Only a few brave souls have tackled the ballet body in the visual arts world. Eleanor Antin began the trend in 1986 with her work Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev, featuring a fictional persona, Eleanora Antinova, a dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. The exhibit featured photographs of Antin’s enchanting ballerina persona starring in various productions: Pocahontas, The Hebrews, Prisoner of Persia, L’Esclave and Before the Revolution.

Eleanor Antin. Pocahontas from Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev 1919-1929, 1977-1978. Courtesy: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

In this show, Antin’s prima ballerina Antinova mocks the glistening, sylph-like dancer in all of her glamorous glory. Antin pokes fun at the ballet ideal using her less than ideal ballet figure. Antin’s deliciously curvy physique and full facial features, though lusted after in contemporary society, are the ultimate “no no” in the ballet world. The ballet, to this day, is noted for its sylph-like women with ballet buns and legs for miles. Thus, Antin, or Antinova rather, infiltrates the dance world, challenging the typical dancing body and its impact on feminine ideals. Classic.

Eleanor Antin, The Hebrews from Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev1919-1929, 1977-1978. Courtesy: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

But there’s a new girl in town, and she’s depicting the ballet in a whole new light. Meghann Snow, a grad student at Parsons The New School for Design, shatters the typical depiction of the dancing body like a hammer to fine china, forcing the viewer to explore the moving female body with honesty rather than idealized societal expectations, to examine body in a grittier, more realistic manner.

Meghann Snow, The Ballet Finger, 2008. 5′x10′, acrylic house paint, oil slick, caulking on wood panel. Courtesy: Meghann Snow.

At first glance, Snow’s featured painting, The Ballet Finger, appears to be a pink, pulsing organ-perhaps a pancreas or a pair of kidneys. But when viewed with a critical eye, it becomes apparent that this work, oil on canvas, is a pointer finger,a small, but very important element in ballet technique. Snow selects certain body parts, fingers and feet, zooms in on these body parts and dissects them, revealing both the beautiful and grotesque elements of the female body. This examination lends to a sort of internal duel, a tug of war between the aesthetically appealing and the bodily blemishes.

Meghann Snow, Size 7, dimensions variable. Courtesy: Parsons The New School for Design, Department of Fine Arts.

Though not on view at The Kitchen, Snow’s work Size 7 kicks the typical ballet shoe up a notch. Snow wraps bare feet in various colorful industrial materials. They’re wrapped sort of messily in canary yellows and navy blues, patches of lime green and magenta. This messiness depicts the wear and tear of the dancing foot, the wear and tear of the dancing body and mind, the lack of glamour, the blood, sweat and tears wrapped up in one tiny shoe. Size 7 is winking with dualism: the sweet fervor of the dance world combined with the twinges of physical and emotional pain that sometimes exhaust the joy of movement.

Both Antin and Snow reveal the restrictive nature of the moving body, as well as the restrictive nature of feminine beauty ideals in general. These female artists, though from different generations, are challenging women to do away with perfection, and reclaim the beauty in those infamous measurements: 36-24-36.

Check out Snow’s work at her open studio at Parsons on Monday, May 12th from 6-8 pm! (25 E. 13th Street, Studio 31)

In conjunction with the Votes for Women exhibition in the Herstory Gallery, we are always looking for more stories about the many unsung pioneers of women’s suffrage. Long-time curatorial and library volunteer and friend of the Brooklyn Museum, Marty Levenson, has this fascinating account to share about Esther Hobart Morris, a local activist from Wyoming who’s brave efforts to promote suffrage legislation led to her appointment as one of the first female justices of the peace in the Wyoming Territory, as it was known in the mid-late 1800s. Read more of Marty’s account of Esther Hobart Morris below.

“Following years of legislative and social struggle, women received the right to vote under US Federal law in 1920. But the country’s first legislative success with regard to women’s suffrage came in 1869 in the then newly created Wyoming Territory.

Though not a member of the Territorial legislature, Esther Hobart Morris has been given major credit for supporting that bill and other laws that allowed married women to control their own property, and provided equal pay for women teachers.

Mrs. Morris was appointed a justice of the peace in 1870 and was the country’s first woman to serve in a judicial office. Afterward, she continued to be active in political affairs and during Wyoming’s statehood celebration in 1890 she was honored for her suffrage activities. In 1895, at age 80, she was elected a delegate to the national suffrage convention in Cleveland.

