel plinth. Made specifically for deCordova’s Sculpture Park, The Wild Within evokes the reclining female nude, a common motif in art history. Using industrial materials and monumental proportions, Weiss’s odalisque turns a symbol of objectification into one of balance, strength, and sculptural innovation. PLATFORM is a series of one-person commissioned projects by early and midcareer artists from New England, national, and international art communities that engage with deCordova’s unique landscape.
Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know
April 10–September 12, 2021
Curator: Sam Adams
Exhibition
DeCordova is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions and a full slate of public programs relating to the art of Sonya Clark. Through large-scale textile pieces, interactive experiences, and performance, Monumental Cloth proposes a shift in the national discussion around race and remembrance. The Confederate Flag of Truce is a simple dishcloth employed as the South’s flag of surrender at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Yet, as Clark shows, propaganda continues to make the more familiar Confederate Battle Flag into the enduring symbol of this history. The exhibition asks: What was surrendered and who had the privilege of surrendering? Did the truce hold? Clark’s works explore the color, texture, and ideology of the Truce Flag, offering avenues for reevaluating foundational American narratives of truce and surrender. Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know is organized by The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.
Sonya Clark’s most recent work responds to the perilous northward journey of formerly enslaved people on the Underground Railroad. Centering African American experiences of survival and emancipation, Sonya Clark: Heavenly Bound will include an installation invoking the Big Dipper and North Star composed of the artist’s hair; an artist’s book of cloth cyanotypes of stars; and an installation incorporating a map used on the Underground Railroad. This body of recent work will be accompanied by selections from deCordova’s permanent collection addressing national symbols, race, and collective memory.
DePaul Art Museum, Chicago
Jennifer Reeder: Girls on Film (1995–2020)
[October–November 2020]
Curator: Julie Rodrigues Widholm
Exhibition
For twenty-five years, filmmaker and activist Jennifer Reeder has constructed personal fiction films about relationships, trauma, and coping, with a focus on the experiences of girls and women, “especially the unruly ones.” Her innovative, award-winning narratives borrow from a range of forms including after-school specials, amateur music videos, magical realism, horror, and feminist fantasy. Reeder is a unique voice within her generation, and her Midwestern roots and riot grrrl youth shape the lives of characters and their relationships in ways rarely seen on film.
DPAM will present a mini-retrospective of a selection of Reeder’s films, including Clit-o-matic (1995), Nevermind (1999), And I Will Rise if Only to Hold You Down (2012), Blood below the Skin (2015), Crystal Lake (2016), and Knives and Skin (2019), supported by discussions and workshops on women in film.
Reeder’s films have shown consistently at festivals around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, SXSW, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial. Her awards include several that have qualified her films for Oscar nominations. She won a Creative Capital Grant in Moving Image (2015); short film funding from Rooftop/Adrienne Shelly Foundation (2016); and short film funding from the Hamburg Film Fund (2016). She is the 2019 recipient of the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony.
The Drawing Center
Fernanda Laguna: I do what I do in order to avoid doing something worse
February–July 2021
Curator: Rosario Güiraldes
Exhibition
An artist, poet, writer, activist, and curator, Fernanda Laguna (b. 1972, Buenos Aires) is well known in Latin America through the project spaces she has run in Buenos Aires since 1999, such as Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness), which was a cauldron of emerging art in that city during the 2000s. Many of her drawings—accomplished with feminine delicacy, a surrealist tinge, and a feminist, politicized kind of humor—tell stories of love, between a purple triangle and an orange circle, for instance, as they fluctuate toward a stellar dimension. Other drawings narrate histories of personal losses, fears, and happiness. Fernanda Laguna: I do what I do in order to avoid doing something worse (working title) is the first institutional survey of the artist’s work in the United States. The exhibition will feature more than forty artworks from Laguna’s prolific career, including works on paper and canvas, as well as journals and books. (In addition to publishing poetry books using her given name, Laguna has published several fiction novels under her nom de plume, Dalia Rosetti.) Spanning one of The Drawing Center’s upper-level galleries, I do what I do in order to avoid doing something worse provides an overview of Laguna’s relationship with paper, which she has long used to create figurative and abstract characters imbued with her own emotional life.
In the late 1960s, at the age of thirty-nine, Huguette Caland (b. 1931, Beirut, Lebanon; d. 2019, Venice, California) left her family in Beirut and relocated to Paris to pursue a career as an artist. Embracing the intrinsic sexuality of the body in her early canvases, Caland briefly came to international prominence in the 1970s. It is this explicit manner in which she expresses sensuality through drawing that has precipitated her recent resurfacing. Caland’s pen, pencil, and color pencil drawings from the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, at first appear abstract, but closer observation of the deliberate lines reveals intertwined body parts, caressing lovers, and carnivalesque portraits of topsy-turvy figures. Extending her drawing practice to fashion during this era, Caland created a series of one hundred caftans, and embroidered many of these with schematic images of breasts and female genitalia. The tension between the nakedness of the human body and the fabrics that conceal it once again became a central theme in Caland’s drawing practice in the early 1990s, both in the artist’s delicately crosshatched ink drawings that resemble woven textiles and in her series of nude mannequins embellished with these same designs. Even in her later forays into abstraction, the vitality of the human body and spirit remains palpable as fragments of figures and geographic elements from her past and present surface amidst brightly colored drawn and patterned landscapes.
From May to September 2021, The Drawing Center presents Tête-à-Tête, Caland’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Bringing together works on paper and canvas from the past five decades—as well as caftans, mannequins, sculptures, and notebooks on which she wielded her pen—the exhibition shows how Caland used the candidness and mutability of drawing to unravel taboos associated with representing female sexuality.
Emerson College Media Art Gallery, Boston
For Hurricane Lost, the entire Media Art Gallery is transformed into a singular site-specific, fully immersive, sculptural video installation. The installation spans the gallery's 1700 sq. ft. floor-plan and rises toward the 20 ft. high ceilings. A soundscape whirls around visitors, as they choose their own path through the visual "storm." The eight sculptural video forms in Hurricane Lost are based on the shapes of hurricane “cloud walls," while their spatial layout mimics the circular wind patterns.
Georgie Friedman’s large-scale, immersive video installations reference our changing climate and extreme weather phenomena. The rapidly melting glaciers, resultant sea-level rise, and warming oceans are increasing the intensity of hurricanes and lead to more frequent, and more-often-catastrophic weather events. Visually metaphoric and experiential, Hurricane Lost captures the inherent power of nature and visualizes the effects of our changing climate.
As visitors intuitively navigate the curved video-covered forms, they are invited to contemplate their relationship to both the natural and built environment. Hurricane Lost inventively addresses the climate crisis not by providing more scientific data, facts, and figures, but rather by enticing a visceral, emotive response through an immersive sound and light environment.
Despite its meditative, aesthetically soothing presentation, it serves as a powerful call to action as it asks whether we can imagine a different, better future. And if so, whether we are willing to change the way we act and make the choices needed to get us there.
EMPAC at Rensselaer
EMPAC celebrates the premiere of Oriana by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.
Oriana entwines the linguistic structure of Monique Wittig’s iconic 1969 feminist novel Les Guérillères with the material and conceptual ground of the Caribbean. It visualizes the ecstatic potential of a near-future, non-binary world order through the struggles of its protagonists to imagine a new sort of sensorium—an autonomous language of postcolonial and post-patriarchal society.
Animated by a shifting cast of collaborators from music, performance, art, and poetry, Oriana is filmed in Puerto Rico and at EMPAC, where the Center’s theatrical infrastructure forms the backdrop to an iterative and recursive moving image work.
Oriana is commissioned for the Feminist Art Coalition series by EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is supported by Creative Capital.
Fairfield University Art Museum
Featuring new relief paintings and figurative furniture-sculpture by New York artist Ruby Sky Stiler (b. 1979), this exhibition is being presented as part of the celebration of 50 years of women at Fairfield University. Stiler, who holds a BFA from RISD and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art, has been investigating images of women inspired by the techniques and language of classical antiquity for over a decade. Recently, Stiler’s art has expanded to include the subject of “father and child.” The dearth of art historical precedent for depictions of men displaying emotional intimacy⏤or being defined by their relationship to their children⏤is in stark contrast to the abundant impressions of “mother and child.” Also for this exhibition, Stiler will create contemporary interpretations of the traditional museum “viewing bench” as a form of utilitarian sculpture. The exhibition will invite viewers to sit and consider their own bodies in relation to the gallery space and the ideas in the artwork on the walls. The exhibition will open with a conversation between Ruby Sky Stiler and Tang Museum Dayton Director Ian Berry on September 17, 2020. The exhibition will travel and will be on view at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, July 3–September 26, 2021.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Judy Chicago: A Retrospective
August 28, 2021–January 9, 2022
Curator: Claudia Schmuckli
Exhibition
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco celebrate pioneering feminist artist Judy Chicago with a retrospective spanning her early engagement with the California Light and Space movement in the 1960s to her current body of work, a searing investigation of mortality and environmental devastation, begun in 2015. The exhibition includes around 150 works and related archival material that chart the boundary-pushing path of the artist named Cohen by birth and Gerowitz by marriage, who, after trying to fit into the patriarchal structure of the Los Angeles art world, decided to change her name and the course of history. Organized on the heels of the fortieth anniversary of The Dinner Party’s first San Francisco presentation and opening in conjunction with the centennial of women winning the right to vote in the United States, Judy Chicago: A Retrospective pays homage to an artist whose lifelong fight against the suppression and erasure of women’s creativity has finally come full circle.
Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?
May 7–November 7, 2021
Curator: Claudia Schmuckli
Exhibition
Over the past two decades, Wangechi Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the power and need for new mythologies—the productive friction of opposites beyond simple binaries and stereotypes—Mutu breaches common distinctions among human, animal, plant, and machine. At once seductive and threatening, her figures and environments take the viewer on journeys of material, psychological, and sociopolitical transformation. An artist who calls both Nairobi and New York home, she moves voraciously between cultural traditions to challenge colonialist, racist, and sexist worldviews with her visionary projection of an alternate universe informed by Afrofuturism, post-humanism, and feminism. Mutu’s sprawling exhibition at the Legion of Honor, a museum built for the showcase of European art from antiquity through Impressionism presided over by Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, aims to spur “a purposeful examination of art histories, mythologies, and the techniques of archiving and remembering.”
Fresno Art Museum
Here She Stands: Women Artists from the Permanent Collection
Extended to January 9, 2022
Curator: Sarah Vargas
Exhibition
The year 2020 is significant in women’s history as it marks the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States. As an homage to the audacity and perseverance of early American women, the Fresno Art Museum presents Here She Stands: Women Artists from the Permanent Collection. This exhibition highlights a selection of the phenomenal and groundbreaking work by women artists in the Fresno Art Museum’s permanent collection. Throughout history, women artists have been overlooked and excluded from the narrative. In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin wrote an essay for ARTnews titled “Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists?” Her argument wasn’t that there were no talented women artists but that systemic social, cultural, and political barriers prevented many women from participating and succeeding in the art world. In the forty-nine years since that article was published, much discourse has been produced on the subject, yet the art world still has much further to go.
The Fresno Art Museum has long been dedicated to the promotion of women artists. The first work by a woman artist in the museum’s permanent collection was Jean Ray Laury’s Tiger Garden (1962), acquired in 1963, just after the museum began building its permanent collection. Judy Chicago brought attention to women artists when she launched the first feminist art program at California State University, Fresno, in 1970. The Fresno Art Museum was the first museum in the United States to devote a full year of exhibitions (1986–87) exclusively to women artists, and this launched the annual Council of 100 Distinguished Woman Artist award and exhibition program that continues to this day.
The works selected for this exhibition reflect the diversity, depth, and creative vision of the many women who are represented in the museum’s permanent collection. Some of these artists are world renowned; some are best known in the local community. Selected with an emphasis on pieces that have not been frequently exhibited, the works are by artists including Helen Lundeberg, Claire Falkenstein, Isobel Sanford, Amy Kasai, Jean Ray Laury, June Wayne, and Marguerite Stix.
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
House to House: Women, Politics, and Place
September 26, 2020–February 6, 2021
Curator: Amy Galpin
Exhibition
In celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, House to House: Women, Politics, and Place examines the metaphor of two houses: the domestic space women have dominated and the public, political space where their voices are increasingly heard. On August 18, 1920, women in the United States gained the right to vote. A century later, women's access to equity in the social and political sphere continues to be at the forefront of the popular consciousness, especially with the increasing visibility of women as political leaders. Varied spaces where women have exercised agency from domestic spaces to beauty salons, factories and courtrooms, will be illustrated. This multimedia exhibition includes work by Aurora Molina, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Laurie Simmons, Mickalene Thomas, and Deborah Willis, among others.
Frye Art Museum
Unsettling Femininity: Selections from the Frye Art Museum Collection
September 21, 2020–May 30, 2021
Curator: Naomi Hume
Exhibition
Unsettling Femininity uses the specific lens of the Frye Art Museum’s Founding Collection to probe the politics of looking and to question our habitual ways of viewing images of women. The exhibition presents portrayals of mostly white women created during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily by German and Austrian artists. This selection reflects a particular area of interest for the museum’s founders, Charles and Emma Frye, Seattleites of German descent, who assembled their art collection mostly between 1900 and 1925.
Many of the works emphasize traits such as submissiveness, vulnerability, and sexual availability that correspond to pervasive nineteenth-century cultural attitudes about the ideal feminine nature and body. Others were intended to challenge the increasingly conservative Christian sensibilities prevalent in Bavaria with confrontational images that eroticize female religious figures. From a present-day perspective, these attributes highlight the performative nature of gender as specific sets of socially patterned behaviors informed by race and class. Whether these images associated women with virtue and beauty or danger and sex, they reinscribed moral boundaries that ultimately upheld the patriarchal status quo.
Organized around four primary themes—judgment, morality, performance, and artifice—the exhibition asks viewers to reconsider the very act of looking in all its positive and negative connotations. In doing so, it offers an invitation to unsettle and unpack these enduring, and often unquestioned, notions of femininity.
Agnieszka Polska: Love Bite
February 15, 2020–January 31, 2021
Curator: Amanda Donnan
Installation/videos
Agnieszka Polska’s computer-generated media works draw on language, history, and scientific theory to illuminate issues of individual and social responsibility. Combining original poetic texts with digitally manipulated imagery, her hallucinatory videos attempt to describe the overwhelming ethical ambiguities of our time. In this exhibition, the artist presents two immersive, deeply affecting audiovisual essays that address the urgent global issue of climate change and the specter of mass extinction.
The first installation pairs two videos, The New Sun and What the Sun Has Seen (both 2017) (now streaming online), depicting a sentient sun that is witness to environmental and ethical collapse on Earth. The sun speaks directly to the audience in half-sung monologues, moving through a range of emotional states and modes of address, from professing love and telling silly jokes to pondering the power of language to construct a new world order. The Happiest Thought (2019), meanwhile, takes us back to a prehistoric environment that might prefigure our own: Earth’s biosphere before the Permian-Triassic extinction, which occurred more than 250 million years ago and annihilated as much as 90 percent of life on the planet. The piece offers a hypnotic exploration of this lush and alluring ancient environment while contemplating humanity’s potential to overcome enormous threats like the climate crisis.
Incorporating online-video tactics such as emotional mimicry and ASMR triggers (heightened sounds and whispers that stimulate pleasant tingling sensations), Polska crafts a mesmerizing atmosphere to compete with what she calls the “environment of seduction” surrounding consumer marketing and organized religion.
Anastacia-Reneé: (Don’t be Absurd) Alice in Parts
January 30–April 25, 2021
Curator: David Strand
Exhibition/installation
Through her writing, performances, and installations, Anastacia-Reneé counteracts the erasure of marginalized identities in American society with an unflinching gaze directed toward collective liberation. In this exhibition, Anastacia-Reneé offers a rageful mediation on gentrification—of neighborhoods and its insidious effects on the body—as seen through the eyes of her multilayered and witty character Alice Metropolis.
Alice has appeared as a multidimensional character in Anastacia-Renee’s literary and interdisciplinary work for the past seven years. (Don’t be Absurd) Alice in Parts takes the shape of an immersive installation that guides museumgoers through the various rooms of Alice’s soon-to-be gentrified home. Through constructed tableaux incorporating poems, objects, personal effects, audio, and video, the exhibition charts the ways Alice strives for wholeness and transcendence against intersecting forms of systemic oppression that relentlessly fracture her sense of self.
Alice’s home is a place of refuge and nightmares, where she has built a spiritual sanctuary dedicated to “The Lorde”—as in the Black lesbian feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde (1934–1992)—as a source of strength amidst the past tragedies and present traumas that haunt her. Through Alice’s lived experience, Anastacia-Reneé provides an unsparing window into the world of an individual attempting to (permanently) stay one step ahead of the many forces that seek to erase her essence and existence.
