Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

An exhibition by and talk with Janet Culbertson, Eco-Feminism: Eve Defends Her Garden, opens May 31st, 3pm, at the Floyd Memorial Library of Greenport, NY.

Happy Anniversary Hera Gallery! Hera Gallery hosts its 34th Anniversary opening on May 31st which features work by its current and associate members. Originally intended as a venue for women artists, Hera has grown to include regionally and nationally recognized artists regardless of gender.

(Myron Rubenstein, Night Burns Bright, 2006, 30″ x 40″, printed on canvas with pigmented ink. Courtesy: Hera Gallery.)

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Found Objects is open through June 5th at bitforms gallery. In this exhibition Hershman Leeson includes an installation comprised of a projector and a realistic female sex doll, posed as Manet’s Olympia, as well as photographic portraits of the doll as seemingly frightened.

(Lynn Hershman Leeson, No Body, 2007, from the Found Objects series, Lambda print, 42″ x 42.5″. Courtesy: bitforms gallery.)

Louise Lawler’s Sucked In, Blown Out, Obviously Indebted or One Foot in Front of the Other remains open at Metro Pictures through June 7th. Lawler, a pioneer of institutional critique in art, here displays photographs taken of recent, publicly displayed art installations in museums and auction houses, including, as shown here, a work by one of Brooklyn Museum’s current guest artists Takashi Murakami.

(Louise Lawler, Polyanna, 2007/2008, 30 1/8″ x 24 1/8″, cibachrome face mounted to plexi on museum box. Courtesy: Metro Pictures.)

California Video at The Getty Center, open through June 8th, addresses the production of video art by California feminist artists and includes work by Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, and Woman’s Building artists such as Cheri Gaulke.

(Nina Sobell, Interactive Electroencephalographic Video Drawings, 1973, photo by Ken Feingold. Courtesy: The Getty.)

ISE Cultural Foundation is currently showing work by Japanese artist Yuko Suzuki in its front project space, through June 27th. Suzuki’s ceramic works encapsulate human interactions as shaped by capitalism and personal identification with globalized commodities.

(Yuko Suzuki, installation view of POP, 2008. Courtesy: ISE Cultural Foundation.)

Energetic Accumulators and Token Exchanges by Andrea Zittel is now open at Regen Projects. In an extension of her Raugh Furniture series, Zittel continues to walk a fine line between sculpture and furniture while creating objects that attempt to embrace human imperfection through the creation of a mindset or ideology.

(Andrea Zittel, Raugh Furniture, 2007. Courtesy: Andrea Zittel.)

A joint show of work by Marilyn Minter and Mika Rottenberg, Sweat, is now open at Galerie Laurent Godin. Minter and Rottenberg kick off the summer with an irreverent celebration of sweat and all its implications.

(Marilyn Minter, Shinola, 2008, color print. Courtesy: Galerie Laurent Godin.)

Within a Budding Grove, an exhibition of artist Ellen Cantor’s work, opened this week at Participant Inc. in Manhattan. A London based artist, Ellen Cantor has mentioned Carolee Schneemann as one of her greatest mentors, and her work exhibits her dedication to feminism as well. At times diaristic, Cantor’s creations explore cultural stereotypes, violence, and the clichés surrounding love and sex. Within a Budding Grove is an installation piece including video and storyboards that deal with issues of loss and death to the destruction of innocence. Within a Budding Grove will run from May 22-June 6, 2008.

(Ellen Cantor, Death Skull, 2008. Courtesy of Participant Inc.)

A group exhibition featuring fourteen female artists opens today at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Manhattan. (Un)common threads displays the work of many of the great feminist artists of our time, including Faith Ringgold, Betty Saar, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Bontecou, and Mimi Smith. The artists utilize new and recycled fabrics and fibers in non-stereotypical ways, questioning the tendency to pigeonhole “craft” mediums as inherently feminine.

(Mimi Smith, Basic Black, 1966 knotted thread, zipper. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Art Gallery)

Jezebel, Works by Carla Gannis opens May 23, 2008 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. Gannis couples a series of six large-scale digital prints with 14th century predellas in this exhibition, in an attempt to critique archetypal portrayals of women throughout time in both mythology and history.

(Carla Gannis, Bette from the Jezebel Series, digital print. Courtesy of Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art)

Two feminist films will be shown this week as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker, written and directed by Barbara Caspar, documents the life of Kathy Acker, a punk-rock icon and founder of the Riot Grrls, who expanded the bounderies of female self-expression and sexuality in her writing. We Want Roses Too, written and directed by Alina Marazzi, will also be shown this week. This film explores the effect of the feminist and sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s on women’s lives.

(Film still from We Want Roses Too, courtesy of the Seattle International Film Festival)

This is the last week to see Yoko Ono’s Touch Me, which closes May 31, 2008 at Galerie Lelong in Manhattan. This multi-dimensional fluxus artist focuses on the female experience in this exhibition through sculpture, painting, interactive installation and includes a film of her 1964 performance of Cut Piece.

(Yoko Ono, Touch me III, 2008. Cast silicone, wood, bowl, water. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.)

Don’t miss the chance to see this legendary artist’s work at her first exhibition since 2003!

This week we would like to highlight a not-to-be-missed day of feminist performance at the Bronx Museum!

(The All City Marching Waitress Band, 1979. Courtesy: Bronx Museum.)