A life size statue of Mrs. Morris stands directly in front of the Wyoming state capitol in Cheyenne and a copy of the statue was donated to the national statuary hall in the US Capitol when she was designated Wyoming’s representative in that exhibit.”

– Marty Levenson.

(Statue of Esther Hobart Morris by Avard Fairbanks in front of Capitol Building, Cheyenne, WY. Photo: Einar Einarsson Kvaran.)

(Yayoi Kusama Painting 1989 - 2005, 2006. Print archival ink on canvas, 24.5″ x 46″, Edition 1/5. Courtesy: Diane Althoff Alysia Duckler Gallery.)

Sotto Voce, an exhibition of works related to the idea of one color as object, subject, idea, and ultimately a presence, opens at Yvon Lambert, New York on Saturday, May 3, and includes work by innovative feminist artist and performer, Yayoi Kusama.

(Tamara Kostianovsky, Actus Reus, 2008. Courtesy: Black & White Gallery.)

Tamara Kostianovsky’s Actus Reus continues through May 24 at The Black & White Gallery in Chelsea. Kostianovsky examines human consumerism through the slaughtering of animals. Actus Reus, Latin for “the guilty act,” employs beef carcasses made from discarded human clothing. Brooklyn-based artist Tamara Kostianovsky’s Actus Reus is the second segment of the three-part series, “The Proper Animal.”

(Anne Hardy, Centre, 2007. Courtesy: Bellwether Gallery.)

London-based artist Anne Hardy continues her debut New York exhibition at Bellwether Gallery through May 17. Hardy employs used and discarded materials to create interior installations. These photographed installations lend to ideas of human life and human narratives, though human beings are never photographed in her works.

(Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher, The Searchers, 2008. Courtesy: The Front Room Gallery)

The Searchers, by Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher, continues through May 4th at The Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn. This exhibition of photographs explores Western tourism in India, specifically focusing on spiritual tourism. Both Bezzubov and Sucher, artistic partners since 2002, examine themes of politics, tourism and spirituality.

(Fara’h Salehi, Female of the Species, 2008. Courtesy: Art 101)

Artist, metal fabricator and welder Fara’h Salehi continues her exhibition, Female of the Species, through May 11 at Art 101. In this exhibition, Salehi examines the hierarchies and survival methods in insect life as commentary for the many hierarchies in human life.

(Dawit L. Petros, Proposition 1: Mountain, 2007. Courtesy: Studio Museum Harlem.)

Flow, an exhibition featuring seventy-five works by African artists under the age of forty, continues through June 29 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In Flow, the twenty featured artists employ sculpture, painting, video, digital photography and installation art to examine and comment on global, environmental and economic issues facing human beings in contemporary society.

(Theatre ALFORT, Lilliput, 2008. Courtesy: gallery hanahou.)

Lilliput, My Little Friends, by Theatre ALFORT, continues through May 14 at gallery hanahou. ALFORT, a Japanese avant-garde art cooperative, creates an installation based on popular fashion doll Blythe.

(Judith Supine, Dirt Mansion, 2008. Courtesy: English Kills Gallery.)

An exhibition featuring Judith Supine, self-proclaimed “street art-ist” and “psych-collage provocateur” continues at Dirt Mansion through June 8th at English Kills Gallery in Brooklyn.

**Many thanks to interns Lauren Nicole Nixon and Jessie Shaffer for helping to compile this week’s Picks!

Free speech: some of us utilize it more than others, babbling faster than the speed of light. While others, meek as mice, prefer to keep our words to the bare minimum. But, Pia Lindman, a New York-based performance and installation artist, has boldly reorganized the way that we think about free speech in her Soapbox Event, granting each participant only one minute to speak.

Overhead view.  Pia Lindman: Soapbox Event, Reinventing Forms of Free Speech.  Federal Hall National Memorial, 26 Wall Street, New York City.  April 5, 2008.  Photo: Pia Lindman.  Courtesy: Pia Lindman.

