Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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.)