Tag Archive "feminist-art"

That Person Who is Your Creation – Iranian feminist art at the Asian Arts Initiative

The current exhibition at the Asian Arts Initiative is small in scale but presents big ideas. That Person Who is Your Creation includes five paintings and two videos. Together these works create a narrative about identity and Iranian women artist’s investigations and negotiations in and of western culture. The paintings from Mona Shomali’s Naked Folklore Series show female nudes or age-old stories such as that of Adam and Eve. There is also a portrait of the poet Forough Farrokhzad, whose poem, Call to Arms, inspired the title of this exhibition. The feminist themes in many of the works are inspired by ... More » »

Wangechi Mutu’s Afro-feminist works inaugurate Leonard Pearlstein Gallery’s great new space at Drexel

Post by Jaclyn Seufert The works by Wangechi Mutu at Drexel’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery inaugurate the gallery’s new space in the Urbn Center Annex with a bang. It’s a big show by an important international artist whose provocative works speak forcefully to issues of women’s empowerment and self-image. The show should propel discussions all over town. Gallery Director Dr. Joseph Gregory told me it has long been his wish to give the Kenya-born, Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist a show at Drexel, and this foundational show at the new gallery, with its high ceilings and almost 5,000 square feet of space, was ... More » »

Carolee Schneemann’s Correspondence (and anticipated visit to Philadelphia)

Women have been behind many of the significant developments in the art of the past  fifty years: bodily-based work, contemporary performance art, artist-run spaces, and various alternative art forms such as artists’ books and temporary installations. Yet major museums have been slow to acknowledge them, and until recently no monographs existed on the work of numerous important figures. The past few years have shown signs of change, with books appearing on major artists whose careers began in the 1960s and 70s. Several recent collections of writing by these women add immeasurably to our understanding of the ideas and efforts behind ... More » »

Suzanne Lacy in Print and in Person; from the Feminist Studio Workshop and the Women’s Building to Otis College of Art and Design

I finished reading the collected writings of Suzanne Lacy  (see below) on the plane to the 100th Annual Meeting of the  College Art Association (CAA) , held from Feb. 22-25 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I was excited that I would finally see the artist in action.  Lacy is a pioneer of what has come to be known as social practice (sometimes termed participatory art, community art,  situational art or social sculpture), and founded an MFA program under that name at Otis College of Art and Design in 2007. Since the early 1970s she has produced work consisting of socially ... More » »

Monographs on Birgit Jürgenssen, Nancy Spero and Hannah Wilke

It’s welcome to see increasing numbers of serious books on women artists, even if all three discussed here are posthumous. The volumes on Spero and Wilke pay sustained attention to two Americans who are well-known and widely reproduced; the book on the Austrian, Birgit Jürgenssen (1949-2003), is an introduction to a fascinating artist whose work is all but unknown in the U.S. Gabriele Schor and Abigail Solomon-Godeau Birgit Jürgenssen (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz and Vienna: Sammlung Verbund, 2009) ISBN 978-3-7757–2461-6 (English edition) Birgit Jürgenssen’s education, teaching career and exhibitions took place primarily in the very small and in-bred art community of ... More » »

Lil Picard and others in New York

Some artists fall through the cracks of history, and Lil Picard was one. The exhibition of her work, Lil Picard and Counterculture New York, at the Grey Art Gallery through July 10, 2010 is a revelation. She made feminist art ten years before the subject was acknowledged and created installations and performance art with the help of artists two generations her junior.  She had 15 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Germany during her lifetime, and her work was included in more than 40 group shows. The exhibition is a poignant reminder of the many omissions from the cannon. Anyone ... More » »