Lindman received her MFA from Finland’s Academy of Fine arts, and received a second masters degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Over the years, Lindman has experimented with social and public space, challenging social, political and economic issues facing human beings globally. She has explored her interest in human masses, space and architecture through projects such as Three Cities, Rivers, Monuments (2002/2006) and Fascia (2006).

In her Soapbox Event, Lindman uses historical public spaces as venues for her art. She grants each participant a soapbox to stand on and sets her handy dandy timer for one minute. Participants can share just about anything in the time allotted; poetry, stories, monologues, movement sequences or articles. But there’s a catch: participants may form coalitions, stacking their soapboxes to create a higher podium. One minute is added to each coalition’s speaking time for each extra soapbox stacked. Now, this is a woman who understands the meaning of teamwork!

Side view.  Pia Lindman: Soapbox Event, Reinventing Forms of Free Speech.  Federal Hall National Memorial, 26 Wall Street, New York City.  April 5, 2008.  Photo: Pia Lindman.  Courtesy: Pia Lindman.

Lindman’s Soapbox Event is about more than getting your chat on. Lindman’s work forces participants to be conscious of one another, to share space, to communicate and listen. Her work is much more than a blab-fest: it challenges those involved to become more aware of their bodies in space, how bodies and voices relate to other bodies, how bodies and voices have the potential to affect the world.

The Soapbox Event is an ongoing project, taking place in public locations throughout New York City. The last event, held at the Federal Hall National Memorial in the Financial District reeled in 41 participants, a great success. Past Soapbox Events have taken place at Cooper Union, Yale School of Art and several other acclaimed venues.  To learn more about Pia Lindman’s upcoming events and her fascinating, thought provoking body of work visit the Soapbox Event Blog or check out Pia Lindman’s bio. Learn how to get involved and exercise your right to free speech.

Casualties of Beauty, painter Sarah Chuldenko’s first solo show, opens April 24th at Fake Estate. Chuldenko’s work is described by the gallery as “a provocative collision of buoyant breasts, carnivorous plants, topographic flesh, oil slicks, and roadside IEDs” that simultaneously evokes creation and destruction.

(Sarah Chuldenko, Beirut (detail), 2008. Courtesy: Fake Estate.)

April 25th-27th, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council opens its doors for Open Studio Weekend. Look for work by artist and feminist Simone Leigh.

(Announcement for Open Studio Weekend. Courtesy: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.)

Xenia Hausner’s You & I opens April 25th at Forum Gallery. Hausner combines painting and photography in her compositions, effectively challenging the assumption that photography presents reality.

(Xenia Hausner, All of Me, mixed media, 2008. Courtesy: Forum Gallery.)

Alice Anderson’s new film The Dolls’ Day opens at Espace Croisé on April 26th. Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s novel Morella, The Dolls’ Day is an allegorical tale of a daughter’s restrictive relationship to her parents.

(Alice Anderson, The Dolls’ Day, 2008. Courtesy: Espace Croisé.)

Ephemera, work by Marie Sivak closes April 26th at A.I.R. Sivak’s carved alabaster and limestone sculptures combine with projected or embedded film to create a ghostly effect. Her work appropriates materials traditionally associated with male artists and introduces them to materials and techniques historically confined to “women’s work.”

(Marie Sivak, Pneuma, carved alabaster, video, stainless steel, mixed media. Courtesy: A.I. R Gallery.)

April 27th through June 8th, take a stroll in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for Artwalking: Bedford Avenue. Over thirty artists have been invited by eyewash gallery to create storefront installations in a marriage of Art and Commerce. Feminist artist Catya Plate is included in the show.

(Announcement for Artwalking: Bedford Avenue. Courtesy: eyewash gallery.)

Feminine Transcriptions, recent work by Olga Alexander, will be open through May 5th at the Koussevitzky Art Gallery at Berkshire Community College. (For more information contact bchilla@berkshirecc.edu)

(Olga Alexander, Feminine Transcriptions (series, detail), mixed media with collage on paper, 2007. Courtesy: Artists Space.)

Phyllis Rosser’s solo show Nature Reassembled is now open at Ceres Gallery through May 17th. The show includes sculptural work comprised of river-washed roots and branches as well as paintings of flowers magnified in up-close compositions.

(Phyllis Rosser, Weaving Fence. Courtesy: Phyllis Rosser.)

