Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Female Forms & Facets: Artwork by Women from 1975 to the Present will be closing April 18th. Hosted by the Central Connecticut State University Art Gallery, this show includes major feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, Carolee Schneemann, and Janine Antoni. On April 17th there will be a day of closing activities including a screening of a full-length video by Penny Arcade.

(Penny Arcade, photograph by Bob Gruen. Courtesy: Penny Arcade.)

Opening April 18th, Galerie Lelong presents Touch Me, Yoko Ono’s first solo New York show since 2003. Ono will present film, conceptual photography, sculpture, and an interactive painting in order to comment on different facets of female experience. The interactive painting requires viewer participation; viewers will be encouraged to insert body parts through cuts in the canvas in a performance reminiscent of Ono’s now canonical Cut Piece, originally performed in 1964.

(Yoko Ono, Sky TV, 1966. Courtesy: Imagine Peace, www.imaginepeace.com)

During the Salem Film Festival, April 18-20th, Alexandra Opie will exhibit two video installation works. Opie’s three-dimensional arrangement of multiple projection screens initiates filmic phenomenology by allowing viewers to walk around and within the installations.

(Alexandra Opie, video installation. Courtesy: Salem Film Festival.)

Voice & Void opens April 19th at Galerie im Taxispalais. This group show dedicated to exploring representations of the human voice, and its absence, in the visual arts addresses the difficulty of translating expression from one medium to another. Included in the show is feminist VALIE EXPORT’s 1969 Tonfilm (Sound Film) and work by Global Feminisms artist Anna Gaskell.

(John Cage, cover of Silence (paper mock-up for cover of book), 1959. Courtesy: Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections and Archives, © 1959 by John Cage; Galerie im Taxispalais.)

Don’t miss your chance to see feminist artist Martha Wilson’s early and little-known Photo/Text Works, 1971-74 at Mitchell Algus Gallery. By repeatedly depicting her own image in myriad forms, including drag, Wilson plays with the presentation and transformation of subjectivity. Closing April 26th.

(Martha Wilson, announcement for Photo/Text Works, 1971-74, Posturing: Age Transformation, 1973. Courtesy: Mitchell Algus Gallery.)

Serial Meditations, co-curated by feminists (and former Sackler Center Research Assistants!) Melissa Messina and Amy Brandt, remains open at Nurture Art through May 3rd. In an attempt to consider serial artistic production outside of commodity production, this exhibition presents meditative aspects of repetition and seriality indebted to a minimalist aesthetic.

(Rita MacDonald, Wall Drawing 69-72 (detail), 2006. Courtesy: Rita MacDonald.)

Through June 1st, Figureworks juxtaposes paintings of the male figure, by McWillie Chambers, with others of the female figure, by Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn.

(left: McWillie Chambers, Collins 12, oil on canvas, 2007. right: Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn, nude with double V, oil on canvas, 2005. Courtesy: Figureworks.)

The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics remains open through June 29th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, YBCA, in San Francisco. This exhibition, while emphasizing performance and collaborative projects, showcases work that has been influenced by feminist ideologies and that addresses topics relevant to women today.

(Nao Bustamante, America, The Beautiful. Courtesy: Nao Bustamante.)

Last but not least, we want to pass on news of a kindred new blog with a feminist bent, The American Virgin. Created as a companion project to the work-in-progress documentary of the same title (directed by Therese Shechter, who also directed I Was A Teenage Feminist,) this blog keeps readers up-to-date on all the fascinating tidbits these filmmakers discover about virginity and American attitudes about sex.