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Last summer we met in storage for a “bonding” session with the figures we selected from the collection for the show, where Maura, Ellen Belcher (our consultant), and I talked at length about each individual object. Much of what came out of these discussions was incorporated somehow into the labels for the exhibition. Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

Once we had established our criteria, nude female figurines with exaggerated or schematized forms, we needed to put together a list of potential objects for the show. This meant including figurines from the entire ancient world, not just Egypt and the ancient Middle East, so first I searched the object records in the Museum’s database and older card files to find appropriate candidates. I also visited other museums or scoured their websites to identify suitable figurine types and put together a bibliography of scholarly sources on these types in order to research them. Finally, I went into the Museum’s storage to look at the actual objects. I must say that, when it comes to ancient pieces, it is always a shock to see the real thing after looking at pictures. In this case, it brought home to me how powerful these figurines are in appearance despite their very small-scale; all of them can be held in one hand.

Most objects were small enough to fit in the palm of our hands! Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

After we chose nine objects to include, we had to schedule their examination and any necessary treatment by our conservators. This would determine if they could be displayed and whether there were any special restrictions on how we could display them based on their condition, always a major concern with any ancient object, some of which can be extremely fragile. We also needed to arrange for new color photography of each object, not least because Museum image records are now digital.

Meanwhile, Maura was arranging for loans of Chicago works related to The Fertile Goddess place setting, as is customary for Herstory exhibitions. We were really excited to get a large-scale version of one of Chicago’s figurines to compare with the ancient figurines, especially because it provided a visual reference to the older Paleolithic figurines, like The Venus of Willendorf, that inspired it. Maura and I both talked to Judy Chicago about the sources that inspired her figurines the books she had been looking at when she made them. For me, it was truly unprecedented to be able to consult an artist, as I am usually dealing with works that were made thousands of years ago!

During the exhibition mock-up for the show, we were able to situate the Chicago goddess sculpture and two Chicago Dinner Party sketches alongside the other objects for the first time. Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

Chicago’s figurine highlighted the issue of figurine types that were not represented in the Museum’s collection and what we wanted to do about including some reference to them. For example, there are no Paleolithic figurines in American collections, at least that we could find, although the American Museum of Natural History has a case with replicas of famous examples in the Hall of Human Origins. Maura came up with the fantastic idea of a world map on the gallery wall that would demonstrate the incredible range of such figurines over time and throughout the world. Implementing this also involved a lot of research and some surprises. I knew about figurines from the Paleolithic period, Old Europe, and other places in the ancient world, like the Indus valley, that I wanted to include but I had no idea that such figurines existed in China, Japan, and in Ecuador before our cutoff date at the end of the first millennium B.C.E. It was very gratifying to go to storage to see gorgeous examples of the third millennium B.C.E. from Ecuador that are in the Museum’s collection and to include them on the map.

In light of the recent protests surrounding the Iranian election, the opening this Friday of Iran Inside Out: Influences of Homeland and Diaspora on the Artistic Language of 56 Contemporary Iranian Artists at the Chelsea Art Museum couldn’t have been more synchronistic in its timing. The show features the artwork of feminist artists Shirin Neshat, Sara Rahbar, Samira Abbassy among others, and will be open until September 5th.

(Shirin Aliabada and Fahrad Moshiri, Intifada Laundry Liquid and Hejab Barbie, Operation Supermarket Series, 2006, Ink Jet Print, both 75 x 100 cm. Courtesy of Chelsea Art Museum.)

The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women, opening this Thursday, June 25th at Cheim & Read seeks to give a varied significance to the female figure in art by presenting a group of women artists depicting the female form. With works from several generations ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron to Ghada Amer this show is a must see for you. Yes, you.

(Berenice Abbott , Mme. Theodore van Rysselberghe, 1926-30 , Vintage gelatin silver print, 10 x 8 in. Courtesy of Cheim & Read.)

Cindy Workman: The Women is currently up at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. This retrospective of Workman’s art from the nineties up to today demonstrates her commitment to the investigation of sexuality, body image and social identity in her artwork. This show closes August 14th.

(Cindy Workman, Pebbles, 2003, 51 x 40-3/4″, unique digital print, plexiglass and frame. Courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.)

The artwork of Tracey Goodman, Kyung Jeon, Shiri Mordechay, Habby Osk, Rocio Rodriguez Salceda, and Joanna M. Wezyk will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery that opens June 25th. The show, titled I Stepped Into the Room, is named for the final line of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and has unifying attributes which center around identity and relation to physical space. This show closes September 12th.