Then and Now and Forever, images by Boo Ritson, is now open, through May 17th at BravinLee programs. Though Ritson’s subjects are caricatures, her unconventional working method dismantles all presumptions. By styling and literally painting her models in order to ultimately photograph them, she invokes performance, photography, and painting all at once.

(Boo Ritson, The Sunbather, archive digital print, 2007. Courtesy: BravinLee programs.)

Look At Me!: The Performative Impulse in Recent Chinese Photography remains on view at the Williams Center Art Gallery of Lafayette College through May 24th. Curator Dan Mills states that the exhibition does not claim to comprehensively represent its subject, but to merely present 15 artists who are the subjects of their art in various ways.

(Chen Qiulin, Ellisis’s Series No. 3, color photograph, 2002. Courtesy: Chen Qiulin, Max Protetch Gallery, and Lafayette College.)

Sackler Center intern Lauren Nixon was invited to write for the Joyce Theater’s blog as this month’s Students Talks contributor! As both a dancer and a feminist, Lauren has used this opportunity to speak out on restrictive physical standards and physical homogeneity in contemporary dance. Way to go, Lauren!

Read Lauren’s commentary here

Female Forms & Facets: Artwork by Women from 1975 to the Present will be closing April 18th. Hosted by the Central Connecticut State University Art Gallery, this show includes major feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, and Janine Antoni. On April 17th there will be a day of closing activities including a screening of a full-length video by Penny Arcade.

(Penny Arcade, photograph by Bob Gruen. Courtesy: Penny Arcade.)

Opening April 18th, Galerie Lelong presents Touch Me, Yoko Ono’s first solo New York show since 2003. Ono will present film, conceptual photography, sculpture, and an interactive painting in order to comment on different facets of female experience. The interactive painting requires viewer participation; viewers will be encouraged to insert body parts through cuts in the canvas in a performance reminiscent of Ono’s now canonical Cut Piece, originally performed in 1964.

(Yoko Ono, Sky TV, 1966. Courtesy: Imagine Peace, www.imaginepeace.com)

During the Salem Film Festival, April 18-20th, Alexandra Opie will exhibit two video installation works. Opie’s three-dimensional arrangement of multiple projection screens initiates filmic phenomenology by allowing viewers to walk around and within the installations.

(Alexandra Opie, video installation. Courtesy: Salem Film Festival.)

Voice & Void opens April 19th at Galerie im Taxispalais. This group show dedicated to exploring representations of the human voice, and its absence, in the visual arts addresses the difficulty of translating expression from one medium to another. Included in the show is feminist VALIE EXPORT’s 1969 Tonfilm (Sound Film) and work by Global Feminisms artist Anna Gaskell.

(John Cage, cover of Silence (paper mock-up for cover of book), 1959. Courtesy: Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections and Archives, © 1959 by John Cage; Galerie im Taxispalais.)

Don’t miss your chance to see feminist artist Martha Wilson’s early and little-known Photo/Text Works, 1971-74 at Mitchell Algus Gallery. By repeatedly depicting her own image in myriad forms, including drag, Wilson plays with the presentation and transformation of subjectivity. Closing April 26th.

(Martha Wilson, announcement for Photo/Text Works, 1971-74, Posturing: Age Transformation, 1973. Courtesy: Mitchell Algus Gallery.)

Serial Meditations, co-curated by feminists (and former Sackler Center Research Assistants!) Melissa Messina and Amy Brandt, remains open at Nurture Art through May 3rd. In an attempt to consider serial artistic production outside of commodity production, this exhibition presents meditative aspects of repetition and seriality indebted to a minimalist aesthetic.

(Rita MacDonald, Wall Drawing 69-72 (detail), 2006. Courtesy: Rita MacDonald.)

Through June 1st, Figureworks juxtaposes paintings of the male figure, by McWillie Chambers, with others of the female figure, by Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn.

(left: McWillie Chambers, Collins 12, oil on canvas, 2007. right: Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn, nude with double V, oil on canvas, 2005. Courtesy: Figureworks.)

The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics remains open through June 29th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, YBCA, in San Francisco. This exhibition, while emphasizing performance and collaborative projects, showcases work that has been influenced by feminist ideologies and that addresses topics relevant to women today.

