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Opening…

Converge: Works by Ana Mendieta and Hans Breder, 1970-1980, opening January 31st at Galerie Lelong’s New York location, offers a chance to see another side of the iconic art goddess Ana Mendieta through the work of her teacher-turned-lover, Hans Breder. As the first show to examine the convergences and divergences of the artists’ practices while together, it will prove interesting to compare, in particular, Breder’s treatment of Mendieta’s body with her representations of her own body in performance and documentation.

(Hans Breder, stills from Transfigured, 1970, 16mm film experiment transferred to DVD. Courtesy: Galerie Lelong.)

Solitaire, work by Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Joan Semmel opens February 2nd at the Wexner Center for the Arts. While Semmel, Plimack Mangold, and Lozano are all of the same second-wave feminist generation (in the 1960’s each artist chose New York as her scene) and they all paint beautifully, similarities among the three artists may unapologetically end there: hence the title of the show, Solitaire. This curatorial concept, however, intends to engage with contemporary painting’s understanding of itself in terms of both realism and feminism. The show also slyly questions the viewer’s interpretation of groupings of work, asking her to think of each piece as individual rather than just relational.

(Joan Semmel, Knees Together, 2003. Courtesy: Wexner Center for the Arts.)

Now Open…

Feel refreshed by the smart, funny, and agressively feminist work in Vaginal Rejuvenation, a collaborative show by L.A. artists Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann. Ross-Ho’s work complements Stoltmann’s and vice versa, making for a delightfully perverse extravaganza of what seems like ten years worth of two friends’ inside-jokes. Stoltmann’s ironic, overly crafty collages and Ross-Ho’s fresh use of porn are a hilarious mix. Showing in New York, at Guild and Greyshkul, through February 16th.

(Amanda Ross-Ho and Kirsten Stoltmann, Vaginal Rejuvenation Poster, 2007. Courtesy: Guild and Greyshkul.)

Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence showcases contemporary photography’s renewed interest in that awkward phase between girlhood and womanhood. On view are works by some impeccable female photographers such as Sally Mann, Hellen van Meene, Lauren Greenfield, and Tina Barney. The exhibition runs through February 24th at the Art Institute of Chicago.

(Lauren Greenfield, Alli, Annie, Hannah, and Berit, All 13, before the First Big Party of the Seventh Grade, Edina, Minnesota, 1998. Courtesy: The Art Institute of Chicago.)

alongside us, new photographs by Global Feminisms and Global Feminisms Remix artist Maria Friberg, remains on view at Galleri Charlotte Lund, of Stockholm, through March 8th. Friberg’s new images gracefully question, from a feminist perspective, man’s place in nature as well as his sense of self in the face of potentially restrictive patriarchal standards of masculinity. Friberg will also have work in the ARCO artfair in Madrid, February 13th-18th.

(Maria Friberg, alongside us #5, 2007. Courtesy: Maria Friberg, mariafriberg.com.)

If you have not yet had the pleasure of seeing Global Feminisms Remix, or if you are a big fan that just can’t stay away, now is your last chance to witness feminist art history in the making! Featuring forty works from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center’s well received inaugural Global Feminisms exhibition, Remix closes on February 3rd. Since its premiere during the weekend of the Center’s opening on March 23-March 25th, 2007, Global Feminisms and later Remix have initiated a wealth of conversations and dialogues about feminism and visual art, some of which we are very proud to share via our press section on the blog. Many of these conversations took place between the artists themselves during that weekend last spring, and are featured on the Museum’s website where you can watch your favorite artists from the two exhibitions discuss or perform their work in the Forum! Thank you again for all your support…

(Miwa Yanagi, Yuka, from the My Grandmothers series, 2000. Collection of Linda Pace, San Antonio, Texas. © Miwa Yanagi. Photograph courtesy of the artist.)

… and mark your calendars for our next exhibition Ghada Amer: Love Has No End, opening February 16th!

Opening…

Work by feminist artist Lida Abdul will be on display at Centre A in Vancouver beginning January 23rd. While Abdul’s work is politically engaged, it remains aesthetically compelling; Abdul elegantly balances form and content as she images the desecrated Afghani landscape. The sight of people amidst the ruins of bombed out buildings is at once tragic and surreally beautiful.

(Lida Abdul, Dome, 2005. Courtesy: Giorgio Persano Gallery and Tate Modern.)

Salomé, Salomé (you must not look at her: look too much at her), a show of work by Nigerian artist Isoje Chou, opens January 24th at M.Y. Art Prospects. The visually and verbally eloquent Chou here utilizes painting, video, and sculpture in revisiting the myth of the eroticized Salomé, a character with a bad (historical) rap as an icon of seduction.

(Isoje Chou, dvd still from the video desire (a polylogue); background painting from the Friends Forever series. Image: artnews.info.)

