Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

This Saturday, June 2, 2007
2–4 p.m.
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 3rd floor

Come hear Feminist icon, Faith Ringgold discuss her groundbreaking work from the 1960s to the present!

Faith Ringgold’s inspiring and often humorous stories illustrate her personal journey and beliefs as an artist, activist, author, teacher, and parent. Her talk focuses on art and activism from the 1960s and 1970s to the present, and how she came to use painting, fabrics, quilt-making, and storytelling to create an extensive body of work containing paintings, soft sculpture, masks, and performances. And, after her talk, come be inspired by Faith Ringgold’s talk and create your very own quilt square in the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court.

For more information on Ringgold’s work, please visit her profile on our Feminist Art Base where you’ll find a biography and lots of images.

We hope to see you Saturday!

• Another artist in Global Feminisms is having a solo show (this feature is sounding redundant, no?!), Ryoko Suzuki has a show, Anikora-Seifuku/uniform, at Zeit-Foto Salon in Tokyo (see photo above). Yeah, we wish we could be in Japan to see it too! It runs through June 7th…if you get the chance to see it, let us know!

• Another place I’d like to visit this long weekend is New Mexico. If I were there, I would definitely see the Helen Frankenthaler & Holly Roberts show, Sin & Soul, at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. This show closes June 4th.

But since I’ll be in town, I’ll check out the following and recommend you do the same…

• In our backyard is Sue Johnson’s show, Animated Nature, at the Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (through June 17th); Kathe Burkhart, The Liz Taylor Series: Selections from 1983-2007, at Alexander Gray Associates (through June 23rd); and Bitforms Gallery (where our dear former intern Emily Bates now works!) to see their Summer 2007 Group Show which features, among others, Lynn Hershman Leeson (and while I’m there, I’ll remind them that they need to carry more women artists!).

Global Feminisms Remix
On View August 3, 2007 - February 3, 2007

Forty-four works selected from Global Feminisms will once again be on view at the Brooklyn Museum in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Like its widely praised predecessor, Remix seeks to challenge the dominance of European and American contemporary art and explore such issues as racial and gender identity, politics, and oppression.

Remix assembles works by 40 women artists, who represent countries that are seldom involved in the contemporary art discourse such as Guatemala, Kenya, Pakistan, Thailand, Korea, India. The wide range of media employed in the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and video.

In this exhibition, many of the artworks are infused with political activism. From Afghanistan, Lida Abdul is represented by a single-channel video White House (2005), which shows the artist white-washing a building in bombed-out Kabul. Sigalit Landau, an Israeli video artist, swings a barbed wire hula-hoop around her naked, bloody stomach in which pain symbolizes the geographical barrier created along the West Bank. Regina José Galindo is seen making a bloody footprint with each step as she walks from the Court of Constitutionality to the National Palace in Guatemala City in memory of murdered Guatemalan women, in her performance video Who Can Erase the Traces? (2003). While other exhibiting artists’ themes are not as politically charged, they do create intense, emotive works that celebrate social freedoms or confront oppression. From Japan, Miwa Yanagi’s photograph from My Grandmothers series, depicts an elderly model with flaming-red hair riding sidecar on a motorcycle driven by her young lover. Japanese artist Ryoko Suzuki contributes a mural-sized installation of three photographs in which her face is bound tightly by pig’s intestines, where she is bullied into a kind of mute, anonymous submission.

Among the artists represented are Ghada Amer (Egypt), Arahmaiani (Indonesia), Pilar Albarracín (Spain), Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland), Tracey Moffatt (Australia), Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (Denmark), and Tracey Rose (South Africa), Adriana Varejão (Brazil).

(Images top to bottom: Miwa Yanagi, Yuka, 2000; Lida Abdul, White House, 2005)

A HUGE, HEARTFELT THANK YOU TO OUR SUPPORTERS!First, we’d like to extend an extra special THANK YOU to the women of A Place at the Table, and especially Susan Grabel, who made the celebration here at the Brooklyn Museum on Saturday, May 19th so much fun–and meaningful! We appreciate their support and know everyone had a great time! We also can’t wait to link the blog to some video footage from the event as well! Thank you to Niki DiCesare of Bella Films and her crew for all their hard work on that. In the meantime, above are some fun photos of the event showing performances by Phoebe Legere, The Brazilian Sisters and Vernita N’Cognita. We also wish to thank all the women who signed the advertisement supporting the initiative at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the May Gallery Guide! What a kind and thoughtful gesture!

The exhibition in the Herstory Gallery, Pharaohs, Queens, & Goddesses, has been extended to January 20, 2008. The show, dedicated to powerful female pharaohs, queens and goddesses from Egyptian history, was inspired by The Brooklyn Museum’s extraordinary Egyptian collection, and includes figures represented in Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party such as, Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Tiye, Isis, Tefnut, Hathor, and Neith. This exhibition is co-curated by Maura Reilly, the Center’s curator, and Edward Bleiberg, Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art for the Museum. Further objects pertaining to the show can also be found in the long-term exhibition Egypt Reborn.

(Image: Amulet in Form of Hathor Head Inscribed for Hatshepsut. Egypt. New Kingdom. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection, 61.192.)