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem
May 22–August 15, 2021
Curators: Connie H. Choi, Amanda Donnan, and David Strand
Exhibition
With works in all media by nearly eighty artists dating from the 1920s the present, Black Refractions presents nearly a century of creative achievements by artists of African descent. Celebrating the role of The Studio Museum in Harlem as a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society, this landmark exhibition proposes a plurality of narratives of Black artistic production and multiple approaches to understanding these works. Black Refractions reveals the breadth and expansive growth of The Studio Museum’s permanent collection and includes iconic pieces by artists such as Barkley Hendricks, Faith Ringgold, Lorna Simpson, Alma Thomas, and James VanDerZee, as well as Seattle’s own Jacob Lawrence and Noah Davis, among many others.
The Studio Museum in Harlem has served as a nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally since its founding in 1968. The museum’s artist-in-residence program—providing the “Studio” in the museum’s name—was established as an opportunity for emerging artists to create new work in the heart of Harlem, a neighborhood historically associated with Black cultural production. The program has supported many distinguished creators at decisive stages in their careers, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Chakaia Booker, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley, all of whom have work in the exhibition. Now, as The Studio Museum celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, Black Refractions will allow audiences across the country to engage more deeply with this important collection and provide additional contexts in which we can understand its powerful works.
Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Visible in the exterior Gallery 400 windows along Van Buren Street, Nia Easley’s text-based work And you hold power considers ideas of place and belonging in the midst of the ever-changing neighborhood around Gallery 400, as well as in the city of Chicago. Sited in public space, the work employs several languages (Ojibwe, Spanish, English, and Greek) specific and important historically to the neighborhood. Across three panels, Easley’s text addresses viewers directly, encouraging reflection on one’s agency in/on a site, in both the past and the future.
And you hold power is grounded in a project Easley has developed over the last year in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood. There, Easley has been investigating the history of the neighborhood, engaging residents and visitors in questions about how a neighborhood is built, by whom, and what happens when community members change.
Lise Haller Baggesen: Museums of Future Past Times Present Hatorade Retrograde: The Musical
February 5–March 27, 2021
Curator: Lorelei Stewart
Exhibition/performance
Centered on an eco-feminist science-fiction narrative of life in the year 2069, this exhibition includes Lise Haller Baggesen’s handmade costumes, lightbox portraits, and video of the 2019 performance of Hatorade Retrograde: The Musical.
Combining countercultural history of the late 1960s, science fiction, and camp, the central story imagines resistance to a future dystopia impacted by cataclysmic climate change and an oppressive technocracy. The characters of Hatorade Retrograde: The Musical struggle to survive and understand the world they live in, on the toxic outskirts of a domed city. The immersive soundtrack features a score composed by avery r young, who draws heavily on funk and psychedelic music of the late 1960s.
Hatorade Retrograde: The Musical will be performed live by Chicago-based dancers in spring 2021. The performance, at an outdoor location on Chicago’s southside, features new, site-specific choreography by Aaliyah Christina.
GYOPO
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee: A Marathon Reading
December 3, 2021, 1–5 pm (PST)
University of Southern California (USC)
Curator: Yong Soon Min
Performance
GYOPO and USC will co-present “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee: A Marathon Reading” on December 3, 2021. A long-anticipated event, this performative reading will feature the genre-defying novel Dictee by internationally renowned artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), whose interdisciplinary practice included performance, video, and written text, among other mediums.
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s birth, USC students and guests will collectively read Dictee in its entirety, both orally and in ASL. The event will also include presentations by Laura Hyun Yi Kang (UC Irvine), Lawrence Rinder (UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive), and John H. Cha (the artist’s brother and biographer); projected images of Theresa Cha’s work; and selected video works, addressing the sobering consequences of colonialism, forced migration, displacement, and violence.
The event will also be livestreamed.
Hammer Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Witch Hunt
October 10, 2021—January 10, 2022
Curators: Connie Butler and Anne Ellegood, with Nika Chilewich
Exhibition
Witch Hunt is an international group exhibition showcasing the work of 16 artists who use feminist, queer, and decolonial strategies to investigate current and historical political events, social conditions, and overlooked or suppressed artistic legacies. The artists have demonstrated decades-long commitments to feminist creative practice as a subversive, expansive, and oftentimes collaborative methodology. Together, their works provide an opportunity to examine ideas, expand awareness, and encourage dialogue about urgent contemporary issues such as the body and its vulnerabilities; women’s rights and representation; the erasure of women’s contributions to critical movements and histories; the impact of technologies of surveillance; environmental justice; the queering of political discourse; the imperative for feminist practice to be inclusive and intersectional; and the power of collective action.
The 15 projects in Witch Hunt employ a variety of mediums—painting, sculpture, video, photography, sound, and performance—and consistently argue for the value of a critical feminist perspective within the subject matter, production, and presentation of contemporary art. Witch Hunt asks how artistic practices informed by feminist ideologies can meaningfully amplify debates within contemporary culture and politics. The projects in the exhibition constitute an art of resistance, disrupting cultural discourse and proposing new ways of thinking and enacting change at a moment of unprecedented suffering and upheaval across the globe.
Witch Hunt offers an incisive survey of complex and impactful practices by some of the most influential artists working today. The show includes newly commissioned works as well as major projects that have yet to be shown on the West Coast or in the United States. Together with the accompanying catalogue and a robust series of public programs and performances, the exhibition highlights artists from diverse cultural positions who argue for the productive capacity of subversive female voices in ongoing efforts to create a future characterized by equity and inclusion.
Included artists: Leonor Antunes (Portuguese), Yael Bartana (Israeli), Pauline Boudry (Swiss) & Renate Lorenz (German), Candice Breitz (South African), Shu Lea Cheang (Taiwanese), Minerva Cuevas (Mexican), Vaginal Davis (American), Every Ocean Hughes (American), Bouchra Khalili (Moroccan), Laura Lima (Brazilian), Teresa Margolles (Mexican), Otobong Nkanga (Nigerian), Okwui Okpokwasili (Nigerian American), Lara Schnitger (Dutch), and Beverly Semmes (American).
Witch Hunt is curated by Connie Butler, Hammer Museum chief curator, and Anne Ellegood, ICA LA Good Works executive director, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant. The exhibition is organized by the Hammer Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA).
Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle
To amplify the FAC message of inclusion and social justice, the Henry is dedicating its complete gallery footprint to exhibitions conceived under this rubric in fall 2020. FAC thought and content will additionally run across our programmatic endeavors during this time period.
Diana Al-Hadid: Archive of Longings
October 2, 2021–February 6, 2022
Curator: Shamim M. Momin
Exhibition
Exploring and expanding the interplay between the female body and the European art canon; Syrian, Muslim, and immigrant histories and mythologies; architectural icons; and the natural world, Diana Al-Hadid’s work informs and enriches these discussions. Born in Aleppo, Syria, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Al-Hadid (b. 1981) creates artworks that speak to her Arab, Muslim family background in concert with an interest in the melding of cultures and the transmogrification of traditional and artistic narratives. Ideas of spirituality, sci-fi, and science coalesce around a drive toward transformation, subjecthood, agency, and active presence, particularly with respect to the female figure.
This monographic exhibition (the artist’s first in the Pacific Northwest and among her first on the West Coast) will consist of a selection of ten to fifteen large-scale sculptural works made between 2010 and 2020—including one major new commission and several newly created bronze sculptures—brought into interpretive grouping for the first time. The lacy, liquid forms of the sculptural installations, embedded with suggestions of the female figure, evoke natural landscapes—grottoes, mountains, decaying walls, and caves. Requiring intense physicality and technical expertise to create, these sculptures appear fragile but are structurally robust. Made from extruded metal, polymer gypsum, and other materials, the works invert ideas of support and foundation. Together, the sculptures identify the artist’s investigation of historical, mythological, and biblical narratives of women as a fundamental through line in her practice. While AI-Hadid’s work is often interpreted primarily in relation to her interest in the art historical canon, this exhibition situates the artist’s deployment of these influences as advancing a network of feminist concerns: the female protagonist and its conflicted history, women’s agency and power, self-actualized identity, and subjugation.
Math Bass: a picture stuck in the mirror
October 16, 2021–March 6, 2022
Curator: Shamim M. Momin
Exhibition
Los Angeles–based artist Math Bass (b. 1981, New York) will create a site-specific installation featuring a commissioned series of paintings, kinetic wall work, and sculptures directly inspired by the Henry’s architecture. In Bass’s work, brightly colored and cryptic, stylized forms—often inspired by the body—are abstracted into a densely graphic, nonnarrative language. Addressing the centrality of the body via the play between its absence and suggested presence, Bass’s painting and sculptural practice has evolved from their initial work as a performance and video artist, where the tracking of the body’s motion and transit through the world is central. The intersection of sculptures, paintings, and architecture becomes important as well: delimiting spectators’ progress through the installation, Bass brings forth the idea of piercing, projecting through, and resisting space.
During their site visit, Bass particularly responded with the theatrical possibilities and multiple perspectives offered by the Henry’s East Gallery, in which their work will be exhibited: in this double-height space, audiences experience the Gallery not only on the ground level but also from an overlook on the Henry’s mezzanine. Bass has referred to their sculptural pieces as “props,” foregrounding the performative interplay among art, artist, and viewer inherent to their installations. The installation will be activated through interventions in situ, notably in a performative lecture conducted by the artist.
Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law
February 27– May 9, 2021
Curator: Nina Bozicnik, in collaboration with Mercer Union, Toronto
Exhibition and new commission
Bugs & Beasts Before the Law (2019) is an experimental essay film by Bambitchell, the artistic collaboration of Sharlene Bamboat (b. 1984, Pakistan; lives and works in Canada) and Alexis Mitchell (b. 1983, Canada; lives and works in Scotland). The artists’ single-channel film, shot in 16mm color and HD video, poses questions about the administration of justice and rights under the law that are essential to an appreciation of the political dimensions of feminism.
This presentation marks the duo’s first museum exhibition in the U.S. and their first significant publication. Commissioned by Mercer Union and co-produced by the Henry, the film explores the history and legacy of the “animal trials” that took place in medieval and early modern Europe and its network of colonies, in which animals—and other nonhumans, such as insects and inanimate objects—were put on trial for various crimes and offenses. The film follows events from the fourteenth through the early twentieth century, questioning how power is performed through the body of the other. Each of the film’s five chapters centers on a specific “trial” or type of trial that engages questions about how the law mediates social relations and personhood through such processes as the formation of property and the criminalization of sexual difference. These stories of the past are narrated against the contemporary landscape and within constructed tableaux, blurring past and present, fact and fiction, and creating an absurdist narrative of the justice system that is all too resonant today.
The installation of Bugs & Beasts features an immersive audio score developed by Richy Carey with Bambitchell and a built amphitheater structure that accentuates the spectacle and function of the animal trials as tools of social control. A new configuration of the artists’ archival research material will also feature in the installation as evidence of how these trials figure in the historic imaginary, and lay the groundwork for the mechanisms of legal practice that shape contemporary society and are of continued concern for contemporary feminisms. An accompanying 120-page publication will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition, also featuring archival material and research documents. It will include an essay by legal scholar Sarah Keenan (Centre for Research on Race and Law, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London) and an introduction by Henry Associate Curator Nina Bozicnik and Mercer Union Director of Exhibitions & Programs Julia Paoli.
Plural Possibilities & the Female Body
February 27–May 9, 2021
Curators: Ann Poulson and Nina Bozicnik
Exhibition
Three exhibitions drawn from a feminist and social justice reading of the Henry’s Permanent Collection, including both historical selections and a contemporary grouping addressing the gendered construction and deconstruction of the woman-identified body, comprise the fourth component of the museum’s commitment to FAC. Organized by Henry Associate Curator of Collections Ann Poulson and Associate Curator Nina Bozicnik, these shows will consist of works selected for their resonance with the themes, content, and aesthetic approaches of the concurrent exhibitions.
High Museum of Art
Pioneers, Influencers, and Rising Voices: Women in the Collection
March 6, 2020–ongoing
Curator: Michael Rooks
Permanent collection installation
In observance of the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote, this installation is drawn from the High Museum of Art’s collection and features artworks made exclusively by women. Artists include some of the most influential voices of the past fifty years, such as Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, and Shirin Neshat; midcareer artists such as Won Ju Lim and Chantal Joffe; and emerging artists such as Jamian Juliano Villani and Ella Kruglyanskaya. Whether exploring the multidimensionality of installation art, refashioning Minimalist forms and strategies, or challenging male-dominated social hierarchies, the selected works are inspired by or related to feminist concerns advanced by the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Concerns that persist today include voter suppression strategies that seek to disenfranchise people from participating in the democratic process.
Underexposed: Women Photographers from the Collection
April 17–August 1, 2021
Curator: Sarah Kennel and Maria L. Kelly
Exhibition
For nearly all of photography’s 180-year history, women have shaped the development of the art form and experimented with every aspect of the medium. Conceived in conjunction with the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women’s suffrage, this exhibition showcases more than one hundred photographs from the High’s collection, and charts the medium’s history from the dawn of the modern period to the present through the work of women photographers. Organized roughly chronologically, each section emphasizes a distinct arena in which women contributed and often led the way, as pioneers of the medium in its early days; as modernists exploring abstraction, light, and form; as professional photographers working in photojournalism, advertising, and documentary modes; as avid experimenters and tinkerers with photographic processes; as politically engaged actors using the medium to address contemporary concerns; and as individuals exploring and often challenging the social constructions of gender, sexuality, and identity in the twentieth century and the contemporary moment.
Hyde Park Art Center
Mujeres Mutantes
February 3–December 4, 2020
Curators: Allison Peters Quinn and Megha Ralapati
Mural / public art
Mujeres Mutantes (MM) joins the Jackman Goldwasser Residency program through December 2020 to research and plan new conscious-raising public projects around Chicago. MM is an all-woman Latinx art collective founded in 2012 by Naomi Martinez and Delilah Salgado to empower women to make art, share stories, and promote art as a healing practice for communities affected by street violence and domestic abuse. During the residency, the group is creating a large mural mourning the loss of Black and brown bodies in our neighborhoods, to be included in the Hyde Park Art Center exhibition Artists Run Chicago 2.0 (September 1–November 1, 2020). The group’s goal is to be a platform for collaborations and exhibitions with like-minded women who are already working independently to challenge the status quo in the art community. MM is an eclectic group of multidisciplinary artists who are also local business owners, mothers, and educators who believe that public art nurtures community and that creative expression is crucial to our self-actualization leading to societal change.
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University
Fernanda Laguna: As Everybody
October 10, 2020–April 25, 2021
Curator: Dominic Willsdon
Exhibition
Fernanda Laguna (b. 1972, Buenos Aires) is a visual artist working primarily in painting and drawing, a curator of alternative art spaces, a novelist and poet, an activist, and a community worker. Her paintings and drawings combine a kitsch or folk art aesthetic with the traditions of Surrealism and abstraction prevalent in Argentina throughout the modern era. The ICA exhibition will be Laguna’s first solo exhibition in the United States showing a range of her activities. It will comprise approximately forty paintings from the last ten years, an installation of High on the Tide, a newspaper produced by the artist with the community in Villa Fiorito, and a play based on one of her recent novels. Cecilia Palmeiro will work on programming in conjunction with the show, in collaboration with Virginia Commonwealth University.
Kandis Williams: A Field
November 6, 2020–September 12, 2021
Curator: Amber Esseiva
Performance/new commission
Kandis Williams is an artist, educator, writer, and publisher based in Los Angeles, California. Williams’s multifaceted practice utilizes collage, printmaking, video, and performance to layer theories and mythologies attributed to women throughout history. From Greek mythology to psychoanalysis to popular culture, Williams transforms representations of desire and hysteria to recode how women are consumed and fetishized. Williams’s new commission for the ICA will merge, for the first time, the artist’s work in visual art, publishing (Cassandra Press), and performance, transforming the gallery into a space for reading image, text, and the body.
Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston
Deana Lawson
November 4, 2021–February 27, 2022
Curators: Eva Respini and Peter Eleey
Exhibition
This exhibition is the first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson (b. 1979, Rochester, New York). Lawson is a singular voice in photography today. For over fifteen years, she has been investigating and challenging the conventional representations of Black life, with a particular focus on the body, through highly staged, large-format color photographs. Drawing on a wide spectrum of photographic languages—including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images—Lawson’s posed photographs channel broader ideas about personal and social histories, sexuality, and spiritual beliefs. Many of her photographs portray or articulate a position of female desire, an often-unarticulated perspective in photography. Her concerns for real and imagined kinship extend powerfully to relationships between women, and between women and their environments, linking notions of motherhood and sisterhood to modes of public and private self-fashioning.
The exhibition will include a selection of approximately fifty photographs from 2004 to the present, including new work. Co-organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston and MoMA PS1, the exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring the voices and perspectives of a variety of scholars, historians, and writers.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs
September 26, 2020–January 10, 2021
Curator: Jamillah James
Exhibition
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will present an exhibition of Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist Stanya Kahn (b. 1968, San Francisco). Kahn works primarily in film and video, with a practice that includes drawing, sound, performance, sculpture and writing. Humor, pathos, and the uncanny are central to Kahn’s hybrid approach to moving image, which seeks to reorient relationships between fiction and document, the real and hyper-real, and varied expressions of time. This exhibition will comprise three videos by Kahn produced over the past ten years: It’s Cool, I’m Good (2010); Stand in the Stream (2011–17), and her latest short film, No Go Backs (2020), marking its Los Angeles debut. Together, they present an urgent reflection on our times, foregrounding global concerns such as climate change, racism, state power, and rebellion with the artist’s singular humor and embrace of experimental time and narrative.
