Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

If you are in New York, make time to visit the new building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which was designed by Kazuyo Sejima in collaboration with Ryue Nishizawa. Their firm SANAA has built a number of impressive structures all over the world including the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion in Toledo, Ohio; the extension of the Institute Valencia d’Art Modern in Valencia, Spain; and a satellite of the Louvre in Lens, France, to name a few. Sejima trained at Toyo Ito’s firm, and has since proven her talents on her own. She founded Kazuyo Sejima and Associates in 1987, and holds a professorship at the prestigious Keio University in Tokyo, and the school of architecture at Princeton University. While architecture remains a notoriously difficult profession for women, and boasts very few established women architects, including Zaha Hadid and Elizabeth Diller of Diller+Scofidio, achievements such as Sejima’s deserve recognition so that more aspiring women architects will find the support to break through the glass ceiling, literally.

(Design and Visualization: Sejima + Nishizawa / SANAA. Site Photography: Christopher Dawson. 2007. Courtesy of the New Museum of Contemporary Art.)

The New Museum is also showcasing the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI)’s Black on White, Gray Ascending. YHCHI is a two-artist collective that uses Flash animation techniques to show fast-moving texts, which are often projected onto the span of gallery walls. Their works are often synchronized with music, which gives an added sentiment or wit to the content of the narratives imbedded on the screen. In her native country of South Korea, Young-Hae Chang is regarded as one of the few women artists who uses new media on such an impressive scale. Click HERE to view a segment of YHCHI’s work–you will not be disappointed!

If you live or plan to travel outside of New York City this week, be sure to check out these exhibits…

(Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940. Courtesy of the Nicholas Murray Collection, Harry Ransom Huminities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.)

Walker Art Center’s Frida Kahlo exhibition in celebration of the 100th anniversary of her birth goes through January 20. During her life time, Kahlo was known for being the wife of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, but today she has fully emerged from the shadow of her famous spouse, and become an icon among surrealist painters and feminist artists, alike. This exhibition features not only her better known self-portraits but also a number of striking still-life paintings.

(Maya Lin, 2 X 4 Landscape, 2006. Photo: Colleen Cartier. Courtesy of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.)

A must-see exhibit before it closes on December 30! Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes on display at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Lin is best known for designing the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC–a structure that dramatically changed the formal language of monuments by infusing design with the emotional charge of memory. Since then, Lin continues to produce sculptural work that transgresses public monuments, earthworks, sculpture, architecture, and landscape design.

(Cosima von Bonin. Installation view of Roger and Out at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. Photo: Brian Forrest.)

A survey of Germany-based, Kenya-born artist, Cosima von Bonin, titled Roger and Out will go through January 7 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. von Bonin makes work that playfully addresses identity and gender representations in a variety of media including sculpture, photography, textile, performance, and video. This installation will present von Bonin’s body of work since the 1990s, including new work produced for the exhibition.

(Lucy McKenzie, After G. Hobe, Salon Library for the Great Exhibition, 1902, Turin, 2006. Installation view at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. Courtesy of the Cabinet Gallery, London.)

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Work: Lucy McKenzie is on display through February 24. Scottish artist McKenzie’s paintings of 19th-century interiors follows the style of famed Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art nouveau designs. The installation also includes McKenzie’s collaboration with fashion designer Beca Lipscombe.