Two wild shows open simultaneously at Berlin’s Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch on January 26th: Delaine Le Bas’ The House of the Juju Queen and Raúl deNieves’ De Feet of Joy. Both artists defy clean-cut categorization by transgressing insider/outsider styles and blending fine art and craft techniques.

(Raúl deNieves, installation view of Three Babies Same Mother Different Father, 2007. Image: artnews.info.)

The Art of Lee Miller opens January 26th at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. As countless female artists have been historically overshadowed by their male counterparts, its time to take another look at the women who were long ago relegated to the realm of “muse.” Lee Miller, widely known for her time with Man Ray, is indeed a renaissance woman in her own right. Model, art photographer, and war correspondent, Miller captured contextually diverse images with her keen eye.

(Lee Miller, Untitled (Exploding Hand), 1930, copyright Lee Miller Archives, England 2008. Courtesy: Lee Miller Archives and Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

Now Open…

Katy Grannan: The Westerns at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through February 9th as well as Another Woman Who Died in Her Sleep in New York at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery through February 16th. Grannan’s stark portraits of Californians are decidedly reminiscent of Diane Arbus’ odd characters, yet with an even greater sense of disorientation and romanticism.

(Katy Grannan, Gail and Dale, Pacifica (I), 2007. Courtesy: Salon 94.)

Currently at Anna Kustera, Cut Away features work by four young artists: Rachel Howard, Vlatka Horvat, Jasper Sebastian Sturup, and Gandalf Gavan. Re-formalizing the filmic “cutaway” in a variety of mediums, the work in Cut Away presents interrupted narratives and fractured visual fields.

(Vlatka Horvat, Obstructed (II), 2007. Courtesy: Anna Kustera.)

Rachel Howard has a concurrent solo show of new work, How to Disappear Completely, on view at Haunch of Venison London through February 23rd. Howard’s abstract “suicide” paintings would be sufficiently disturbing even without the titular clues and, impressively, despite their often alluringly vibrant color palettes.

(Rachel Howard, Happy Birthday, 2006. Courtesy: Anna Kustera.)

Opening…

Hey Girl! has its U.S. premiere in Columbus, Ohio, at the Wexner Center for the Arts on January 15-16. Clearly much more than conventional theater, the production promises dramatic imagery, sculptural props and costumes, and an atmospheric soundscape. Created by Italian theater director Romeo Castellucci, Hey Girl! is a surreal reinterpretation of archetypes of feminine isolation, i.e. Juliet sans Romeo, Joan of Arc, or even “the girl next door.”

Following the Ohio premiere, Hey Girl! will move on to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on January 18-19.

(Romeo Castellucci/Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Hey Girl!, Photograph by Francesco Raffaelli. Courtesy: Wexner Center for the Arts.)

Take a rare opportunity to view early work by Japanese artists Atsuko Tanaka and Akira Kanayama at Paula Cooper Gallery beginning January 17th. Both Tanaka and Kanayama were involved in the avant-garde Gutai Art Association in Osaka in the 1950’s. Within this context of constant aesthetic reinvention,Tanaka became famous for her Electric Dress (1956) and Kanayama for his Remote-Control Paintings (1955). Though not a self-proclaimed feminist, as one of the few women prominently involved in a mid-twentieth century avant-garde movement, Tanaka is an incidental predecessor of the Feminist art movement.

(Atsuko Tanaka, Untitled, 2004. Courtesy: Paula Cooper Gallery.)

Now Open…

The Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers, an organization that aims to support challenging art made by artists from under-represented groups, hosts its Annual Exhibition through January 25th. Don’t miss the collection of mixed media work in Femfolio, made by 20 founding artists of the 1970s Feminist movement including Nancy Azara, Betsy Damon, Mary Beth Edelson, Harmony Hammond, Joyce Kozloff, Carolee Schneemann, Sylvia Sleigh, Joan Snyder, Nancy Spero, and June Wayne.

(June Wayne, Zinc, Mon Amour, 2007. Courtesy: Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions.)

John Connelly Presents hosts AA Bronson’s School for Young Shamans through February 16th. The show features two irreverent collaborations between Bronson and Terence Koh, alongside work by nine younger artists, including feminist artist Sands Murray-Wassink. This collection of artists, intentionally cross-generational and international, provides, likewise, work employing a wide-ranging spectrum of media: two and three dimensional work as well as video, performance, and even a musical score by composer Andrew Zealley.

(AA Bronson, Evidence of Body Binding (arm with torso), vintage gelatin silver print, ca. 1970. Courtesy: John Connelly Presents.)

A show of paintings and photographs by Karen Kilimnik, at 303 Gallery through February 23rd, follows up the artist’s first American survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, which premiered last year. (The survey is currently at the Aspen Art Museum until February 3rd and will conclude its tour at the MCA Chicago February 23rd-June 1st.) These paintings, an expansion of Kilimnik’s practice of historical landscape painting, further explore her interest in the natural world as situated in time and space. Kilimnik’s photographs of east coast clouds, seemingly displaced from a tropical climate, allude to the curious effects of global warming–a timely subject for a Chelsea show, considering New York’s unseasonably warm January.