Completed earlier this year, No Go Backs follows two teenagers (and real-life friends) who leave the city for the wild, traveling through the monumental landscapes of the Eastern Sierra, encountering other youth along the way and forming camaraderie in facing the unknown. A timely indictment of current crises and a meditation on an uncertain future, No Go Backs is an allegorical epic about a generation that must find a new way forward. Stand in the Stream, an ambient digital feature film shot or screen-captured in real time over the course of six years, situates intimacies from Kahn’s life within a visceral reflection of power and uprising in late capitalism, revealing the many intersections of the personal and the political. It’s Cool, I’m Good features a severely injured protagonist (played by the artist) whose metaphoric embodiment of overwhelming psychic and environmental stress remains prescient and relatable, ten years later.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight
October 28, 2021–April 17, 2022
Curator: Stephanie Seidel
Exhibition
ICA Miami’s presentation of American artist Betye Saar will survey her immersive, site-specific installations from 1980 to 1998, many of which have been recently rediscovered and will be exhibited for the first time in decades. Rooted in the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and intersectional feminism as well as the racialized and gendered connotations of found objects, Saar’s installations expand on her celebrated repertoire and offer broadened insight into ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies in relation to the African American experience and the African diaspora.
Influenced by research trips to Haiti, Mexico, and Nigeria undertaken by the artist in the 1970s, the installations explore concepts of ritual and community through both cultural symbols and autobiographical references.
The exhibition features a selection of the significant installations, including Oasis (1985), House of Fortune (1988), The Ritual Journey, and Wings of Morning (both 1992), that draw from the history of the African diaspora and the African American experience to create tangible and powerful monuments.
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (ICA Philadelphia)
RAW Académie Session 9: Infrastructure, directed by Linda Goode Bryant
February 11–July 10, 2022
Curators: Dulcie Abrahams Altass, Linda Goode Bryant, Alex Klein, Koyo Kouoh, and Marie Hélène Pereira
Exhibition
RAW Académie Session 9: Infrastructure is the result of a long-term dialogue between the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (ICA), and RAW Material Company, Dakar, Senegal. The project is collaboratively organized by ICA’s Alex Klein, Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Curator; Koyo Kouoh, executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, and founder of RAW Material Company; and Marie Hélène Pereira, director of RAW Material Company, along with her entire team. The RAW Académie is rooted in the question “How do we learn from each other?” in order to provide an alternative, horizontal mode of pedagogy that, in the process, dismantles hierarchical and biased systems of knowledge production. Over the course of a seven-week “Académie,” RAW will relocate their staff and organization to Philadelphia in a radical experiment in institutional hospitality. The resulting exhibition will challenge notions of authorship and asserts that the creative process is collaborative.
Working with artist, curator, activist, and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant, RAW will engage an international group of fellows and interdisciplinary visiting faculty in the production of a seminar program, research, public-facing events, and exhibition. Under the direction of Goode Bryant, the session will propose a different model for the infrastructure and value system for contemporary art and includes contributions from Gudskul, Rujeko Hockley, Arthur Jafa, Thomas Lax, Louis Massiah, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and Greg Tate.
International Arts and Artists and South Bend Museum of Art
Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936–Present
Touring: October 2020–September 2023
Curator: Rebecca DiGiovanna
Exhibition
In contrast to the other artist collectives, where equal footing for women was unusual, American Abstract Artists (AAA) in New York provided a place of refuge for women artists. Blurring Boundaries explores their astounding range of styles, including their individual approaches to the guiding principles of abstraction: color, space, light, material, and process. In celebration of this tradition, this exhibition traces the extraordinary contributions of the female artists within AAA from the founders to today’s practicing members. Included are works by historic members Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Esphyr Slobodkina, Irene Rice Pereira, Alice Trumbull Mason, and Gertrude Greene, as well as current members such as Ce Roser, Irene Rousseau, Judith Murray, Alice Adams, Merrill Wagner, and Katinka Mann.
Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery is pleased to present Ilana Harris-Babou: Long Con, premiering the artist’s most recent video work, Long Con. The new video skewers the wellness industry through stories about well-known fortune-tellers and health gurus such as the Honduran healer Alfredo Darrington Bowman (aka Dr. Sebi) and Youree Dell Harris (aka Psychic Readers Network spokeswoman Miss Cleo).
Commissioned by The Black Embodiments Studio, Long Con is presented alongside two of Harris-Babou’s other recent video works: 2019’s Decision Fatigue, a parody of wellness culture that takes the form of a makeup tutorial; and 2018’s Reparation Hardware, a scathing critique of consumerism that promises absolution from the incalculable violence of slavery through handcrafted objects.
Ilana Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary, spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever-unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe, with solo exhibitions at the Museum of Arts & Design and Larrie in New York. Other venues include Abrons Art Center, the Jewish Museum, SculptureCenter, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the de Young Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Harris-Babou has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Artforum, and Art in America, among others. She holds an MFA in visual art from Columbia University and a BA in art from Yale University.
Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
Reseeing the Schnitzer Collection with Judy Chicago [tentative title]
Spring 2021
Curator: Judy Chicago
Exhibition
Judy Chicago, one of the world’s most important feminist artists, will curate an exhibition from the collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, one of the world’s largest and most important print collections. The Schnitzer holdings include works by many women artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, Alison Saar, Louise Nevelson, Kiki Smith, Lesley Dill, Kara Walker, Hung Liu, Deborah Oropallo, and Sue Coe, among others. The exhibition can be toured via the online virtual gallery on the Schnitzer Foundation website.
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
A Woman’s Worth considers the representation of women by male artists from the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Paintings and prints from JSMA’s permanent collection explore archetypal ideals of feminine virtues, the objectification of the female form, and woman as model and muse. Through the lens of feminist theory, the exhibition reflects on the social and aesthetic values assigned to women when represented as symbolic vessels, anonymous beauties, or passive bodies to be manipulated and viewed by male artists and a patriarchal cultural.
Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois
Hive
January 30, 2020–May 16, 2021
Curators: Amy L. Powell and Clara Bosak-Schroeder
Exhibition
Hive is a site-specific sculpture and sound commission by Nancy Davidson and Lakshmi Ramgopal, two artists with distinctive practices collaborating for the first time at Krannert Art Museum (KAM). The installation features two inflatable sculptures by Davidson, each approaching twenty feet tall and lit from within, filling the portico of KAM’s Kinkead Pavilion. The portico presents the museum as a temple that references the ancient world through the structure’s large-scale, classicizing columns and inscribed frieze.
The artists’ inspiration is Artemis of Ephesus, a cult goddess of the ancient Mediterranean. Davidson’s sculptures exaggerate Artemis’s bodily qualities: her multiple breasts a sign of fertility, possibly in the form of a beehive or bull testicles. A braid emerges from the top of each sculpture, trailing to the floor, suggesting caryatids—an architectural feature in which figures of women with braided hair provide physical support for a building.
Roman historian and multidisciplinary artist Ramgopal completes the installation with sound. Deep inhales, sighs, clicks, and hums reverberate and clip through the space. To make the work, Ramgopal recorded vocalizations from non-binary and women-identified collaborators, some of whom live with disabilities and chronic illness. Focusing on bodily breath and questioning what constitutes a feminine sound, Ramgopal arranged sections of the composition and left others randomized by computer algorithm.
To expand and comment upon the project’s questions, the curators have developed an adjacent collections installation of art from antiquity to the present day.
Homemade, with Love: More Living Room
August 27, 2020–July 3, 2021
Curator: Blair Ebony Smith, DRIVE postdoctoral fellow in art education
Multimedia performance installation
What would it mean to co-create and be in a homemade space of interior world-making imagined for and with Black girls, women, and femmes as part of their everyday creative livelihoods? Homemade, with Love: More Living Room is a multimedia performance installation of artwork made during Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truth’s (SOLHOT) sessions locally at Urbana and Franklin Middle Schools. It includes a portion of Unheard Sounds, Come Through, an installation by St. Louis–based artist Jen Everett, and works by Black women artists in KAM’s collection, including Carrie Mae Weems, Margo Humphrey, and Doris Derby. The installation will also include films from Kamari Smalls, Ruth Nicole Brown, and Paris Cian that explore Black girls’ relationships to home, land, and Black girlhood. The artists featured visualize and sound Black everyday life, celebration, and interiority with Black girlhood and feminist poetics, art, and collective care in mind. Homemade, more than an art exhibition, will be co-curated with SOLHOT as a home space that prioritizes Black girls’ creative lives. This evolving installation makes room for the celebration, creativity, and imagination of Black girls, women, and femmes.
Pressing Issues: Printmaking as Social Justice in 1930s United States
October 3–December 23, 2020
Curator: Kathryn Koca Polite
Exhibition
Pressing Issues brings together work by artists in the 1930s United States who, through their art, produced radical, critical commentaries on the social injustices plaguing the country at that time.
Relying primarily on rarely displayed Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) prints in KAM’s collection, the exhibition organizes art into themes of labor unrest (exploitation, economic disparity, and gender inequalities), discrimination and racial violence, and reactions to the rise of fascism. In particular, traditionally underrepresented voices of women in the workforce will be emphasized, reflecting distinctions that are at play during this tumultuous era. Pressing Issues is especially timely in that it connects this past to a present in which the current political climate in the United States is revisiting similar themes of isolationism and nationalism, populism and fascism, and racial violence.
Pressing Issues will be on view leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Given the social and economic upheaval experienced in the United States in the last decade, including the revival of fascist ideologies and the refugee crisis in America, this exhibition provides a visceral and much-needed reminder of how visual artists call attention to and combat various forms of oppression.
Artists include Ida Abelman, Carlos Andreson, Phil Bard, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Leroy Flint, Michael Gallagher, Minetta Good, Boris Gorelick, Harry Gottlieb, Riva Helfond, Jacob Kainen, Florence Kent, Chet La More, Joseph Leboit, Nan Lurie, Kyra Markham, Hugh Miller, Charles Ramus, Lillian Richter, Bernard Schardt, Herman Volz, Albert Webb, and Hale Woodruff.
Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory
November 5, 2020–March 6, 2021
Curators: Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Jamie Allen, and Amy L. Powell
Exhibition
Bea Nettles explores the narrative potential of photography through constructed images often made with alternative photographic processes. The first large-scale retrospective of her fifty-year career, Bea Nettles: Harvest of Memory demonstrates this celebrated artist’s experimental approaches to art making. Combining craft and photography, Nettles’s work makes use of wide-ranging tools and materials, including fabric and stitching, Instamatic cameras, the book format, manually applied color, and hand-coated photographic emulsions. Her imagery evokes metaphors that reference key stages in the lives of women, often with autobiographic undertones, and her key motifs draw upon mythology, family, motherhood, place, landscape, dreams, aging, and the passage of time.
A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing
August 26, 2021–February 26, 2022
Curator: Amy L. Powell
Exhibition
A Question of Emphasis: Louise Fishman Drawing is the first career-spanning exhibition and publication of Fishman’s works on paper from 1964 to the present. Citing John Cage’s response in 1965 to the question “What is drawing?,” A Question of Emphasis encompasses collage, oil and wax, thread, acrylic text, ink, charcoal, printmaking, oil stick, watercolor, and tempera in Japanese-bound Leporello (accordion) books.
Fishman’s drawings are distinctive within her full oeuvre because many are dedicated to lovers—an illustrious network of lesbian writers, scholars, and critics that includes Bertha Harris; Esther Newton; and Ingrid Nyeboe, Fishman’s spouse and longtime partner of the late critic and writer Jill Johnston. Fishman’s works on paper also honor the artist’s greatest teachers—Paul Cézanne, Piet Mondrian, Franz Kline, John Cage, Eva Hesse, and Agnes Martin among them. Some works are collaborative, including prints Fishman made using her artist mother’s collagraphic plates, and her “angry women” acrylic text series made for friends and muses during periods of feminist consciousness raising in the 1970s. Drawing is often perceived as a window to an artist’s interiority and a spontaneous activity that happens more readily than painting on canvas. This project is a curatorial experiment that instead follows Fishman’s lead, through drawing, to convene a community of living and historical figures that are integral to the construction of self. While centered on the artist’s hand, Fishman’s works on paper are in fact radically open and give audiences a strong perspective of artmaking as a world-making project.
A Question of Emphasis examines the relationship between artist’s biography and drawing through feminist and queer perspectives. Drawing is often perceived as a window to an artist’s interiority and a spontaneous activity that happens more readily than painting on canvas. This project is a curatorial experiment that instead follows Fishman’s lead, through drawing, to convene a community of living and historical figures that are integral to the construction of self. While centered on the artist’s hand, Fishman’s works on paper are in fact radically open and give audiences a strong perspective of artmaking as a world-making project.
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento
May 15–August 14, 2021
(programming begins Fall 2020)
Curator: Daniela Lieja Quintanar
Exhibition
Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento is a group exhibition and diasporic research project that focuses on strategies of coalitions, collective life, and our cosmic condition to resist the historical violence generated from physical and conceptual borders and severe immigration policies. The border has become the ultimate machine of necropolitics and the nullification of the human body, a system led by the United States. Intergalactix further investigates the implications of borders and how their construction is conducive to violence against womxn, femme, and trans individuals. Intergalactix presents a platform of exchange and dialogue among artists, poets, activists, curators, and writers from diverse fields and practices all working against isolation.
Intergalactix maps connections, intimacies, and histories across physical and symbolic borders between multiple communities. Rather than reaffirming the geographical borders that isolate us within North and South America, Intergalactix seeks to destabilize their formation and examine a network of resistance, a web of forces, a collective of work that spirals from the heart of the continent, Central America.
This exhibition features newly commissioned work by Tanya Aguiñiga, Beatriz Cortez, and Cog•nate Collective, among other artists.
Intergalactix holds dialogue with An Offering of Honor, a performance by Amitis Motevalli that challenges the normalization of domestic and intimate violence against girls, femme, and womxn, and the underreported cases of femicide across the globe. See the performance in LACE’s storefront here.
Official programming for Intergalactix will begin in fall 2020 with a series of closed encuentros, one of which will be in collaboration with Motevalli.
LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division)
LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) presents Gatherings, an exhibition of public sculptures, performances, and programs. Guided by sculpture and performance’s shared principle of care, as applied to material such as clay or flesh, Gatherings frames public spaces as sites for reconvening with each other and the land. Gatherings reimagines public sculpture as conduits for contemplation—capable of nurturing artistic and contemplative practices. This reimagination is led by but not exclusive to artistic practices built upon ancestral knowledge, teachings, and mythologies that have been historically devalued for their feminine connotations. Gatherings amplifies these communal and loving-orientated practices, welding them to reimagine all forms of relation. Artist list forthcoming.
Lawndale Art Center, Houston
Feminist Memory in Latinx/Chicanx Print Culture
September–December 2020
Curator: Emily Butts
Exhibition
Print culture and graphic arts have long been a way to communicate countercultural sentiments that stand against and outside patriarchal, colonialist, and “mainstream” institutions. Feminist Memory in Latinx/Chicanx Print Culture will look at the history of Chicanx/Latinx print culture, with an emphasis on gendered forms of expression and feminist exercises of resistance. The ephemeral nature of print culture—which includes political prints, zines, and mail art, among others—reinforces the precarious nature of political resistance as well as supports the democratic method of communication as both inclusive and equitable. These alternative spaces of communication and representation are created to circulate and sustain a radical spirit of political activism. With works from the civil rights era to present-day musings on feminism, race, gender, politics, and power, this exhibition highlights experimental visual practices and the power of language in building communities across geographic regions and digital realms.
LAXART, Los Angeles
At a date to be announced, LAXART will present a symposium in advance of the group exhibition Life on Earth: Ecofeminist Art since 1979. A central component of exhibition research, this symposium will convene scholars, artists, activists, and art historians to discuss historical and current topics around ecofeminist art. The exhibition itself will survey four decades of ecofeminist thought and action in art.
Ecofeminism is a theoretical, academic, and activist movement that locates critical connections between gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources. It developed in the early 1980s from the environmental, antinuclear, and feminist movements; in addition to its primary concerns around the subordination of nature and women, ecofeminism sought to resist racism, homophobia, and the capitalist patriarchy. As ecofeminist thought spread, women artists became key proponents of the new movement. This symposium and exhibition will consider the important new forms of art that built upon the feminist, conceptual, site-specific, and performance art of the 1970s to draw critical parallels between the exploitation of nature and women. Topics addressed will include antinuclear activism, environmental racism, indigenous rights, social ecology, gender injustice, water rights, lesbian separatism, and reproductive issues, among other important themes.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Cauleen Smith is a Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. A traveling solo exhibition of film, video, and sculpture, Give It or Leave It features a series of experimental portraits of different sites related to spirituality, creativity, and utopianism. Much of the research conducted for Smith’s film projects has taken place in California, on location at Alice Coltrane’s ashram, the Vedantic Center, and in history through a restaging of a photograph of nine dapper Black men taken in 1966 at the Watts Towers by Bill Ray. Additional archival research delves into the nineteenth-century Black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson, who was the Eldress of the first Black Shaker community in Philadelphia. These separate and unrelated universes coalesce into an emotional cosmos in Give It or Leave It.