(Nao Bustamante, America, The Beautiful. Courtesy: Nao Bustamante.)

Last but not least, we want to pass on news of a kindred new blog with a feminist bent, The American Virgin. Created as a companion project to the work-in-progress documentary of the same title (directed by Therese Shechter, who also directed I Was A Teenage Feminist,) this blog keeps readers up-to-date on all the fascinating tidbits these filmmakers discover about virginity and American attitudes about sex.

Opening April 10th, Regen Projects II presents a new body of work by Catherine Opie, Highschool Football. Opie turns her camera from surf culture toward American high school football, investigating the ways in which masculinity is constructed and re-enforced within regional communities.

(Catherine Opie, photograph from new series Highschool Football, 2008. Courtesy: Catherine Opie and Regen Projects II.)

Lives and Works: Talks with Women Artists, mixed media portraits, as well as Portrait of an Artist as a Young Girl: Fulfilling Society’s Limited Expectations, assemblages with text and commentary, both by Joan Arbeiter, open on April 11th at the Rutgers University Art Library. This show marks an extension of Arbeiter’s commitment to women’s history, particularly art history, into the realm of painting, her primary medium.

(Joan Arbeiter, “We have to start having more fun…” Joan Snyder, 1997. Courtesy: Joan Arbeiter and Rutgers University Libraries.)

Elke Krystufek’s A Film Called Wood woof Woolve Vulvahoodmoodsuperwoovertrooper opens April 11th at Transit Art Space. Last year Krystufek presented Dr. Love on Easter Island, a film featuring the character “She Bas” based on Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader. In this exhibition Krystufek introduces A Film Called Wood as the continuation of last year’s work as well as new paintings on various subjects.

(Elke Krystufek, Vaginanose (Max Raphael revisited), 2006. Courtesy: Elke Krystufek, Georg Kargl Fine Arts Vienna, (c) 2006 photo: MAK/Georg Mayer.)

Beginning April 15th, Galerie Mourlot presents Music of Silence: Metalpoint Paintings and Drawings, a solo show of work by Susan Schwalb. Schwalb employs the ancient technique of silverpoint drawing to create precise, fine lines. Though her work recalls minimalist abstraction, she has stated that her earlier, often representational, feminist-inspired work still serves as “an underlining basis for my creative thinking.”

(Susan Schwalb, red/white/blue IV, silverpoint acrylic on paper on wood, 2002. Courtesy: Susan Schwalb.)

April 16- 20th, check out Open Space at the Cologne Art Fair to see photography by British feminist artist Alexis Hunter. In her photography, Hunter has routinely inverted expected gender roles, ironically objectifying male subjects while allowing female subjects to actively confront the viewer.

(Alexis Hunter, one image of eight from series Approach to Fear: Pain-destruction of Cause, 1977. Courtesy: Alexis Hunter.)

Dawn Mellor’s Vile Affections remains on view at Spacex through May 3rd. Mellor’s gruesome paintings portray chosen celebrities and cultural icons as the leather-skinned surfaces to which they are so often reduced.

(Dawn Mellor, Morrissey, 2007. Courtesy: Dawn Mellor, Spacex, and Team Gallery New York.)

NEW ADDITIONS, continuing through June, features work by Jenny Scobel, Cristian Boffelli, and Peter Mayer at 5+5 Gallery in Brooklyn.

(Jenny Scobel, Untitled, 2008. Courtesy: 5+5 Gallery)

The LACK of Desire, featuring twenty-two up and coming Brooklyn artists, continues through April 11 at Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery.

(Joseph Shahadi, Garotte (sex doll), 2006, digital c-print, 20 x 30 inches card design: Misha Tyntyunik. Courtesy: Brooklyn Arts Council)

Feminist performance and video artist Tamy Ben-Tor continues her solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery through May 3.

(Tamy Ben-Tor, Normal, 2006, DVD, 4:20 min. Courtesy: Zach Feuer Gallery)

Eva Davidova continues her exhibit at Magnan Emrich Contemporary Gallery in Chelsea through May 10.

(Eva Davidova’s Untitled (dani) (2005). Courtesy of Magnan Emrich Contemporary.)

**Special thanks to intern Lauren Nicole Nixon for helping to compile this week’s Picks!