(Rocio Rodriguez Salceda, Agujero Negro 2, 2008, Pigmented print, 16 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Tina Kim Gallery.)

Declaration of Independence: 50 Years of Art by Faith Ringgold is in its last week at the Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. This retrospective of Ringgold’s work closes Friday, so check it out before it’s too late!

(Faith Ringgold, Working Women (detail), 1996, Acrylic on canvas, 41 x 31 inches. Courtesy of the Institute for Women and Art at Rutgers.)

Fever Dreams at the Crystal Motel is currently up at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. This solo-exhibition of the video and photographic work of Laurel Nakadate can be quite unsettling, particularly her Lucky Tiger series, which documents a performance involving anonymous middle-aged men enlisted via Craigslist, 1950s style camera club photos, and fingerprinting ink. The show closes July 24th.

(Laurel Nakadate, Lucky Tiger #3, 2009, Type-C print and fingerprinting ink, 4” x 6”. Courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.)

Structured Simplicity just opened at Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn. Bringing together the work of Mai Braun, Hilary Harnischfeger, Elana Herzog, Fabienne Lasserre, and Amy Yoes, this exhibition seeks to convey how structures take shape using various different approaches and materials, from shredded bed-linens and deconstructed garments to the New York Times.

(Amy Yoes, Modification and Collapse, 2009. Video loop. Courtesy of Dumbo Arts Center.)

Tracey Emin: Those who suffer Love is currently up at White Cube in London. Emin, who had a piece in both Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection and Global Feminisms here at the Center, has timed Those who suffer Love to coincide with her new book, titled One Thousand Drawings. The show closes July 4th.

(Those who suffer Love exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of White Cube.)

Through her use of unusual materials such as face powder, spray tan, and lipstick, Karla Black creates an oppositional approach to Minimalist Art in her solo-exhibition, currently up at Migros Musuem in Zürich. The show closes August 16th, so if you are in the area, check it out!

(Karla Black, Principals of Admitting (2009), plaster powder, powder paint, sugar paper, spray tan, chalk, concealer stick. Courtesy of Migros Museum.)

Rachel Harrison: Consider the Lobster opens this Saturday, June 27th, at CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art. This 10 year survey of Harrison’s work will be displayed in conjunction with a re-installation of works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, chosen by Harrison and a group of invited artists including Nayland Blake, who was recently included in Burning down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection. The show will be open until December 20th.

(Consider the Lobster exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art.)

Black Madonna, a group show currently up at HP Garcia Gallery, focuses on how one perceives the body in a corporate, celebrity-obsessed culture, seeking to balance the masculine and feminine. This exhibition closes August 1st.

(Marissa Soroudi, Jules, 2009, Photograph in lightbox, 40” x 20”. Courtesy of HP Garcia Gallery.)

At times feminist, anti-corporate, surreal, or simply humorous, the work of artist Amélie Chunleau will be included in a group show opening at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center (CSV) Thursday, June 25th. Presented by Sweethearts and Spies, The Gnomon includes the work of nine emerging contemporary artists and a performance by Cleo Fischl.

(Amélie Chunleau, Untitled, 2009. Courtesy of the Artist.)

An installation view of The Fertile Goddess in the Herstory Gallery. Photograph by Christine Gant.

As we deinstall The Fertile Goddess exhibition, it seems appropriate to reflect on a very good question that numerous visitors have asked me: how do we conceive of, plan, and create an exhibition like this one? So for those who did not get the chance to ask me this in person, here is the (long) answer in three parts.

I should mention here that the Herstory gallery exhibitions in the Center are slightly different from other special exhibitions in the Museum. First, the subjects for all these exhibitions are drawn directly from The Dinner Party, comprising the names of the guests and the related names on the Heritage floor, and second, while the planning phase is often shorter than normal, the shows usually remain on view for longer than the standard three month span of a special exhibition, which can affect the choice of objects, especially with regard to loans. Works in certain materials have restrictions on how long they can be exposed to light, for example, and requests for loans must often be made years in advance.

Another gorgeous photograph taken of the installation of The Fertile Goddess. From this angle you can also see the original didactic “murals” that Judy Chicago created for The Dinner Party. These are installed permanently in the gallery. Photograph by Christine Gant.