Louisville Metro Hall / Louisville’s Commission on Public Art (COPA) and Louisville Visual Art (LVA)
BallotBox uses an intersectional lens to examine past and present voting rights and connections between the centennial of the 19th Amendment, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act; and this year’s presidential and state-wide elections. The year 2020 is significant for reflection on what a vote is worth, while considering contemporary voter engagement and the monumental efforts in past decades to secure voting rights in the United States. Using art as a catalyst for community engagement, five artists with diverse practices have drawn on personal stories and historical narrative to create new work that explores issues related to voting rights, democracy, and citizenship.
BallotBox creates a bridge between art and activism by sharing personal and political narratives, inspiring voter engagement, and creating a public dialog about how we can build a more equitable democracy. Sandra Charles (Louisville, KY), Brianna Harlan (Brooklyn, NY), Jennifer Maravillas (Brooklyn, NY), Taylor Sanders (Louisville, KY), and James R. Southard (Lexington, KY) are participating artists. BallotBox is curated by Skylar Smith, and is in partnership with Louisville Metro, Louisville Visual Art, and What is a Vote Worth Louisville. BallotBox is funded by an “Advancing Democracy, Building Power” grant from Kentucky Foundation for Women and a Great Meadows Foundation Curator Grant.
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Gladys Nilsson: Out of This World
August 6, 2020–June 6, 2021
Curator: Mel Becker Solomon
Exhibition
Spanning four decades of Chicago Imagist and Hairy Who artist Gladys Nilsson’s career, this exhibition features the complexly layered watercolors that humorously exaggerate the everyday. Larger-than-life women are blissfully content when surrounded by clusters of tiny people engaged in silly and sometimes sinister behaviors. The painted multilevel narratives of the “everyday woman” invite the viewer in to explore, examine, and investigate—the very act of looking that Nilsson employs when generating the imagery for her work. Nilsson’s collages, watercolors, and prints are a delightful recording of human foibles and the humorous interactions that pervade the mundane while addressing issues of domesticity, aging, and vanity.
Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York
Maya Lin: Ghost Forest
May 10–November 14, 2021
Curators: Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Tom Reidy
Exhibition
For Madison Square Park Conservancy’s forty-first public art commission, Maya Lin realized a new, site-responsive installation that brings into focus the ravages of climate change on woodlands around the world. Ghost Forest takes the form of a towering grove of spectral cedar trees, all sourced from the region and presented in sharp contrast to the Park’s lush tree line. The work’s name derives from the natural phenomenon of ghost forests, vast tracts of forestland that have died off due to climate change, sea-level rise, and saltwater infiltration. Ghost Forest builds on Lin’s practice of addressing climate change within her work and serves as a call to action to the 60,000 visitors who pass through the Park daily. The installation is complemented by a series of public programs, lectures, and events that explore the challenges of climate change and propose potential nature-based solutions.
To create Ghost Forest, Lin worked with the Conservancy to source dead trees from the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, a vulnerable site that has suffered severe deprivation. The Atlantic Cedars installed in the Park were all afflicted by extreme salinization during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, victims of rising seas and salt-water inundation, and slated to be cleared to allow for the regeneration of surrounding trees. The installation brings the dire reality of this naturally occurring phenomenon to audiences in a dense urban environment and encourages a consideration of nature-based practices that can protect and restore the ecosystem.
Mandeville Gallery, Union College
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter is a mixed-media painter from upstate New York. She is a 2021 Foreland Studio Fellow and a 2020 Sustainable Arts Foundation recipient. She has been awarded residencies at the Fountainhead Residency, the Millay Colony for the Arts, NXTHVN, Vermont Studio Center, the Wassaic Project, and Yaddo. She has participated in group exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery (New York City), Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago), and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (London), and she has an upcoming solo show at Fridman Gallery (Beacon, New York).
Sikelianos-Carter asserts that Black features are a manifestation of a sacred and divine technology that has served as a means of survival, both physically and metaphysically. She envisions a cosmically bountiful world that celebrates and pays homage to ancestral majesty, power, and aesthetics. Inspired by traditionally Black hairstyles, Sikelianos-Carter uses web- and catalog-sourced images to construct new archetypes. Through her exploration of opulent, luminescent materials, she is creating a mythology that is centered on Black resistance and uses the body as a site of alchemy and divinity.
Massachusetts College of Art and Design + MassArt Art Museum
Creative Counterpoints: Uprooted, Translated (panel discussion)
Wednesday, April 14, 2021, 6:30–8 pm (EST)
Curators: Darci Hanna and Marika Preziuso
Livestream reading and artist talk
Creative Counterpoints—an annual MassArt series founded and organized by Marika Preziuso, associate professor of world literature—is devoted to the intersections of narratives of creativity and difference as investigated by visual artists, writers, public intellectuals, and other culture makers. The speaking program specifically addresses gender and sexual identities in difference, looking at the contemporary world of the arts and culture within the U.S. and transnationally. Past Creative Counterpoints speakers include Maria Popova, media producer, blogger, and founder of Brain Pickings; and Jack Halberstam, prolific author and professor of English and gender studies at Columbia University.
We are excited to contribute to the Feminist Art Coalition in spring 2021 with a program that reflects the call of twenty-first-century feminism to engage critically with transnational arts and activism. The event will feature two prominent women creatives—author and activist Valeria Luiselli (Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive) and visual artist Scherezade Garcia—who employ their talent to tell narratives of border-crossings, uprooting, and transplanting, and the agency that exists in every participatory act of cultural translation through the arts. Creative Counterpoints also features the participation of MassArt students and faculty. This event is cosponsored by the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), Boston’s newest museum featuring visionary artists at the forefront of contemporary art. Events and exhibitions at MAAM are free and open to the public.
Joana Vasconcelos: Valkyrie Mumbet
February 22–March 12, 2020; on view through 2021
Curators: Lisa Tung with Michaela Blanc
Exhibition
Renowned Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos is premiering a new monumental site-specific installation. Known for her unprecedented multimedia works, Vasconcelos, in her first U.S. solo show, will honor Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, an enslaved woman whose court battle for her freedom in 1781 helped make slavery illegal in Massachusetts. The large-scale installation entitled Valkyrie Mumbet is the newest in her Valkyries series, named after Norse female war goddesses, which pays homage to inspirational women.
Menil Collection, Houston
Virginia Jaramillo: The Curvilinear Paintings, 1969–1974
September 26, 2020–July 3, 2021
Curator: Michelle White
Exhibition
With bright, flat fields of color and sharp, thin undulating lines, the paintings of American artist Virginia Jaramillo (b. 1939) from the early 1970s exemplify the art movement known as “hard-edge abstraction.” This focused exhibition presents a group of her curvilinear paintings from this era on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of The De Luxe Show, organized in 1971 by the Menil Foundation, Houston. One of the first racially integrated exhibitions in the country, it brought together a leading group of artists working in abstraction. Jaramillo was the only woman artist in this historic exhibition. This will be her first solo museum exhibition.
Mills College Art Museum, Oakland
Tabitha Soren: Surface Tension
September 18–December 12, 2021
Curator: Stephanie Hanor
Exhibition
Featuring photographs by Bay Area artist Tabitha Soren, Surface Tension explores the intersection of everyday technology with culture, politics, and human contact. Using an 8 x 10 large-format camera, Soren shoots iPad screens under raking light to reveal the tactile trail we leave behind. The images beneath are a compendium of private and public experiences, from a young girl blowing a kiss goodnight to her mother, to the protests that followed the fatal 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The images she chooses are drawn from the news, social media, and amateur phone photos, raising questions about authenticity and exploring the difficulty and lack of desire to distinguish between reality and fiction.
Milwaukee Art Museum
Susan Meiselas: Through a Woman’s Lens
December 4, 2020–April 11, 2021
Curator: Lisa J. Sutcliff
Exhibition
Throughout her nearly fifty-year career, American photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) seeks to bear witness to stories that might otherwise go unnoticed. She has traveled from rural county fairs to conflict-ridden Central America, focusing her lens on what she thinks the public needs to see. Collaboration is an integral part of the artist’s practice, and she works closely with her subjects, and over long periods, to bring their voices to the issues they face, often returning to communities she has photographed to reconnect and examine how their perspectives have changed over time. A member of the international photographic cooperative Magnum Photos since 1976, Meiselas creates photographs that raise provocative questions about the documentary practice and the relationship between photographer and subject.
Susan Meiselas: Through a Woman’s Lens presents never-before-shown photographs alongside iconic series that reflect the artist’s ongoing commitment to sharing the stories of women. The exhibition will be accompanied by a virtual tour and a series of webinars exploring feminist themes.
The MAM’s Currents series is part of an ongoing cycle of exhibitions that explores new trends in contemporary art, and, in the case of Currents 38: Christy Matson, the recent, strong embrace of fiber by contemporary artists. The series began in 1982, and has featured such artists as Günther Förg, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Harrison, and Julian Schnabel, as well as such craftspeople as Richard DeVore, Gord Peteran, and Robert Turner.
The next Currents exhibition—the thirty-eighth in the series and the first to feature textiles—will explore the woven pictures of Christy Matson, a highly skilled weaver who creates captivating tactile surfaces on a TC2 digital jacquard loom. Historically viewed as women’s work, woven textiles from Matson’s recent bodies of work will be displayed in order to contextualize a new series that will debut in Currents 38. Her most recent work questions ideas of memory and imagination through historic weave structures and textile techniques, and Matson’s new weavings will likely build upon these themes.
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge
In a career spanning nearly five decades, Leslie Thornton has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Her early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma-vérité traditions as a student in the 1970s fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Engaging these themes within a focused survey, Thornton’s List Center exhibition will mark the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive presentation to date.
The relationship between technology, power, and violence is an enduring concern for Thornton. In early works, such as X-TRACTS (1975), All Right You Guys (1976), and Jennifer, Where Are You? (1981), Thornton contends with the basic conditions of representation in film and how the camera itself wields power. In Let Me Count the Ways (2004–ongoing) and Cut from Liquid to Snake (2018), Thornton takes up the United States’ history of nuclear warfare—a subject fraught with personal resonance for her, as both her father and grandfather were involved in the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort that produced the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japan in the final days of World War II. A touchstone of experimental film, Peggy and Fred in Hell is a multi-chapter work that surfaces the Cold War-era anxieties that shaped Thornton’s formative years and plumbs the psychological impact of technology in postwar America.
Thornton’s recent film Ground (2020) embeds the voice of a physicist discussing particle decay within elegant yet foreboding technological landscapes. Hemlock (2021), which debuts in this exhibition, complements and builds on Ground. In this newly commissioned two-channel video, conversations about particle physics, multidimensional universes, and antimatter overlay shallow-focus shots taken in the woods of New Hampshire that reveal intimate patterns of growth and decomposition.
The exhibition’s title, Begin Again, Again—borrowed from a line in Peggy and Fred in Hell—alludes to human-made cycles of destruction and renewal as well the hallmarks of Thornton’s practice: an accumulation and repetition of images and language and a radically open-ended approach to observing, processing, and understanding.
MoMA PS1
Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life
March 11–August 2021
Curator: Ruba Katrib
Exhibition
Niki de Saint Phalle (American and French, 1930‒2002) created exuberant works intended to transform environments, individuals, and society. The first New York museum exhibition of the work of this visionary feminist and activist artist will feature over 100 works that highlight Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and engagement with pressing social and political issues.
Early in her career, Saint Phalle pushed against accepted artistic practices, creating work that used assemblage and performative modes of production. Beginning in the late 1960s, Saint Phalle started making large-scale sculptures, which led to an expansion of her practice into architectural projects, sculpture gardens, books, prints, films, theater sets, clothing, jewelry, and, famously, her own perfume. Addressing subjects that ranged from women’s rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness, Saint Phalle was often at the vanguard in addressing the social and political issues of her time.
Central to the exhibition is an examination of Saint Phalle’s large-scale outdoor sculptures and architectural structures, including her central life project Tarot Garden, a massive architectural park outside Rome, Italy, which she began constructing in the late 1970s and continued to develop alongside key collaborators until her death. Opened to the public in 1998, the garden and its structures, which are based on the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, allow for moments of interaction and reflection that underscore Saint Phalle’s use of art to alter perception. The exhibition will include photographs and drawings of Tarot Garden as well as models that Saint Phalle created for its various structures.
Museum of Arts and Design, New York
Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times
On view through February 13, 2022
Curator: Jaime DeSimone, Portland Museum of Art, Maine
Exhibition
Abstraction, feminism, and activism come together in profound and immersive ways in the traveling exhibition Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times. Throughout their decades-long careers, painter Carrie Moyer and sculptor Sheila Pepe have achieved international acclaim through abstract works that are rich with color and materiality and informed by feminist politics and queer activism. Organized by the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, and now presented at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, this exhibition reimagines a familiar form of religious furniture—the tabernacle—as a symbolic location for cultural values such as justice, equality, and knowledge.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Andrea Bowers
November 20, 2021–March 27, 2022
Curators: Michael Darling and Connie Butler
Exhibition
For over thirty years, multidisciplinary visual artist Andrea Bowers (American, b. 1965) has made art that activates. Bowers works in a variety of mediums, from video to colored pencil to installation art, and speaks directly to pressing national issues. Her work combines an artistic practice with activism and advocacy, giving voice to stories rarely seen or heard.
Born in Wilmington, Ohio, Bowers received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her subject matter contends with issues like immigration, workers’ rights, environmentalism, and women’s rights, presented in a range of media. Her empathetic and labor-intensive practice draws attention to the humanity impacted by injustice—shifting the conversation from politics to people.
The first museum retrospective surveying over two decades of Bowers’s practice, this exhibition is divided into four thematic sections: feminism, the environment, immigration, and labor, with a selection of her works rendered in neon. Highlights of the exhibition include Courtroom Drawings (Steubenville Rape Case, Text Messages Entered As Evidence, 2013) (2014) and My Name Means Future (2020). These two works speak to the range of issues in Bowers’s work, the former emerged from her work as an embedded observer in a landmark sexual assault case; the latter from her involvement in activism around the Dakota Access Pipeline project.
Carolina Caycedo: From the Bottom of the River
December 12, 2020–August 8, 2021
Curators: Carla Acevedo-Yates and Iris Colburn
Exhibition
London-born Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978) lives and works in Los Angeles. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with riverside communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure projects around the world, Caycedo makes work that addresses humanity’s relationship with nature. She works on the front-lines of social and environmental justice, gathering materials, experiences, objects, and feelings to make her multidisciplinary work.
Informed by Indigenous philosophies, Caycedo’s work challenges us to understand nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders. Her innovative approach integrates an art-making practice in the studio with actions in communities affected by the large-scale extraction of natural resources by corporations and governments, inviting viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism—and how we might bolster resistance, solidarity, and cultural and environmental biodiversity.
Carolina Caycedo: From the Bottom of the River surveys the last ten years of Caycedo’s artistic practice and prominently features Be Dammed (2012–ongoing), a multimedia project that examines the impact of hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects on riverine communities and the natural world. It also features Caycedo’s powerful Cosmotarrayas, a series of net sculptures produced through fieldwork in areas where the privatization of waterways has irrevocably altered the ability of local communities to live and work. The exhibition encompasses video, drawing, photography, sculpture, and performance and reflects the importance of process and participation in Caycedo’s work.
Los Angeles–based artist Christina Quarles (American, b. 1985) paints bodies that are subjected not only to the weight and gravity of the physical world but also to the pleasures and pressures of the social realm. Her ambiguous and evocative scenes feature figures whose limbs, torsos, and faces collide and merge with familiar domestic objects made strange through her color choices and experimental painterly gestures. Her work explores the universal experience of existing within a body, as well as the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect to form complex identities.
The largest presentation of her work to date, the exhibition at the MCA brings together a selection of her work made over the last three years, as well as a new, large-scale installation that explores illusions and histories of painting.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Tala Madani is the first North American survey of this celebrated artist’s paintings, animations, and drawings. Eliciting curiosity, fantasy, and repulsion, Madani’s paintings and animations are replete with irony and lewd, mischievous narrative. In them, a cadre of mostly male middle-aged figures play out absurd sociocultural dynamics to darkly comic ends, engaging in humiliating, sometimes violent scenarios where the stakes are unclear and the aims dubious at best. Taken together, Madani’s work forms a powerful meditation on the deeply seated fears, conflicts, and desires of our present day, in which the potent and combustible relationship between art history and global history comes to a head.
Organized by Mia Locks, senior curator and head of new initiatives, with Kimi Kitada, curatorial assistant, the exhibition will be on view from November 2020 through April 2021 at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location in downtown Los Angeles. Bringing together fifteen years of the artist’s incisive work, it will also include a selection of the artist’s notebooks, offering a rare look at the rich process by which Madani develops her ribald menagerie of characters and scenarios. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, the most comprehensive on the artist’s work to date.
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Downtown
Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist
October 16, 2021–April 24, 2022
Curator: Jill Dawsey, PhD
Exhibition
Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist is the first solo museum presentation of one of the most important Chicano/a/x artists working in California over the past five decades. The exhibition explores López’s influential feminist corpus of the 1970s and 1980s, highlighting her iconic Guadalupe triptych and an expansive series of related works, including rarely seen larger-than-life self-portraits.
Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist can be found on MCASD: Digital, a platform for online programs and digital content that connects audiences with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop
January 11, 2021–ongoing
Curator: Alana Hernandez
Virtual exhibition
During the 1960s, Anni Albers (1899–1994), Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), Gego (1912–1994), and Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) spent several months at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles, where each developed a focused body of work. Drawn from MCASD’s collection, the exhibition explores each artist’s distinct inquiry into printmaking and how the medium informed aspects of their later sculptural and textile practices.
Experiments on Stone: Four Women Artists from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop can be found on MCASD: Digital, a platform for online programs and digital content that connects audiences with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
MCASD debuts a new installation by Tijuana- and San Diego–based artist Griselda Rosas (b. 1977). Rosas makes sculptures that combine plaster, metal, and organic materials, alongside textile drawings that layer found images and sewn lines. Her decolonial strategies connect Indigenous and European histories with personal and familial memory to forge new meanings around ancestry, identity, and cultural hybridity.
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago
Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency
January 19–May 23, 2021
Curators: Karen Irvine and Kristin Taylor
Exhibition
Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency explores the psychological, physical, and emotional realities women encounter in the years leading up to, during, and after fertility. The exhibition features eight artists who consider a range of topics including birth, miscarriage, pleasure, the lack of access to abortion, trauma, and the loss of fertility. The term reproductive is twofold. It implies the characteristics of a photograph, bringing attention to a notable lack of visual representation of the experiences of the female body. Additionally, the term is a reference to a common patriarchal, capitalist view of women’s bodies as vehicles for reproduction. This exhibition aims to add visual presence and a deeper understanding of the precarious nature of female rights and freedoms in a time where the future of these rights is uncertain.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Women Take the Floor
September 13, 2019–November 28, 2021
Curators: Nonie Gadsden, Reto Thüring, Lauren Whitley, Patrick Murphy, Karen Haas, Erica Hirshler, Zoë Samels, Emelie Gevalt, and Caroline Kipp
Exhibition
Women Take the Floor challenges the dominant history of American art by focusing on the overlooked and underrepresented work and stories of women artists. This reinstallation—or “takeover”—of Level 3 of the Art of the Americas Wing advocates for diversity, inclusion, and gender equity in museums, the art world, and beyond. With nearly two hundred works drawn primarily from the MFA’s collection, the exhibition is organized into seven thematic galleries; a full range of programs and events accompanies the show.
The central space, “Women Depicting Women: Her Vision, Her Voice,” features paintings such as Frida Kahlo’s Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) and Alice Neel’s Linda Nochlin and Daisy. “Beyond the Loom: Fiber as Sculpture” highlights pioneering artists Sheila Hicks, Ruth Asawa, Olga de Amaral, and Lenore Tawney, who radically redefined textiles in the 1960s and 1970s as sculpture. A second rotation in the same gallery, “Subversive Threads” (opening July 2020), will focus on how contemporary artists have used textiles to challenge notions of identity, gender, and politics. “No Man’s Land” is devoted to artists who reimagine the metaphoric possibilities of landscapes, often through the use of symbols that allude to female experiences. “Women on the Move: Art and Design in the 1920s and ’30s” features work made in a range of mediums by artists including Georgia O’Keeffe, Loïs Mailou Jones, Ruth Reeves, and Maria Martinez. Building on recent scholarship, “Women of Action” recognizes the contributions of Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, and Lee Krasner to the formation and expansion of Abstract Expressionism and other gestural art forms, movements often credited to their male counterparts. Presented in two rotations, “Women Publish Women: The Print Boom” celebrates the founders of three printmaking workshops who played an underappreciated role in the revitalization of American printmaking in the late 1950s and 1960s: Tatyana Grosman of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), June Wayne of Tamarind Lithography, and Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press. The third rotation in this gallery (opening October 2020) will feature more than thirty-five artists in “Personal and Political: Women Photographers, 1965–85.” Finally, “Women and Abstraction at Midcentury” explores the visual language of abstraction in the mid-twentieth century in a range of mediums, including painting, prints, textiles, jewelry, furniture, and ceramics.
The family and community that precede us shape how we see the world today. From pride in identity to the effects of suffering across generations and the desire to imagine better futures, how do we process the memories and experiences we inherit?
Centering women of color as protagonists, Helina Metaferia: Generations uses collage, video, and installation to explore how inherited trauma informs present-day experiences. Metaferia mines oral histories and institutional archives of Black liberation ephemera to point toward ways in which activists—especially women of color—can profoundly influence the future, and always have. She respectfully involves these communities as collaborators in her art-making practice, asking them to share their “everyday revolutions”—the ways they navigate and negotiate a world that tries to put barriers in their way. Their responses manifest in different media, including collage and video, that explore how we carry on the legacies of our elders, the kinship we find in our contemporaries, and the many ways these relationships inform and shape our worlds.
This exhibition is part of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University’s 2021 Traveling Fellow exhibition program, presented in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Across artistic mediums, Samantha Nye interrogates the power, beauty, and occasional humor she sees in consensual sexual encounters between older people—a population often deemed beyond desire. In Samantha Nye: My Heart’s in a Whirl, the artist turns her focus to video, recreating Scopitone classics from the 1950s and ’60s. A visual component of Scopitone jukeboxes, these 16mm film reels were an early form of music video and a precursor to MTV, YouTube, and TikTok. Many featured a white male pop star or band surrounded by scantily clad women, or female singers wiggling suggestively. These videos were groundbreaking technology and a novel form of entertainment, but they also perpetuated stereotypes.
Nye rejects the original Scopitone videos and their reductive representations of gender, class, and race, reframing them shot for shot with queer elders—people she meets during her research—and even her own mother and grandmother. The reimagined films discard ageist and ableist definitions of sexuality and erotic pleasure, as well as homogenous and oppressive understandings of desire and domesticity. Instead, Nye offers intergenerational fantasies with an expanded vision of love, sex, agency, and belonging.
This exhibition is part of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University’s 2021 Traveling Fellow exhibition program, presented in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Museum of Sonoma County, Santa Rosa
From Suffrage to #MeToo: Groundbreaking Women in
Sonoma County
January 25, 2020–January 24, 2021
Curator: Eric Stanley
Exhibition
The year 2020 is the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the constitutional right to vote. While different in goal and origin, the recent #MeToo movement and women’s marches also represent pivotal change and the power of the collective voice to challenge the status quo. The Museum of Sonoma County’s exhibition From Suffrage to #MeToo: Groundbreaking Women in Sonoma County explores the changing expectations, challenges, and obstacles to inclusion that women have faced, and the remarkable people who have broken through the barriers.
Agency: Feminist Art and Power brings together the work of a wide spectrum of womxn-identified artists, representing diverse cultural backgrounds, generations, sexualities, gender identities, and geographic locations. During times of turbulent political changes, global conflicts, social, racial, gender, and economic inequities, these feminist artists challenge cultural political norms related to womxn as individuals and global citizens. Demonstrating artistic excellence, the artists present work that recognizes and amplifies issues of concern for the regional population of Sonoma County and the greater Bay Area. They investigate topics of empowerment, identity, gender roles, aging, gender fluidity, reproductive choice, women and work, violence, and more. All challenge our understanding of what shapes us as individuals and communities.
Some of the artists confirmed to exhibit:
Rosemary Meza-DesPlas depicts anger as a useful tool against oppression, personal and institutional, and an unwillingness to remain silent. Ceciley Wilson’s photographs address Black women’s empowerment using Maya Angelou’s poem “And Still I Rise” as inspiration towards liberation. Ria Brodell, a non-binary trans artist, addresses society’s strictly prescribed gender roles and the queer experience. Mickalene Thomas’s work explores claiming authority, the “gaze,” and the power in Black female beauty. Martha Wilson uses self-portraits to create witty observations on beauty and aging. Sawyer Rose’s work uses data visualization to explore women’s work inequities. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith creates work that addresses current issues facing Native Americans such as the destruction of the environment, and governmental oppression of native cultures. Sonya Kelliher-Combs, an Alaskan Native American, addresses sexual abuse and rape against women, and the struggle for self-definition and identity. Joan Semmel’s large nude paintings are portrayals of sexual empowerment from a woman’s point of view.
Artists: Shonagh Adelman, Dotty Attie, Ria Brodell, Judy Chicago, Cat Del Buono, Jessie Edelstein, Sally Edelstein, Alyssa Eustaquio, Vanessa Filley, Judy Gelles, Guerrilla Girls, Rozanne Hermelyn Di Silvestro, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Holly Ballard Martz, Kristine Mays, Delilah Montoya, Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, Priscilla Otani, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Lucky Rapp, Jenny Reinhardt, Winnie van der Rijn, Sawyer Rose, Joan Semmel, Mickalene Thomas, Margi Weir, Ceciley Wilson, Martha Wilson, and Nancy Youdelman.
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Textile and social practice artist Sonya Clark (b. 1967) is renowned for her mixed-media works that address race and class, celebrate Blackness, and reimagine history. This midcareer survey includes the artist’s well-known sculptures made from black pocket combs, human hair, and thread, as well as works made from flags, currency, beads, sugar, cotton plants, pencils, books, a typewriter, and a hair salon chair. The artist transmutes each of these objects through her application of a vast range of fiber-art techniques: she weaves, stitches, folds, braids, dyes, pulls, twists, presses, snips, or ties within each work. By stitching black thread cornrows and Bantu knots onto fabrics, rolling human hair into necklaces, and stringing a violin bow with a dreadlock, Clark manifests ancestral bonds and reasserts the Black presence in histories from which it has been pointedly omitted.
Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans
Laura Anderson Barbata: “Transcommunality”
January 16–October 3, 2021
Curator: Laura Blereau
Exhibition
The process-driven practices of artist Laura Anderson Barbata engage a wide variety of platforms and geographies. Centered on issues of cultural diversity and sustainability, her work blends political activism, street theater, sculpture, and arts education. Since the early 1990s, Barbata has initiated projects with people living in the Amazon of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, Norway, and New York. The results of these collaborations range from public performances to artist books and handmade paper, textiles, garments, and the repatriation of an exploited nineteenth-century Mexican woman.
“Transcommunality” focuses on five of Barabata’s collaborations, presented together for the first time. Though varying in process, tradition, and message, each of these projects emphasizes the artist’s understanding of art as a system of shared practical actions that can increase communication around topics of cultural diversity and create sites of human connection or belonging. In Intervention: Indigo, characters representing ancestral and protective spirits reckon with the past to address present-day systemic violence and human rights abuses. In The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana, Barbata’s efforts shift the narratives of disability, human worth, and cultural memory. Earlier works crafted with Yanomami and Ye’kuana peoples, as well as Barbata’s most recent creations, consider the effects of individuals on their local community’s future, through actions of reciprocity that are both intentional and organic.
“Transcommunality” offers a space to contemplate ritual, folklore, and the impact of the natural environment on culture. Celebrating the human experience, Barbata’s diverse collaborators revive intangible cultural heritage and resist homogenization by deploying skills inherent to the survival of their local expressions. Performance documentation and stunning garments throughout the museum invite onlookers to connect with the traditions of West Africa, the Amazon, Mexico, and the Caribbean while exploring visual narratives.
New Mexico State University Art Museum
Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020
February 28–December 6, 2020
Curators: Marisa Sage and artist Laurel Nakadate
Exhibition
Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020, the inaugural exhibition in the new University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University (NMSU), opened on February 28, 2020, and is now extended through December 6, 2020. This exhibition, co-curated by museum director Marisa Sage and artist Laurel Nakadate, aims to expand and enrich the compelling conversations regarding motherhood in today’s sociopolitical climate. Through video, painting, installation, sculpture, film, and photographic works, a diverse group of artists explores themes of empowerment, empathy, intimacy, selflessness, vulnerability, failure, anxiety, and choice. While the University Art Museum is temporarily closed, please take this opportunity to view all four video walk-throughs and installation galleries (click on MORE INFO) and fully explore the theme of motherhood in each of the new spaces: the Main Contemporary Gallery, the Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, the Margie and Bobby Rankin Retablo Gallery, and the Mullennix Bridge Gallery.
Many of the artists in Labor openly address the choice of becoming mothers, initiating crucial conversations in the arts regarding childlessness and the invisibility of parenting, and reproductive choice, while looking to their own mothers’ lives for insight into the mercurial experience of mothering. Many of the works reframe motherhood within the context of artistic practice, using it as a source of inspiration, creation, and collaboration. Other works speak to motherhood as a political act that seeks institutional support in sparking diversity, equality in compensation, and recognition.
This exhibition strives to create a space of inclusivity and support that offers opportunities not only for internationally celebrated artists but also for the regional community, through local programming and the exhibition of work by New Mexico–based artists that speak to their own experiences surrounding motherhood.
New Museum
For over fifty years, Lynn Hershman Leeson has created an innovative and prescient body of work that mines the intersections of technology and the self. Known for her groundbreaking contributions to media art, Hershman Leeson has consistently worked with the latest technologies, from artificial intelligence to DNA programming, often anticipating the impact of technological developments on society. As the artist posited in 1998, “Imagine a world in which there is a blurring between the soul and the chip, a world in which artificially implanted DNA is genetically bred to create an enlightened and self-replicating intelligent machine, which perhaps uses a human body as a vehicle for mobility.”
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted, the artist’s first solo exhibition at a New York museum, will bring together a selection of her work in drawing, sculpture, video, and photography, along with interactive and net-based works, focusing on themes of transmutation, identity construction, and the evolution of the cyborg. The presentation will include some of her most important projects, including wax-cast Breathing Machine sculptures (1965–68), early drawings from the 1960s, selections from the series Roberta Breitmore (1973–78), Water Women (1976–present), Phantom Limb (1985–88), Cyborg (1996–2006), and the Infinity Engine (2014–present), a multimedia installation that explores the effects of genetic engineering on society. Together, the works in the exhibition will trace the ever-intertwined relationship between the technological and the corporeal, illuminating the political and social consequences of scientific advances on our most intimate selves and biological lives.
New Orleans Museum of Art
Mending the Sky brings together seven artists’ projects that respond to a world turned upside down. The exhibition takes its title from a Chinese fable in which a rip in the sky causes the earth to split open, bringing floods, fires, famine, and disease—until a goddess takes on the arduous task of mending the rip. Working across the fields of art, animation, community organization, and performance, these artists shift conversations, challenge entrenched views, and subvert the established order. Their art gives shape to the aftermath of chaos and calamity, building toward a more equitable future by helping us envision the world that might rise in the wake of disaster. Each of the projects by Firelei Báez, Heidi Hahn, Baseera Khan, Beili Liu, Thao Nguyen Phan, Jamilah Sabur, and Clarissa Tossin is also an act of world-building that offer us a glimpse of a future we cannot quite see yet.
Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds
October 1, 2021–January 23, 2022
Curator: Katie Pfohl
Exhibition
Dawn DeDeaux: The Space Between Worlds is the first comprehensive museum exhibition for this pioneering multimedia artist. Since the 1970s, DeDeaux’s practice has spanned video, performance, photography, and installation to create art that exists at the edge of the Anthropocene. Anticipating a future imperiled by runaway population growth, breakneck industrial development, and the looming threat of climate change, DeDeaux has long worked between worlds of the present and the future. From early projects like CB Radio Booths, which linked underserved communities across New Orleans via radio and satellite, to more recent works from her MotherShip series, which plots an escape from a ruined Earth, her art generates connections across seemingly impossible divides. One of the first American artists to connect questions about social justice to emerging environmental concerns, she establishes spaces for community, collectivity, and critique that aim to counter present inequality and forestall future social strife. In the face of these universal existential threats, her art is a lifeline that presents us with a limited-time-only opportunity to come together and coexist.
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction
August 24, 2020–May 7, 2022
Curator: Bolton Colburn
Exhibition
Drawn exclusively from the museum’s collection, Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction endeavors to look beyond typical art historical boundaries, and to begin to lay claim to a more holistic and complex view of art history, one that includes parties left out because of aesthetic biases based on a system of privileged white male patrimony.
During the twentieth century, art made by women was often overlooked or dismissed by museums, collectors, and art historians. An ironic side effect of this absence of attention was that it lessened the constraints and dictates of the marketplace for women, allowing for increased experimentation and the pursuit of a personal vision in ways often less available for their male counterparts. It was not until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that art history started to be revised to incorporate more women.
Until more recently, women of color, especially Native American women, have rarely been included in art historical studies focusing on Surrealism and abstraction. In addition, artists who work in ceramics, fabric, photography, and printmaking, rather than painting and sculpture, are often left out of these studies as well. However, Surrealism and abstraction offered women a glimpse of a world in which creative activity and liberation from societal expectations coexisted, allowing them to embark on the difficult path to artistic freedom.
The Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery
Paper Routes: Women to Watch 2020–Ohio
July 30–October 17, 2020
Curators: Matt Distel and Stephanie Rond
Exhibition
The National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.) is holding its sixth worldwide exhibition of under-recognized women artists. The Ohio Advisory Group is honored to participate once again in this exhibition, this year spotlighting Ohio women artists who explore the expressive possibilities of paper as a creative medium.