(Karen Kilimnik, A Summer Day, 1763, 2001. Courtesy: 303 Gallery.)

In this first full week of the New Year, we have compiled an all Openings edition of ‘picks’…

(Fiona Shaw as Winnie in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. Directed by Deborah Warner. Production still taken at the National Theatre, London. 2007. Photo: Hugo Glendinning)

Theater director Deborah Warner and well-known stage and screen performer Fiona Shaw have cultivated an influential repertoire by staging many of the most important female-driven works on the modern stage, including acclaimed productions of Medea on Broadway in 2002, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Shakespeare’s Richard II (with Shaw in the title role), and an experimental, site specific performance of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Together Warner and Shaw have empowered or subverted many classic stage characters. In their latest collaboration of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, Beckett’s fickle, flaky 1950s housewife–imprisoned throughout the play in a mound of earth–is glamorous, witty, and practically weightless! The Brooklyn Academy of Music presents Happy Days from January 8th through February 2nd.

(Barbara Roux, Wetland Myths, 2005. Courtesy of the Artist)

The always ambitious feminist cooperative, A.I.R Gallery presents three different exhibitions on January 8th, including Barbara Roux, Under Cover of Trees, an installation based on Roux’s work as an ecological based artist and conservationist. In Gallery II will be Nancy Azara, Maxi’s Wall/Fierce Gatherings, which includes Azara’s Maxi’s Wall, a ten foot wall made out of carved and painted wood, aluminum, and gold. A.I.R’s Fellowship Gallery features Lauren Simkin Berke’s A Text A Fiction, A Fissured Envelope, a show inspired by Roland Barthe’s Pleasure of the Text, the classic work that shifted the critical understanding of authorship. All three exhibition run at A.I.R through February 2nd.

(Jannis Kounellis. Untitled, 1988. Photograph of installation. Courtesy of Cheim & Read)

Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis, and Jannis Kounellis among others, contribute works to a new group exhibition at Cheim & Read, titled The Sum of its Parts, opening on January 8th, and running through February 2nd. Sum of its Parts highlights artists that exploit language, repetition, and dissimilar subject matter to create multi-faceted yet unified compositions.

(Mary Frank, Untitled, 2007. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery)

The Near Far–Portraits and Paintings by feminist sculptor and painter Mary Frank are on view at the DC Moore Gallery from January 9th through February 9th. Similar to Barbara Roux’s conservationist approaches to photography, Frank’s painting and drawings fuse together the architectures of the body with architectures of space and landscapes that are found in the natural world. Frank’s work has been reviewed by many feminist art scholars, including Linda Nochlin, who published a survey of Frank’s paintings in 2000.

(Sarah Pickering, Cigarette Accident, 2007. Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art)

British artist, Sarah Pickering captures the seductive qualities of staged destruction, explosions, and fires in her photographs. In Pickering’s Fire Scene, on display at Daniel Cooney Fine Art from January 10th through March 15th, the glowing images of fires appear to liberate the domestic scenes in which they are set from their cramped and untidy existences.

(Hope Gangloff, Untitled illustration, 2007. Courtesy of Susan Inglett Gallery)

New York-based artist Hope Gangloff’s paintings and drawings appear to faithfully document every painful detail of the cultivated lifestyles of the young and hip. Drawn primarily from casual snapshots of Gangloff’s friends, each work seems to capture a voyeurist’s obsession with documenting minutiae and scenes of ironic detachment. Gangloff shares this exhibition with Blaze Lamper, who imagines a dreamscape of dark forests, feral beasts and fractured time, on paper. If Lamper’s work is anything as bold as Gangloff’s, this show is sure to be fierce! Opening at Susan Inglett Gallery on January 10th, and running through February 9th.

(Judith Bernstein, Horizontal, 1973. Courtesy of Mitchell Algus Gallery)

Judith Bernstein, a central figure of the first-wave feminist art movement, a founding member of the A.I.R cooperative, and the subject of notorious censorship, when her artwork Horizontal, 1974 (pictured above) was banned from the “Woman’s Work” exhibition at Philadelphi’s Civic Center in 1974–exhibits Horizontal and other equally frenetic drawings in, Signature and Phallic Drawings: 1966-2008, opening at the Mitchell Algus Gallery from January 10th through February 9th.

(Seher Shah, The Meeting (from the Jihad Pop series), 2007. Courtesy of the Artist)

As a Muslim woman living in the West, Seher Shah uses Islamic symbols and iconography to explore issues of identity and historical associations with family and religion. Having lived in Pakistan, the UK, and Belgium, Shah’s art combines a dramatic pastiche of pop and cultural imagery. Shah’s series Jihad Pop opens at Bose Pacia on January 11th and runs through February 23rd.