The Fertile Goddess began with a shared interest and an invitation. Before the Center opened, its staff undertook the monumental task of devising a web resource of background information about The Dinner Party. I was enlisted to assist with identifying and researching the ancient goddesses and women whose names appear on place settings or the heritage floor—a project that gave me an enormous amount of respect for all the research Judy Chicago did—truly amazing for the time! During this highly enjoyable collaboration, we began an ongoing dialogue on the subject of what is now known about ancient goddesses through scholarship and how feminist artists have drawn upon goddess imagery for their own work. As someone who always felt that contemporary art was “just not my millennium” and something I would just never “get,” this was a revelation for me, opening up a new realm of interest.

Then, in early 2008, Maura Reilly, the founding curator of the Center, contacted me to say that there was an opening in the exhibition schedule for the Herstory gallery and suggested that we collaborate on a “goddess” show. We chose The Fertile Goddess as our subject because, as the second guest in The Dinner Party, she is the first to be embodied in the form of small figurines sewn onto the place setting runner. (The first guest, The Primordial Goddess, is represented by spirals, fur and cowrie shells.) It was immediately clear to me that these figurines were inspired by ancient examples, giving us the perfect forum to illustrate the relationship between ancient art and contemporary feminist art that we had been discussing.

Drawings of letter studies for the Primordial and Fertile Goddess place settings await hanging. One of Judy Chicago’s contemporary goddess figurines was installed nearby. Photograph by Sarah Giovanniello.

I have always been interested in the fascinating—and frustrating—subject of ancient nude female figurines and the questions surrounding their identity and function. While researching and updating records for our ancient Middle Eastern objects as my current project for ECAMEA, I had been taking special note of such figurines, as well as other works that related to names from The Dinner Party. The “star” piece, of course, was our Halaf era figurine, which I discovered was the oldest sculpture in the Museum. Serendipitously, I found out that a friend and colleague I hadn’t seen in a while, Ellen Belcher, was working on Halaf figurines as a dissertation topic and had a lot to tell me about these and other ancient figurine types; she also agreed to serve as a volunteer consultant for the exhibition.

Stay tuned for more on this in the coming weeks, and for a different take on the use of this gallery, visit Patricia Cronin:Harriet Hosmer, Lost and Found, currently on view in the Herstory gallery through January 24, 2010.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris just opened elles@centrepompidou: Women artists in the Collections of the Centre Pompidou. Including over 500 works by 200 women artists, this exhibition is divided into sections with  titles like Pioneers, Free Fire, Body Slogan, The Activist Body, A Room of One’s Own, Woodworks, and Immaterials in order to represent a chronology of artwork by women from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

(Pipilotti Rist, À la belle étoile, 2007, (détail), installation audiovisuelle. Courtesy of the Centre Pompidou.)

Feminist performance and body art pioneer Manon currently has an exhibition up at the Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art in Manhattan. Titled simply, Manon, this retrospective of her work will be on view to the public until June 30th and will include the very first exhibition of her pieces The End of Lola Montez and The Salmon-Colored Boudoir outside of Switzerland.

(Manon, She Was Once Miss Rimini, projection still, 2003. Courtesy of the Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York.)

Curated by Joan Weber, Masked is currently up at School 33 Art Center in Baltimore. Participating artists, including Brooklyn Museum collection artist Bailey Doogan, have used their own bodies or biographies to convey secrecy in this exhibition. The show closes June 27th.

(Masked exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of School 33 Art Center.)

Making Worlds, the 53rd International Art Exhibition opened on June 7th in Venice. The show, directed by Daniel Birnbaum, will feature the work of some 90 artists including that of Susan Hefuna, Joan Jonas, Miranda July, Natalie Djurburg and Yoko Ono. A record of 77 countries will be participating in this year’s Venice Biennial, which will be open to the public until November 22, 2009.

(Susan Hefuna. 4 women-4 views made in Egypt, 2001. Courtesy of the artist.)

Closing Thursday, June 11th, at The Women Made Gallery in Chicago is Lily Mayfield- Intimate Distance. Mayfield’s series of photographs challenges what it means to be “home” by exploring the contradicting desires for intimacy and separateness from those with whom we live.

(Lily Mayfield, Coffee in Bed, archival inkjet print, 20x 30 inches. Courtesy of Women Made Gallery.)

Sketch in Stitch, a solo-exhibition of the work of Shizuko Kimura will be opening at Noho Gallery on June 9th in Manhattan. Fusing textile art with figure drawing, Kimura explores the subtlety of line and form through her use of thread as a medium. Her drawings, executed without preliminary sketches or the aid of photographs, capture the immediacy of the gestures and figures, and can redefine traditional bodily aesthetics. This show closes on June 27th.