Like alchemists, these artists have altered a common material and increased its value. As viewers, we can be both introspective and empathetic, recognizing paper’s ties to and uses in our own lives. There is hope in what these artists create, and a recognition that transformation is possible despite modest beginnings. Through this exhibition we continue to celebrate the legacy of innovation and perseverance of women artists of Ohio.
We are grateful for the extraordinary work of our curators, Stephanie Rond and Matt Distel, who selected these artists and works from the outstanding talents in Ohio. During the eleven-week exhibition, the public will have several opportunities to engage with the curators and artists through artists’ talks, workshops, and tours.
Orange County Museum of Art
OCMAExpand-Santa Ana: Season 4
Opening July 16, 2020
Curators: Cassandra Coblentz, Ruth Estevez, and Ricardo J. Reyes, PhD
Exhibition
At OCMAExpand-Santa Ana, the Orange County Museum of Art will present seven solo exhibitions, all of which comment on identity and cultural legacy by exploring language and the transmission of narratives, both personal and legendary. The exhibitions highlight the work of a dynamic range of Pacific Rim artists: the art collective known as ASMA (Ecuador/Mexico), Marsia Alexander-Clarke (Chile/Altadena), Carolyn Castaño (Colombia/Los Angeles), Alexandra Grant (Los Angeles), Noé Martínez (Mexico), Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza (Philippines/Los Angeles), and Kyungmi Shin (South Korea/Los Angeles).
These exhibitions challenge historical power dynamics by examining texts and narratives that empower those who have been silenced by patriarchal systems of control. In doing so, the projects call authorship into question and who has the power to write history. The impact of colonialism is evident in the works of Martínez and Cobarrubias Mendoza, while Castaño and Shin examine cultural assimilation from their positions as the daughters of immigrants. ASMA and Alexander-Clarke consider notions of “otherness,” and Grant’s project presents a notion of love that resists privileging one entity over another.
All of the artists draw upon an expanded understanding of feminism that champions moving beyond traditional patriarchal hierarchical power dynamics. Their approach to feminism is empowered by equality and reciprocity, transcending outmoded binary frameworks and establishing complex pluralist perspectives.
Peabody Essex Museum
Made It: The Women Who Revolutionized Fashion
November 21, 2020–March 14, 2021
Curator: Petra Slinkard
Exhibition
One in six people in the world work in the fashion industry, and 85 percent of them are women. Made It: The Women Who Revolutionized Fashion showcases nearly one hundred works, spanning 250 years, exposing the women behind the seams—including celebrated masters, pioneering designers, and hidden figures. From Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress to Elsa Schiaparelli and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel to experimental labels like Chromat, women designers have transcended genres and revolutionized ideas of identity.
Made It features showstopping ensembles, street fashion, ready-to-wear, and haute couture that illuminate issues of representation, creativity, consumption, transculturation, and distinctiveness which have and continue to impact the fashion industry.
This exhibition has been organized in association with Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
Share your impressions with us on social media using #MadeItFashion.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)
Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale
January 21–September 5, 2021
Curators: Jodi Throckmorton and Brittany Webb
Exhibition
One of PAFA’s 2020–22 exhibitions devoted to women artists, Taking Space invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists. Co-curated by Jodi Throckmorton and Brittany Webb, this exhibition examines the approaches of women artists for whom space is a critical feature of their work, whether they take the space on a wall, the real estate of a room through sculpture and installation, engage seriality as a spatial visual practice, cast a wide legacy in art history, or claim the space of their body. Featured artists include María Berrío, Joan Brown, Elizabeth Colomba, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Eiko Fan, Mary Frank, Viola Frey, Hope Gangloff, Nancy Graves, Clarity Haynes, Ellen Harvey, Orit Hofshi, Barbara Kruger, Leah Modigliani, Elizabeth Murray, Wangechi Mutu, Dona Nelson, Louise Nevelson, Ebony G. Patterson, Debra Priestly, Faith Ringgold, Brie Ruais, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Mira Schor, Alyson Shotz, Sylvia Sleigh, Becky Suss, Mickalene Thomas, Marie Watt, and Deborah Willis. This exhibition is composed of works from PAFA’s renowned permanent collection of American art.
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)
MY BODY, MY RULES is a group exhibition that examines the mainstream portrayal of female bodies, confronting the various stereotypes, violence, limitations, and ideals imposed on women. This exhibition presents a roster of diverse women artists working across mediums, unified by a strong commitment to contemporary discussions on race, gender, and representation in today’s social landscape.
Considering the record-breaking number of women elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, renewed attempts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, the upcoming centennial of the women’s suffrage movement, and related current political developments, the exhibition offers a platform from which to reflect on contemporary female image narratives through a feminist lens, while gauging the significance of these themes within twenty-first-century art historical discourses.
MY BODY, MY RULES is conceived as a chant of empowerment—stimulating awareness and asserting women’s authority and power over their own experiences. Together with a number of accompanying programs, the exhibition showcases the artists’ diverse cultural influences, prompting a collective, in-depth dialogue on how women have the right to own their lives and their bodies.
Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont
Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia
September 30, 2020–April 2, 2021
Curator: Gabriel Bogossian and Solange Farkars
Exhibition
Throughout fall 2020 and spring 2021, Pitzer College Art Galleries will present Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia. Since the late 1990s, Cuevas has been making work that actively critiques or attempts to subvert capitalist structures. The centerpiece of this exhibition is a twenty-five-minute video, Disidencia (2007–ongoing), comprising the artist’s ongoing archive of over thirty hours of footage filmed in the streets and public squares of Mexico City, documenting signs of dissent and evidence of grassroots resistance—anti-police graffiti, banners demanding improved labor conditions, a group of farmers marching in protest and other popular demonstrations. The exhibition convenes five of the artist’s video works that confront the growing dissatisfaction and resistance to economic and political power structures, the vestiges of colonialism, privatization of wealth, and destruction of the natural world. Minerva Cuevas lives and works in Mexico City.
Minerva Cuevas: Disidencia was curated by Gabriel Bogossian and Solange Farkas and first presented at Galpāo VB (Associaçāo Cultural Videobrasil). The touring exhibition was curated by Alaina Claire Feldman and presented at the Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College. Disidencia is organized and presented at the Pitzer College Art Galleries by Ciara Ennis. Additional support has been provided by kurimanzutto, Mexico City/New York.
Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center
Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, 1956–1965:
Japan’s Women Printmakers
September 24, 2020–June 13, 2021
Curator: Jeannie Kenmotsu
Exhibition
Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, 1956–1965 unearths a critical yet uncelebrated episode of modern printmaking history that began in October 1956, when a vibrant group of contemporary etchings, relief prints, and lithographs went on display in a Tokyo gallery. This was the debut of Japan’s first printmaking society for women artists, the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai, or Women’s Print Association. It provided a crucial vehicle for talented female printmakers working in a crowded field of male maestros. For the next decade, the nine professional women artists who founded the society, including Iwami Reika (b. 1927), Kobayashi Donge (b. 1926), Uchima Toshiko (1918–2000), and Yoshida Chizuko (1924–2017), would be joined by others in staging group exhibitions from Tokyo to New York City. Their collective body of work demonstrates the expansive and fiercely creative vision of Japan’s first women printmakers association. A retrospective look at the work of Joryū Hanga Kyōkai’s founding members and those who joined the group later, this presentation includes rare impressions and archival material never before on public view.
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake
June 4, 2021–January 16, 2022
Curator: Tamara H. Schenkenberg
Exhibition
One of the foremost artists to emerge in the 1960s, Hannah Wilke (1940–1993) stands as a pivotal figure in postwar American art for her role in challenging contemporaneous dialogues around art and feminism. Since its inception, her distinctive and original work has provocatively pushed against prevailing narratives of women’s bodies and their representation. The artist’s signature folded and layered forms synthesize a variety of influences, including Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, while also formulating a uniquely feminist iconography.
This career-spanning exhibition will be the first major presentation of the artist’s work in the United States in over ten years. Examining Wilke’s prolific career from the 1960s up to her untimely death in 1993, the exhibition will bring together works on paper, photography, and video, as well as examples of Wilke’s diverse sculptures in clay, bronze, latex, and other nontraditional materials. This diverse selection of iconic and rarely shown work will highlight her daring practice and iconographic innovations. Through a loosely chronological presentation that represents themes, motifs, and materials across Wilke’s over three-decade long career, the exhibition will offer new perspectives on this critical and influential artist.
Queens Museum, New York
Ulrike Müller: The Conference of the Animals (A Mural)
September 16, 2020–August 22, 2021
Curators: Larissa Harris and Sophia Marisa Lucas
Exhibition and new commission
As a painter, Ulrike Müller’s seemingly abstract vocabulary of colors and shapes is emotionally and politically charged and encourages figurative readings. In past installations, she has used colored walls to act as backdrops for her enamel paintings, woven wool rugs, and works on paper. In The Conference of the Animals (A Mural), she foregrounds the painted wall with giant animal-like shapes. Their muted palette and monumental scale draws on histories of public art and muralism before and after World War II.
The project’s title comes from German writer Erich Kästner’s children’s book The Animal’s Conference (1949), a political satire about a group of animals frustrated by the inefficacy of human international conferences, who convene to save the planet. While conceiving of the mural, Müller became interested in artwork by children, specifically how scale and perspective shift our understanding of ideas, spaces, and ourselves. She invited curator Amy Zion to realize an exhibition in the adjoining gallery. Both the exhibition and the mural were conceived as site-specific projects hugging the 45-foot-high wall that encircles The Panorama of the City of New York, and referring to the building’s history as host to the United Nations from 1946 to 1950.
A selection of cityscapes by children reproduced from Zion’s exhibition was installed on the surface of Muller’s mural, inviting closer inspection, along with three collagraph prints by Müller. Taking seriously the creative production of children, alongside that of a professional artist, The Conference of the Animals foregrounds perspectives that have been sidelined, overlooked, or silenced and draws attention to art’s role in the formation of political representation.
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Seeing Citizens: Picturing American Women’s Fight for the Vote
August 26, 2020–August 26, 2021
Curator: Allison Lange
Exhibition and new commission
In 2020, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute marks several anniversaries—including the twentieth anniversary of its founding—with two exhibitions: one that explores women’s struggle for equity on a national scale, and one that envisions the creative exchange of two artists, forged in fellowship.
Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library—the world’s foremost archive on the history of women in America—hosts an exhibition marking the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Seeing Citizens: Picturing American Women’s Fight for the Vote. Drawn from the library’s collections and including a newly commissioned artwork, the exhibition presents the images that leading activists wanted the public to see—and some that they wanted to hide. Pro– and anti–women’s rights images illustrate the vibrant debates about the status of women.
Radcliffe’s contemporary art gallery offers a more intimate exhibit that celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Radcliffe’s Bunting fellowships, named for the then-president of Radcliffe College, Mary Ingraham Bunting, and created to stem the exodus of highly educated women from promising careers.
Accompanied: The Artworks of Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman
September 21, 2020–January 16, 2021
Curator: Meg Rotzel
Exhibition
The exhibition Accompanied: The Artworks of Marilyn Pappas and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman presents a pair of artists and Bunting fellows whose work was transformed by an abiding friendship. On view will be Pappas’s Nevertheless She Persisted, a pair of hand-stitched, three-dimensional figures drawn from images of ancient goddesses. Slosburg-Ackerman presents Blossfeldt-Rietveld/Slosburg-Ackerman. (An illustration. Imminent Collapse and Ascent.), a set of sculptures and wall pieces that ruminate on organic and geometric forms.
The Renaissance Society, Chicago
Nine Lives
September 12–November 15, 2020
Curators: Caroline Picard and Karsten Lund
Exhibition
Nine Lives takes shape around a diverse set of protagonists, as if this exhibition were a collection of short stories told from different points of view. These figures—whether real or imagined—come forward in the artworks, which offer intimate but imperfect access to their respective lives. As these individuals occupy everyday settings or navigate more extraordinary circumstances, larger dimensions also begin to emerge. A notion of the self remains central to the exhibition, but this self moves in relation to society and history, with an ongoing tension between public and private experience.
Through new commissions or recent works by eleven artists—Marwa Arsanios, Raven Chacon, Bethany Collins, Tamar Guimarães, Kapwani Kiwanga, Hương Ngô, Aliza Nisenbaum, Alison O’Daniel, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Elle Pérez, and Charlotte Prodger—Nine Lives is weighing how stories are told, where they can be found, and what their effects might be, both on a collective scale and in a more personal register. Along the way, the exhibition echoes various feminist legacies, especially artists who have explored what it is for women to tell their own stories or who made space for narratives otherwise obstructed or unwritten. Not all narratives are told in the present tense and many follow us from the past; as such, some of the artists in Nine Lives also consider how traces of the past are interpreted, developing new appraisals of history as it is felt here and now.
In conjunction with Nine Lives and a concurrent exhibition, Upkeep, at The Arts Club of Chicago, the two institutions are cohosting a series of related public programs.
Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum
Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities
November 12, 2021–January 30, 2022
Curator: Jan Howard
Exhibition
Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander (RISD MFA 1995, painting and printmaking) is internationally celebrated for bringing South and Central Asia manuscript painting into dialogue with contemporary art practice. This exhibition tracks the first fifteen years of this artistic journey, from her groundbreaking deconstruction of these illustrated manuscript traditions in Pakistan to the development of a new personal vocabulary at RISD, expanded explorations around identity as a Core fellow at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and her global outlook during her first years in New York. During this period, Sikander richly interrogated gender, sexuality, race, class, and history, creating open-ended narratives that have sustained her work as that of one of today’s most significant artists.
Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans
Elinor Carucci: Halfway
Digital publication
Click on the title to access the digital publication for Elinor Carucci: Halfway.
Elinor Carucci: Halfway is a photography essay and oral history by the artist Elinor Carucci spanning twenty-five years of her practice and three series of work: Closer, Mother, and Midlife. Released in the final days of 2020, it is a study on the myth of origins, the courage of women, the politics of domesticity, the intensity of intimacy, the performance of sexuality, the burdens of loving, the agony of growing, the liberation of aging, and the proximity of death. Carucci suspends our gaze at the strange and difficult, familiar and glorious in our family lives. She gives form to a feminist motherhood.
Elinor Carucci: Halfway is accompanied by “Now,” an essay by Jacqueline Rose from Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
The oral history by Elinor Carucci was edited by Aimée Toledano.
Elinor Carucci (b. 1971, Jerusalem) is a New York–based photographer whose work presents stark and intimate portrayals of family, relationships, and the changing, aging, and ever-evolving human body. Her work has appeared often in the New York Times and the New Yorker, where her images illustrate a variety of unusual or sensitive real-life situations. She has published four monographs—Closer, Diary of a Dancer, Mother, and Midlife—and teaches in the graduate program of Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (2002) and the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for a Young Photographer (2001), and she has had solo exhibitions at Edwynn Houk Gallery, Gallery Fifty One (fine art photography), and James Hyman Gallery, among others.
Root Division, San Francisco
Until It Shatters presents work by fifteen Root Division Studio Artists, both current and alumni. Exhibiting artists disrupt existing systems of structure to create alternative routes forward both through the thematic content presented and the physical making process itself.
The exhibition’s title references Hillary Clinton’s presidential concession speech: “Now, I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday, someone will.” Although the exhibition began with a standard curatorial model, it has adapted and shifted to an artist-driven project based on the shared need for community.
To modify Clinton’s quote: the elusive ceilings will only shatter by a collective force in tandem with the elevation of diverse voices. The exhibition’s theme inherently calls for a collaborative, emergent model to highlight its intersectionality, which includes themes of womanhood, environmentalism, the womxn body, motherhood, self-care, and invisible labor, among others— all informing and woven together. Additionally, many of the exhibited works are outside the artists’ main body of work and/or developed throughout the last several months of quarantine.
The process leading up to the exhibition is a part of the show itself—creating a web of connections, a call and response between artists through shared agency and experiences. After participating in group virtual-studio visits, the artists finalized the work they will be exhibiting based on conversations and feedback. Artists then interviewed one another in pairs or small groups, discussing what they are working on, how they support or are supported by other womxn, and what they are currently reanalyzing. Artist interviews will be published alongside the physical work itself and available online. Until It Shatters resulted in a collection of works that is deeply personal, direct, visually varied, and stronger when presented together.
Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art
Feminizing Permanence
February 20–December 13, 2020
Curator: April Bojorquez with Kate Perdue
Exhibition
Feminizing Permanence features forty historical and contemporary artworks by forty women artists from the permanent collection of Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art. The recontextualized works explore a wide range of themes while collectively speaking to the under-representation of women artists in the permanent collections of museums across the country. The exhibition recognizes the contributions of women in the arts and their shared journey toward parity.
