Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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.