(Exhibition announcement image for Sketch in Stitch. Image courtesy of Noho Gallery.)

Open Source Embroidery just opened at Bildmuseet in Sweden. Traversing the link between craft and code, this exhibition features collectively and individually made artworks that examine cultural participation in technologies both old and new. This show will be up until September 6th, so if you are in the area, head on over!

(Becky Stern, LilyPad Arduino Embroidery: A Tribute to Leah Buechley, 2008. Courtesy of BildMuseet.)

Sadie Benning currently has a video up at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Benning has a history of questioning gender and sexuality in her artwork. In this new video, titled Play Pause, she cuts together hundreds of her own gouache drawings of urban landscapes, figures, and abstractions, and uses split-screen and color filters to convey the heightened sense of perception surrounding loss. This exhibition closes September 20th.

(Sadie Benning, drawing for Play Pause, 2001-06. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.)

Currently up at the Museum for Contemporary African Diaspora Arts in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, is a group show featuring five women artists titled, Perspectives: Women, Art and Islam. Fariba Alam, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Mahwish Chisty, Safaa Erruas, and Nsenga Knight all share a connection to Islam through their various cultural backgrounds which they channel into their artwork. This exhibition ends September 13th.

(Exhibition announcement for Perspectives: Women, Art, and Islam. Courtesy of MoCADA.)

Feminist artist Cristina Biaggi currently has a show up at Ceres Gallery. Cristina Biaggi, A Collage Retrospective: Political Collages from 1977 – Present, will be up through this Saturday, June 13th. Check out Biaggi’s artist page, coming soon to the Feminist Art Base!

(Cristina Biaggi, At Last 1, Color collage on wood triptych, 22″ x 17″, 2009. Courtesy of Ceres Gallery.)

The Other Half of the Sky, an exhibition of the photographic and video work of feminist artist Lili Almog, is currently up at the Andrea Meislin Gallery in Manhattan. Almog’s work in this show focuses on the extraordinary situation of Muslim women and matriarchal societies in China. Check it out before it closes this Saturday, June 13th.

(Lili Almog, Lugu Woman #3, 2007,Chromogenic color print. Courtesy of Andrea Meislin Gallery.)

Kol Ishah, In Her Voice / Elle prend la parole is currently up at the Emet Gallery in Hampstead, Quebec. This exhibition features the work of Lucy Levine, Melissa Shiff, and Devora Neumark. The three artists attempt to reclaim and rewrite aspects surrounding Jewish marriage rituals in this show, which closes September 7th.

(Promotional imagery from Kol Ishah, In Her Voice / Elle prend la parole. Courtesy Emet Gallery.)

Don’t forget, Patricia Cronin: “Harriet Hosmer, Lost and Found” just opened in the Herstory gallery here at the museum-make some time in the coming weeks to see this one!

Also, a big thank you to our newest intern here at the Center, Nina Pelaez, for contributing to this week’s picks!

Excavated examples of figurines such as this one from northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Syria, made during the Late Halaf Period in the late fifth millennium B.C.E., have been found, often in groups, among domestic refuse.

We were thrilled to read of the discovery of the oldest known Paleolithic female figure and are fascinated by the widely divergent tone of the coverage from the press, as well as blogs and bloggers from all over the world just as our exhibition The Fertile Goddess nears its end. Although the ancient female figures on view in our exhibition are later, dating from the fifth to the first millennium B.C.E., they too have highly stylized forms that emphasize or reduce to abstraction breasts, bellies, and thighs; older Paleolithic figures are represented on a world map in the gallery.

Matthew Yokobosky, Chief Exhibition Designer, and I spent a lot of time positioning the mounts for each figurine. They were very tricky to steady because none of them, except for the seated Halaf figure, were made to stand by themselves.

Its interesting to compare the coverage of this discovery with the more nuanced views expressed in that of the anniversary of the discovery of the Venus of Willendorf last August, when Venus mania gripped Vienna.  The title of the new book produced for the occasion is Die Frau von W. (The Woman of W.).

Tomoko Nakano, Assistant Graphic Designer, looks over the world map of female figurines.  It took months and months to research and assemble a range of figurines from across the world, but we think it really paid off!

This weekend is your last chance to see nine extraordinary examples of ancient female figurines before The Fertile Goddess closes on Sunday, May 31st in the Herstory Gallery of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.