Featuring artists Alice Brown Chittenden, Anna Klumpke, Anna Kingwatsiak, Annie Harmon, April Funcke, Barbara Kasten, Bertha Lum, Bertha Stringer Lee, Beth Van Hoesen, Carrie Anderson, De Ann Jennings, Diane Rosenblum, Dody Weston Thompson, Elaine de Kooning, Elizabeth Emerson Keith, Elizabeth Norton, Elizabeth Ginno, Georgia Crittendon Bemis, Helen Hyde, Helen Katharine Forbes, Isabelle Percy West, Jane O’Neal, Jessica Dunne, Judy Dater, Karen Truax, Kenojuak Ashevak, Laurie Brown, Linda Simmel, Linna Vogel von Fogelstein Irelan, Marion Palfi, Mary Deneale Morgan, Mary Elizabeth Parsons, Mary Herrick Paxton Ross, Napachie Pootoogook, Nikki Basch Davis, Pam Glover, Pitseolak Ashoona, Robin Kandel, Sonya Rapoport, and Suda House.
Kari Marboe, a contemporary ceramic artist living and working in the Bay Area, creates site-specific work in response to nineteenth-century California landscape painter William Keith. Kari explores how form, materials, and aesthetics can record a site’s meaning and representation of truth. Through interviews and visits, Kari contemplates three Bay Areas sites—Lagunitas, Stinson Beach, and Mount Tamalpais—and how these locations, previously pursued, sketched, and painted by Keith from the 1870s through the 1910s, appear over one hundred years later. Kari reimagines Keith’s interpretations of these physical and topographical terrains through molding materials of clay, soil, and earth. Her fourth location, the moon, redirects the focus from the physical site to an aesthetic mood, exploring a universally gazed-upon subject in a nocturnal setting and light. Keith + Kari uncovers and builds forth a physical layer of earth and representation, adding an exploratory dimension to the rhetoric and observations of the California landscape and how “truth of place” can shift and yet remain the same.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
Insist, Resist, Persist: Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy Collection of Women’s Liberation Posters from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s
October 3, 2020–May 16, 2021
Curator: Joseph Becker
Exhibition
As one of the founders of the field of women’s studies, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy has been a pioneering force in feminist and lesbian scholarship. Since the 1970s, a pivotal decade for feminism and LGBTQ+ activism, she has been collecting political posters related to these movements. The prints displayed here have been selected from the Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy Collection of Women’s Liberation Posters, which was donated to SFMOMA in the spring of 2020.
The collection celebrates the solidarity and uprisings that have grown out of struggles for equality. Often displayed on bulletin boards and shop windows or handheld at rallies, these posters were produced by individuals, artist collectives, and activist groups, many unnamed or unknown. Their messages against oppression and injustice are just as relevant today, each of them a testament to the energy and creativity that fueled the political activism of the late twentieth century. Together, they remind us of our immediate and collective responsibility to take action towards equity and social justice.
No Day of Rest!
November 11–December 22, 2020
Curator: Rudolf Frieling, Gina Basso
Film series
No Time to Rest! is a five-part program of films by women that foreground the possibilities of resistance and activism as it critiques power structures, reclaims historical narratives, seeks bodily autonomy and reframes the act of representation in direct confrontation with patriarchal, racist, and capitalist legacies.
Featuring Eve Fowler, Jeanne C. Finley, Kelly Gallagher, Ja’Tovia Gary and Lynn Hershman Leeson.
San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery
Beyond Binary
Spring 2022
Curators: Sharon E. Bliss, Kevin B. Chen, and Roula Seikaly
Exhibition
Expanding upon the Feminist Art Coalition’s stated goal of encouraging feminist-inspired programming during the 2020 U.S. presidential election cycle, the San Francisco State Fine Arts Gallery has chosen to pursue an exhibition celebrating the work of trans and gender-nonconforming artists working across media and transdisciplinarily. Beyond Binary focuses on the exploration of a gender spectrum, across cultures and generations, in the formation of personal and collective identities and visual narratives. The exhibition celebrates trans and gender-nonconforming artists who engage the body as both a form and site of social sculpture and who challenge established narratives of art history to become more inclusive. This project has been postponed until spring 2022 due to the current distance-learning status of the university.
Beyond Binary is being organized by the Fine Arts Gallery’s Sharon E. Bliss and Kevin B. Chen, in collaboration with independent writer and curator Roula Seikaly. Artists include Cassils, Jayasri Alhamdaputri, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Craig Calderwood, Wells Chandler, Jeffrey Cheung, Ben Cuevas, Demian Dinéyazhi', Nicki Green, Juliana Huxtable, E. “Oscar” Maynard, MCXT (Monica Canilao + Xara Thustra), Vivek Shraya, Beatrice L. Thomas, Eli Thorne, Alok Vaid-Menon, Chris E. Vargas, Leila Weefur, and Jess Wu.
San José Museum of Art
Barring Freedom
October 30, 2020–April 25, 2021
Curators: Rachel Nelson and Alexandra Moore
Exhibition
With more than two million incarcerated people, a majority of them Black or brown, and nearly all from poor communities, the prison–industrial complex reveals a troubled vision at the heart of the nation. Co-organized by the UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences and San José Museum of Art, Barring Freedom features works by twenty U.S.-based artists that explore the complex nexus of policing, surveillance, detention, and imprisonment.
While Barring Freedom was conceptualized before the current crises—COVID-19 and its ongoing and unequal effects, and the epidemic of brutal police killings of Black people in the United States—they have brought into sharp relief the horrific consequences of structural racism. As the depths of the injustices come into focus, Barring Freedom reflects the teachings of prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis:
“When we are told that we simply need better police and better prisons, we counter with what we really need. . . . We need to be able to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them . . . [and] reinvent entire worlds.”
It is with the urgency of the times that Barring Freedom underscores the importance of artists and creative practitioners in envisioning a world beyond racist policing, biased courts, and overflowing prisons.
Artists: American Artist, Sadie Barnette, Sanford Biggers, Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick, Sonya Clark, Sharon Daniel, Maria Gaspar, Ashley Hunt, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts, Deana Lawson, Sherrill Roland, Dread Scott, jackie sumell, Hank Willis Thomas, Patrice Renee Washington, and Levester Williams.
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA)
Unapologetic: All Women, All Year
February 15, 2020–January 17, 2021
Curators: Lauren R. O’Connell with Keshia Turley
Exhibition
Unapologetic: All Women, All Year takes an in-depth look at works from SMoCA’s collection, highlighting diverse women artists whose work boldly and unapologetically parses topics such as identity, beauty, violence, and equality. Artists include Dotty Attie, Melinda Bergman, Claudia Bernardi, Dominique Blain, Cristina Cardenas, Sue Chenoweth, Judy Chicago, Renee Cox, Lesley Dill, Bailey Doogan, Angela Ellsworth, Lalla Essaydi, Dorothy Fratt, Barbara Hepworth, Laura Korch, Barbara Krashes, Kyung-Lim Lee, Laurie Lundquist, Muriel Magenta, Louise Nevelson, Yoko Ono, Adria Pecora, Barbara Penn, Beverly Pepper, Monique Prieto, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kate Shepherd, Deb Sokolow, Beth Ames Swartz, Julianne Swartz, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Melanie Yazzie and Asami Yoshiga.
As a result of historically being overlooked within the structure of art history, women constitute an average of less than 15 percent of the artists in museum collections nationally. For the year, SMoCA presents a selection of women artists from its collection to bring awareness to this lack of inclusion. This exhibition’s title conveys a sense of strength, signaling for systemic change within culture, where individuals of all genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, ages, and abilities see themselves represented within museums. On view during the 100th anniversary of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, Unapologetic aims to create a space that recognizes the importance of equality within cultural institutions.
This exhibition presents a variety of mediums and genres of art, including modernist bronze sculpture; large, abstract, shaped canvases; conceptual art; written word; photography; printmaking; painting; sculpture; and collage. It is the museum’s first yearlong collection show, and it includes a section for rotational highlights, as well as a gallery dedicated to rarely shown installation-based works (on view February 15–September 13, 2020).
Seattle Art Museum
Dorothy Napangardi was born in the Tanami Desert of Australia, where a crystalline salt-lake region played a powerful role in her life. She spoke of the unconditional happiness and freedom she felt when she traversed her family’s country and slept beside them with stars as a canopy. Translating the rhythm of walking hundreds of miles across the landscape into paint, Napangardi’s paintings in this exhibition take us to the shimmering salt lake, where she absorbed indigenous laws and stories from the land and her family. Her individual style of intricate dotting can suggest a vast aerial perspective or a microscopic maze.
Barbara Earl Thomas: The Geography of Innocence
On view through January 2, 2022
Curator: Catharina Manchanda
Exhibition
Seattle-based artist Barbara Earl Thomas draws from history, literature, folklore, and biblical stories to address what she calls the plagues of our day, from pervasive violence against Black men and youth, to gun violence, to the climate crisis. Defining herself as a storyteller, the artist notes that “it is the chaos of living and the grief of our time that compels me, philosophically, emotionally, and artistically. I am a witness and a chronicler: I create stories from the apocalypse we live in now and narrate how life goes on in the midst of chaos.” In this exhibition, the artist will create an immersive environment of light and shadow—inhabited by large-scale narrative works in cut paper and glass—that addresses our preconceived ideas of innocence and guilt, sin and redemption, and the ways in which these notions are assigned and distorted along cultural and racial lines.
Lynne Siefert’s experimental nonfiction films give expression to a dystopian state of mind and address our urgent climate crisis in unsettling yet seductive ways. Her works transform familiar artistic genres, from 19th-century pictorial landscape paintings to modern travelogues, into dissonant filmic takes on our time. By recontextualizing the familiar, or revealing what is hidden in plain sight, she explores the boundary between the real and surreal, seeking to jolt viewers into awareness.
Experience two of Siefert’s most recent films on a loop in this installation. Ark is set on a cruise ship in the midst of a vast blue ocean. Combining scenes of decadence, artifice, and the occasional musings of passengers, the film highlights the surreal world of desire and consumption as a fantastic outgrowth of our current, late-capitalist moment. Meanwhile, the three-channel film Generations lays bare the tensions between industry, human activity, and the natural environment, with 13 tableaux showing people living, working, and playing in the shadow of gigantic coal power plants.
Lynne Siefert is the winner of the 2019 Betty Bowen Award. Established in 1977 to honor the legacy of Betty Bowen—an enthusiastic supporter of Northwest contemporary art—the annual award celebrates a Northwest artist for their original, exceptional, and compelling work.
City of Tomorrow: Jinny Wright and the Art that Shaped a New Seattle
October 23, 2020–January 18, 2021
Curator: Catharina Manchanda
Exhibition
Virginia “Jinny” Wright (1929–2020) played a pivotal role in the cultural development of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Along with her husband Bagley (1924–2011), Jinny (as friends called her) wanted to make Seattle and the Northwest a premier venue for the arts, generously supporting numerous cultural institutions, including SAM. City of Tomorrow tells the story of the future-focused initiatives spearheaded by Wright. Landmark modern and contemporary paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs from the illustrious Wright collection are complemented by historical ephemera that trace formative moments and initiatives, including the organization of the Contemporary Arts Council that brought major contemporary exhibitions to the Fine Arts Pavilion in the 1960s before SAM had a department of modern and contemporary art. You’ll follow Jinny’s intuitive eye and journey of discovery starting in the 1950s as they led her from celebrated to lesser-known artists of the moment, all of whom are now icons, including Carl Andre, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, David Hammons, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and many more. Yet this is just the beginning of the story, as Virginia Wright championed and funded works in public spaces around Seattle and beyond and spearheaded initiatives to benefit the entire region.
The gap between our ideal homes and the lived reality of our overgrown, patched-up, and slightly worn habitats can be an ongoing negotiation at the best of times. Dawn Cerny’s title for this exhibition, Les Choses (Things), references the 1965 novel by French author Georges Perec, which follows a young Parisian couple dreaming of the good life in their overstuffed apartment. Tangible and intangible “things” are at the center of their lives, and the couple is suspended between part-time jobs and dreams of wealth, leisure, and freedom—paralyzed by the vastness of their desires.
Les Choses features sculptures that embody mindscapes. Cerny answers modernist demands for elegance and clean lines with an aesthetic that reimagines the shape of necessity. Like Perec’s novel, objects convey different psychological and emotional states and are the protagonists of Cerny’s installation. Sagging, slumping, leaning, they provide makeshift support for other functional things: a painting, a glass jar, a ceramic vase. They shapeshift into people, places, and blank spaces where their enigmatic titles act as prompts for possible stories, dreams, and memories to be completed by the viewer.
Dawn Cerny (American, born 1979) is the 2020 winner of the Betty Bowen Award. Established in 1977 to honor the legacy of Betty Bowen—an enthusiastic supporter of Northwest contemporary art—the annual award celebrates a Northwest artist for their original, exceptional, and compelling work.
The Shed
Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water
October 22, 2020–Spring 2021
Curator: Adeze Wilford
Exhibition
For her solo exhibition at The Shed, Howardena Pindell will present Rope/Fire/Water, her first video in twenty-five years. In this powerful work, Pindell recounts personal anecdotes and anthropological and historical data related to lynchings and racist attacks in the United States. She accompanies this voice-over with archival photos of lynchings and the historic Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, a series of nonviolent protests carried out by young people in May 1963. In the work, Pindell also recounts her interest in creating the video as early as the 1970s and the censure her project and practice faced from a feminist coalition at the time. The artist hopes to raise awareness of the women who were victims of hate crimes, including lynching, as historical documents and records often focus on more widely known accounts of male victims.
Over her nearly sixty-year career, Pindell has created richly textured abstract paintings while engaging with politics and the social issues of her time. In the exhibition, Pindell will also debut a pair of large-scale paintings related to global atrocities of imperialism and white supremacy, and several abstract paintings that demonstrate a through line in Pindell’s practice: after working on traumatic historical projects, the artist decompresses by creating meticulously produced, large-scale abstract works on unstretched canvas. An accompanying catalogue will feature new writing by Pindell and new scholarship on the artist’s practice.
SITE Santa Fe
SITElab 14: May Stevens: Mysteries, Politics and Seas of Words
March 26–August 1, 2021
Curators: Lucy R. Lippard and Brandee Caoba
Exhibition
SITE Santa Fe presents May Stevens: Mysteries, and Politics and Seas of Words, a survey of the career of the internationally recognized painter May Stevens (1924–2019). The exhibition includes Stevens’s work from 1970 to 2010, exploring her roles as a feminist artist and political activist. She was a founding member of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and the Guerrilla Girls. Throughout her seventy-year career, Stevens made art to combat social injustice and bring about change, elevating the silenced voices of women throughout history. In the last years of her studio practice, she focused on meaningful landscapes, some of them local. Stevens lived in El Dorado, New Mexico, from 1997 until her death in 2019.
Over the last three decades, Los Angeles–based artist Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice: from early target paintings in the 1990s based on operatic heroines, to expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that brought attention to Weatherford’s practice in the 2010s. Mary Weatherford: Canyon—Daisy—Eden presents a survey of her career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989–2017. As constant experiments with color, scale, and materials, these works reveal the continuity of Weatherford’s preoccupation with memory and experience, both personal and historical.
Skirball Museum/Skirball Cultural Center
Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
January 21–May 31, 2021
Curator: Cate Thurston
Online exhibition
Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist whose work focuses on conflicts and human rights issues. Addario regularly works for the New York Times, National Geographic, and Time. Over the past fifteen years, she has covered every major international humanitarian crisis, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, South Sudan, Somalia, and Congo. Addario’s lens is particularly attuned to the lives of women in conflict zones, including her series Veiled Rebellion, an intimate look at the lives of Afghan women, and her work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which chronicles rape as a weapon of war.
The Skirball will exhibit Addario’s new body of work, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, a never-before-seen photographic series that exposes the entrenched challenges besetting working-class America. Having previously covered international crises, Addario with this series turns inward to cover a domestic humanitarian crisis hiding in plain sight. This exhibition, developed in partnership with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, will feature a narrative by Kristof and WuDunn. Addario has been the recipient of numerous international awards throughout her career, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism.
Talking Back to Power: Projects by Aram Han Sifuentes
[Opening January 2021]
Curator: Laura Mart
Exhibition
The work of Chicago-based artist Aram Han Sifuentes investigates identity politics, immigration, citizenship, and protest through sewing. Her participatory, mostly textile-based projects draw on crafts such as sewing, embroidery, and appliqué—long-marginalized forms of making associated with women’s domestic work and exploited labor. As a central part of her artistic practice, she creates communal spaces for skill-sharing and freedom of expression through workshops and collective archives of collaboratively created works.
Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery | Bennington College
Usdan Gallery presents a survey of works by Los Angeles–based artist Lisa Anne Auerbach, focusing on her engagement with politics and grassroots activism.
swissnex San Francisco
After her exhibition Praying for my haters (2019) at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris, Swiss artist Lauren Huret extends her research to San Francisco, culminating in the exhibition The cursed system at swissnex Gallery on Pier 17. This research continues her exploration of the notion of “cursed imagery” through the prism of content moderation on social media in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Content moderators—a job that is still little-known—constantly sort through the images and videos that are posted to social media every day. In an era of “meme warfare” and political misinformation, this content can be problematic, even traumatic, and the psychological and physical consequences of this work can be disastrous. The artist thus raises the question of the performative power of images and their effects on the body and soul of spectators and workers. In the context of the global content-sharing economy, Huret also brings awareness about our belief systems in communication technology and our tendency to trust—and assume the presence of—automated processes.
For her exhibition at swissnex San Francisco, the artist wishes to reveal more of the links between tech-ideologies, mysticism, and the power of images.
Artist’s website: laurenhuret.com
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond
September 17, 2020–June 6, 2021
Curators: Rachel Seligman and Minita Sanghvi
Exhibition
Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond takes the centennial of the 19th Amendment as the occasion for an exploration of the issues and challenges women in the United States have faced, and continue to face, in politics and society. The exhibition will serve as a campus and community hub for action and activism during the run up to the 2020 United States presidential election and post-election.
Installed in the gallery will be one hundred works by one hundred women artists. The center of the gallery will hold a symbolic representation of the Wesleyan Chapel—site of the first suffrage meeting in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York. The exhibition is intended as a space for debate, discussion, and dialogue: between visitors, between artists, and between the artists and the original suffragists, in a symbolic conversation across time that both critiques and expands on the suffragists’ initial accomplishment. Short written reflections by each artist, on their work in the context of the exhibition, will also be presented.
Never Done and its related programming will look at institutional structures that create power hierarchies impacting women across all aspects of society, including media bias, access to funds, and backlash against women seeking power. The exhibition will also consider the role of race and economics in shaping women’s participation in politics—for example, the relative disenfranchisement of women of color and low-income women far beyond the 19th Amendment.
Tufts University Art Galleries
With work by Judy Chicago, Young Joon Kwak, MPA, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ellen Lesperance, Joiri Minaya, Cauleen Smith, Faith Wilding, Paula Wilson, and Carmen Winant with Carol Osmer Newhouse, Staying with the Trouble is a group exhibition that proposes strategies and coping mechanisms for navigating the current political and socio economic climate, which seems to be simultaneously slipping backward into the archaic and forward into the apocalyptic.
Each of the artists in Staying with the Trouble engages in a practice that is weblike in its references and positioned to challenge histories, past and projected, to engage with the immediate. Often drawing on world-building strategies and from the landscapes where they dwell, these artists embrace concepts of science fiction, intersectionality, and utopia through humor, joy, performance, mythology, and re-presentations of femininity and sexuality.
Nonetheless, the works in this exhibition resist escapism, taking the hard road to “stay with the trouble” of the present while envisioning a new paradigm for negotiating it. These works ask viewers collaboratively to begin to lay the groundwork for imagining the unimaginable. This last year has witnessed continued violence against Black bodies, silencing of Indigenous voices, and attempts at erasure—whether at the ballot box or along the Dakota Access Pipeline. Yet this year has also seen a wider recognition of such systemic violence and a new commitment to the project of decolonization in efforts to both dismantle and shift societal narratives, newly privileging identities and voices long suppressed or misrepresented by the mainstream.
The exhibition title is a direct reference to ecofeminist Donna Haraway’s 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, in which she calls for new ways of nonlinear thinking in an age when old methodologies are clearly failing. Echoing the critical ethos found within indigenous knowledge, philosophical practices, and modern science, Haraway advises collaborative approaches to learning to live (and die) together on a damaged Earth. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, similarly highlights out interconnected paths to survival. Kimmerer writes of the extraordinary behavior of trees and remarks, “What happens to one of us happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.” Both Kimmerer and Haraway ask all of us to see beyond the trees to the forest. The act of staying with the trouble is a call for new stories through acts of joy, empathy, coauthorship, collaboration, and invention; and to redefine family and economies in the here and now rather than to mourn the future preemptively.
Staying with the Trouble: Paula Wilson + Faith Wilding
August 30—December 5, 2021
Curator: Kate McNamara
Exhibition
While the majority of Staying with the Trouble will be on view at the Aidekman Arts Center on the Tufts Medford campus, a portion will be installed in the Grossman Gallery on the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) campus. The Grossman Gallery will feature a unique dialogue between Staying with the Trouble artists Paula Wilson and Faith Wilding. Wilson is interested in drawing connections between the human rights and environmental movements and offers a paradigm for engendering harmony by embracing the natural world. Her 2018 video installation Spread Wild: Pleasures of the Yucca shows naturalists manifesting the yucca flower pollinating dance. A selection of new Faith Wilding drawings and paintings on paper and papyrus will also be exhibited alongside Spread Wild. Both artists share a distinct investment in depicting the human and natural worlds in conversation.
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University
10 x 10: Ten Women / Ten Prints
Opened July 1, 2020; ongoing
Curators: Nellie Elliott, curatorial intern, with Ksenya Gurshtein, curator of modern and contemporary art
Online exhibition
In commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, the Ulrich Museum of Art is mounting an online exhibition titled 10 x 10: Ten Women / Ten Prints. The exhibition showcases a portfolio of ten prints by ten different women artists. Printed by Jos Sances, founder of Alliance Graphics, the portfolio was first published in 1995 by the Berkeley Art Center in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. Twenty-five years later, these prints remain a poignant testament to the experiences and struggles, both public and private, that women continue to face. The ten featured artists represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the United States, and the prints tackle a variety of issues relevant to women in American society today. The virtual exhibition will be available through the Ulrich Museum of Art’s website. It is accompanied by curricular content available to college faculty anywhere for use in the classroom.
Visual Arts Center, UT Austin
Joey Fauerso: Wait for It includes work by San Antonio–based artist Joey Fauerso. Across a range of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, and video, Fauerso’s practice engages with history, spirituality and utopian communities, domesticity, and the body. Fauerso’s complex installations resemble theatrical sets, fitted with props of various shapes and sizes that are enacted through performances staged for the camera. Neither precious nor fixed, these installations are activated through participants—friends, peers, and her family, including her children—who push, prod, and nudge these items into action. In the gallery, the props are evidentiary, reminders of the actions that took place in another setting and at another time. Humor, play, and the absurd underscore these witty works and offer a potent commentary on the current state of affairs in the United States, which is precarious and on the verge of collapse.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Don’t let this be easy
July 30, 2020–July 4, 2021
Curators: Nisa Mackie and Alexandra Nicome
Exhibition
Drawn from the collections of the Walker Art Center, Don’t let this be easy assembles work by artists whose practices reflect the diverse and intersectional agendas and values of feminism. The exhibition highlights artists, projects, performances, and gestures that have evaded easy categorization by gathering artworks alongside artists’ books and materials from the Walker archive. Positioned beside one another, these elements connect feminist and artistic thought through a shared evasion of dualisms that govern social and political discourse today, from art/not-art or right/left to cause/effect or subject/object. They also highlight ways museum categories and collecting practices have created obstacles to the acquisition and display of works by women and gender-nonconforming artists. As research for the exhibition continues to reveal how museum collections have been shaped by pervasive systemic inequality, the Walker will respond by dedicating resources to increasing scholarship, images and documentation, and interpretive materials about select artists online. Engaging current conversations about institutions and equity, the exhibition explores the complex nature of the feminist enterprise.
Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
Cecilia Vicuña is on our mind.
September 28, 2020–August 1, 2021
Curators: Anthony Huberman and Jeanne Gerrity
Lecture and event series
Alongside its exhibition program, the Wattis dedicates an entire year to reflecting on the questions posed by a single artist’s work through public programs and a reading group. The seventh research season is informed and inspired by the work of Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948, Santiago, Chile). This series will include discussions, lectures, screenings, performances, and other events that connect Vicuña’s art to a larger context of contemporary culture, politics, science, and philosophy. Themes that arise in her work include collective memory, ecofeminism, colonialism, language, dissolution, extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.
Vicuña is a Chilean poet, visual artist, and activist who is based in New York and Santiago. Since the 1960s, she has contributed a radical perspective on the relationship between art and politics through her writing and art practice. Feminist and sociological methods, as well as indigenous culture and natural materials, imbue her work.
Influenced by the oral history of her family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the history between the two countries, Maia Cruz Palileo investigates larger questions pertaining to identity, history, migration, and belonging. Infusing narratives with both memory and imagination, Palileo translates diverse materials into a novel formal language to describe a new world of her own making.
This exhibition of new paintings stems from research she conducted at the Newberry Library in Chicago, which has one of the largest collections of Filipiniana in the world. These varied documents, spanning centuries and cultures, offered a kaleidoscopic vision of the Philippines as seen through numerous eyes and recalled by multiple “natives” and “others.”
Palileo recontextualizes these stories, portraits, and images in an attempt to resuscitate these figures from the exploitative gaze of these ethnographic images. Inspired by Damián Domingo, Palileo’s expressive, gestural paintings imbue a sense of humanity and dignity to the subjects. She integrates historical narratives from the colonial past of the Philippines with stories and memories of her own life as a Filipina American growing up in the United States, producing paintings that possess dreamlike qualities that hover between fact and fiction. Combining Palileo’s extensive research with Spanish colonialism, the Filipino-American War, and the artist’s own understanding of a fractured and complex past, the work evokes nostalgia and romanticism while critiquing the ramifications of colonization, past and present.
West Virginia University Libraries
Undefeated: Canvas(s)ing the Politics of Voter Suppression since Women’s Suffrage
Virtual program launch: August 7, 2020,
noon–1 pm. Hosted by exhibit coordinator Sally Brown Deskins and featuring a presentation by graphic design professor Eve Faulkes on social justice design theory.
Print installation: Downtown Campus Library, January–August 2021
Curator: Sally Brown Deskins
Exhibition
The West Virginia University Libraries’ collaborative exhibition Undefeated: Canvas(s)ing the Politics of Voter Suppression since Women’s Suffrage comes on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (granting women the right to vote), and the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (enforcing voting rights for racial minorities). Undefeated examines the political process, with special attention to efforts to suppress the votes of women and minorities since 1920, and its educational content and artwork are organized into themes: Information / Disinformation; Access / Intimidation; Legislation / Legal Questions; Voter Fraud; and Advocacy / Action. The exhibit will debut with an online component in August, and print will follow in the fall.
Wexner Center for the Arts
Awilda Rodríguez Lora y Macha Colón: SUSTENTO
Spring 2019–Spring 2022
Curators: Lane Czaplinski, in partnership with Theresa Delgadillo (Ohio State University) and Ramón Rivera-Servera (Northwestern University)
Creative Residencies and Performance Film
SUSTENTO is an embodied feminist practice of dreaming a future for all beings to exist in their present joy and truth. Can she—the future self—be a guide to tell the story of the now? How can we be present while acknowledging the trauma, the survivor, the warrior, the exhausted, the exotic, the dancer, the virus, the love, and the grief?
Manifested into video performance, the Caribbean queer woman, La Performera explores time traveling and movement as a strategy of finding hope in the now. Performed and choreographed by Awilda Rodríguez Lora and directed by Macha Colón, SUSTENTO is an improvised action for existing. Performed and filmed during the summer of 2021 at Wexner Center for the Arts and the Motion Lab at Ohio State University’s ACCAD, the final work will premiere in spring 2022.
Developed as part of a three-year art residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio) and La Rosario (Santurce, Puerto Rico). Developed and created thanks to the support of Puerto Rico Arts Initiative, Northwestern University, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Wexner Center for the Arts, ACCAD, and a team of creative collaborators from Puerto Rico and Columbus, Ohio.
Jacqueline Humphries: jHΩ1:)
September 18, 2021–January 2, 2022
Curator: Mark Godfrey
Exhibition
jHΩ1:) is the first large-scale museum exhibition for vanguard abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries. Guest-curated by Mark Godfrey, the exhibition will feature over thirty works, including a new multipanel installation—her largest to date—created in response to the center’s iconic postmodernist architecture.
A maverick figure in New York’s downtown scene, Humphries has reworked and revitalized the language of abstract painting over a career that has covered four decades and multiple transformations in style. The Wex’s presentation will focus on the past seven years, highlighting the importance of digital communications and online culture to Humphries’s evolving practice.
Incorporating the QWERTY keyboard as a means of generating abstract form, some paintings feature emoticons, emoji, kaomoji, and CAPTCHA. Humphries produces others by scanning her earlier works, translating them into ASCII character code, and using stencils created from the results as the basis for new compositions.
The exhibition will also feature Humphries’s recent work exploring the visual language of logos; her black light paintings, made with fluorescent paints to be presented in a darkened space; and a selection of protest sign paintings. These invoke art’s long history as a medium of dissent as well as the uprisings that have increasingly shaped modern politics.
William Paterson University Galleries
The Weight of the Body: Selections from the Permanent Collection
January 27–April 7, 2021
Curators: Casey Mathern, with assistance from Kristen Evangelista and Emily Johnsen
Exhibition
To mark the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted many American women the right to vote, the University Galleries presents an exhibition of works by women artists from its permanent collection. Through paintings, prints, and artists’ books, these artists challenge traditional gender roles and societal norms while addressing the dialogues between issues of gender, race, sexuality, and class. In this way, we honor the women’s suffrage movement for its role in advancing the feminist movement, the women’s liberation movement, the civil rights movement, and subsequent critiques of dominant power structures. Exhibiting artists include Rodríguez Calero, Patricia Cudd, Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Margot Lovejoy, Adrian Piper, Michal Reed, Clarissa Sligh, Joan Snyder, May Stevens, Stella Waitzkin, Carrie Mae Weems, and others. The traveling poster exhibition Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote from the National Archives will be on view alongside the artworks to ground them within this longer historical arc of women speaking truth to power.
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown
Feminist writer and scholar Sara Ahmed describes the notion of a “sweaty concept” as “one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world.” A presentation of nearly 60 works made between 1960 and 2018 by 50 artists including Laylah Ali, Tomie Arai, Giuseppe Campuzano, Nicole Eisenman, Nancy Grossman, Carolyn Lazard, Lee Lozano, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Cara Romero, Nancy Spero, Kara Walker, and others, Sweaty Concepts explores and exposes the difficulty and labor of “coming up against . . . and trying to transform a world.”
Coincident with FAC is the fiftieth anniversary of coeducation at Williams College (1969–71). Sweaty Concepts, together with other projects taking place across campus throughout the year, provides multiple platforms for a variety of voices and makes a claim about the value of building and sustaining equity across difference.
Women Photographers International Archive, WOPHA
Women Photographers International Congress
November 18–19, 2021
Curator: Aldeide Delgado
Symposium
Women Photographers International Congress is a two-day symposium that seeks to create a critical space for photography in Miami by bringing together worldwide organizations of women photographers, art historians, theorists, and curators who aim to build upon and better represent the dynamic history of women photographers from the nineteenth century through today. The Congress presents seminal and emerging research and discourse in the field, considering international discussions about women in the history of photography. This highly visible, interactive event will present panels of renowned art historians, theorists, and curators as well as preeminent women photographers.
Yale Union
Marianne Nicolson: A Feast of Light and Shadows
June 30–August 29, 2021
Curator: Hope Svenson
Exhibition
Yale Union (YU) will present the first solo exhibition in Portland, Oregon, of a newly commissioned artwork by Marianne Nicolson. Nicolson’s site-specific work for YU’s 9,500-square-foot gallery will utilize the dramatic shifts of natural light characteristic of YU’s industrial space to animate the gallery with figures and images of cultures indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. In the center of the gallery, Nicolson will place a large traditional Kwakwaka’wakw feast dish, carved from cedar. According to the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, “Feast dishes were used primarily to hold food served to guests at important social occasions. Great ‘house dishes’ could hold immense quantities of food. They also held their own names and histories, and were among the most valued privileges passed on through marriage and inheritance.” At approximately ten feet long, the feast dish will not only be the sculptural centerpiece of Nicolson’s exhibition, it will also be a highly symbolic reference to the sharing of resources, and to a collective investment in the future.
Marianne Nicolson (b. 1969, British Columbia) is an artist-activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations, part of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala-speaking peoples) of the Pacific Northwest Coast. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver, BC) and an MFA from the University of Victoria (BC), as well as an MA in linguistics and anthropology and a PhD in linguistics and anthropology with a focus on space as expressed in the Kwak’wala language. As a First Nations artist, Nicolson works to bring poetry and beauty to highlight some of the most troubling issues of our time around colonization, dispossession, land rights, and cultural genocide. Trained in both traditional Kwakwaka’wakw forms and contemporary gallery- and museum-based practice, Nicolson centers the preservation of Indigenous cultural knowledge but presented in contemporary media, inviting access to First Nations traditional craft and public discourse around the importance of Indigenous autonomy. Her artwork acknowledges the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their lands and traditions, while celebrating the reemergence and empowerment of Indigenous voices.
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Notes on Feminisms
Commissioned Essays
The Notes on Feminisms section is a series of newly commissioned essays. Each writer has been asked to discuss an issue or issues relating to feminisms that she/he considers urgent. The essays have been commissioned by the FAC and participating institutions. We encourage you to download and print these new publications for use in your gallery or institution. This collection will grow over the course of the project, so check back for new essays.
Copyright is retained by the writers.
Essays
Feminisms
There are many different definitions for feminism, both past and present, so FAC prefers to put it in the plural. Feminism is no longer a singular concept, but embraces and encompasses many different forms of thought and approaches to cultural change.
Here you’ll find a diverse range of perspectives and a selection of some of the seminal voices that have helped to shape and continue to shape feminist thinking.
“A gender line...helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”
“My feminist nomadic subjects are all about engaging with the complexity of our own interaction with human and non-human elements, and our own multiple layers of belonging as subjects-in-process.”
“The major imperative is to think expansively to create a world that no longer has a need to rely on oppressive systems.”
“Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”
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