Day of Performance: Contemporary Collectives Do Outrageous Work! is scheduled for May 17th as the live component of Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art + Community (exhibition on view through August 4th) at the Bronx Museum. Making It Together was curated by the incredibly influential feminist art critic Carey Lovelace. Lovelace has written an essay Together, Again: Women’s Collaborative Art + Community that speaks in depth on the artists included in the exhibition as well as more generally on feminist artistic collaboration in the 1970’s. Check out the awesome list of events which includes performances by The Brainstormers (in collaboration with the Guerrilla Girls), The Waitresses, Ridykeulous, and, among others, Cristal Brown & InSpirit!

(Three Weeks in May, 1977, performance by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz. Courtesy: Bronx Museum.)

*Watch a video of Suzanne Lacy’s The Performing Archive Project.

**To read the New York Times review of Making It Together, click here.

This week, also check out:

Alice Anderson’s MIROIR MIROIR-La traversée des apparences opens at FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.

On May 16th, Cheryl McGinnis Gallery hosts Dwell, a group show of work by Lisa Dahl, Susan Hamburger, and Margaret Murphy ruminate on the current cultural obsession with the home and its accoutrements as symbols of status and success. These artists sardonically allow social and economic politics to infiltrate the safety of the domestic sphere.

(Dwell announcement with work by (left to right) Margaret Murphy, Lisa Dahl, and Susan Hamburger. Courtesy: Cheryl McGinnis Gallery.)

Pink & Bent: Art of Queer Women opens May 20th at the Leslie/Lohman Gallery. On the evening of May 29th there will be a panel discussion entitled Women in the Arts Speak Out. The group show aims to enlighten audiences about the different aspects of being a queer woman within the contexts of artistic freedom of expression and to define terms such as “queer” through visual media rather than within the confines of language.

(Rebecca Bradley, Lover, 2006. Courtesy: Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation.)

A.I.R. Gallery Retrospective: 1972-1979 remains open through June 14th at Werkstätte Gallery. Founded in 1972, A.I.R. Gallery was the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York. Keeping abreast of the concurrent women’s movement, A.I.R. responded to the inadequate representation of female artists and ultimately helped pioneer the SoHo art scene in the 1970s. This is an extensive survey of the women artists who helped found and build A.I.R.

Ladyfest London, an arts festival celebrating female creativity in all its incarnations- music, art, comedy, film, spoken word, etc.- happens May 9th-11th.

Also on May 11th, CSS Bard Hessel Museum opens three new shows including, Modernism: On and Off the Grid, with work by VALIE EXPORT, and Act Out, with work by Hannah Wilke and Cheryl Donegan.

(Superstudio, Supersurface-Life, 1972. Included in Modernism: On and Off the Grid. Courtesy: Superstudio archive, Italy and CSS Bard.)

Beginning May 12th, Chloe Piene’s distinctively beautiful and disarming new drawings will be displayed alongside five of her sculptures at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc.

(Chloe Piene, Goat with Ghost Hand, charcoal on paper, 2002. Courtesy: Chloe Piene.)

Recent Works by Anita Dube opens May 15th at Bose Pacia. In work such as Phantoms of Liberty, Dube transgresses boundaries of inside/outside and public/private by wrapping domestic objects in camouflage-patterned fabric and displaying them.

(Anita Dube, Inside Out, 2006. Courtesy: Bose Pacia.)

Fire Walkers: Contemporary Artists from India and South Asia, now open at Stefan Stux Gallery, includes work by Mona Hatoum and Lalla Essaydi. Closes June 7th.

(Reena Saini Kallat, Synonym-Man, painted rubber stamps on acrylic, 2007. Courtesy: Stefan Stux Gallery.)

Aude du Pasquier Grall’s The Male Cycle #7 remains open through June 7th at Envoy Gallery. In this series Aude du Pasquier Grall inverts the stereotypical gender roles of voyeurism by filming and photographing male nudes.

(Aude du Pasquier Grall, Le Cycle Masculin no. 6, video/photograph, 2004. Courtesy: Envoy Gallery.)

Two and three dimensional work by Rosemarie Trockel is now on view, through June 25th, at Galerie Georg Kargl.

(Rosemarie Trockel, Skies, glazed ceramics, 2006. Courtesy: Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers.)

Global Feminisms artist Ryoko Suzuki has a show of new images of the character Anikora-Seifuku, this time in fetishized costumes, open now through July 13th at Corkin Gallery of Toronto.

(Ryoko Suzuki, Anikora-Seifuku (Uniform 2), chromogenic color print, 2007. Courtesy: Ryoko Suzuki.)

Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s includes work by Alice Aycock, Lynda Benglis, and Nancy Holt among other feminists who made significant, often overlooked, contributions to the development of sculptural practice in the 1970s. Open now through July 28th at the Sculpture Center along with Michael Portnoy’s Casino Ilinx.

(Agnes Denes, Wheatfield-A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, NY, 1982. Courtesy: greenmuseum.org.)

*Also, on May 17th at Sculpture Center, Decoys curator Catherine Morris and WACK! curator Connie Butler will speak with exhibiting artists about their relationship to feminism then and now.

**Which reminds me: if you New Yorkers have not yet seen WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, this is your last chance; the exhibition runs through May 12th at P.S.1 MoMA.

Only a few brave souls have tackled the ballet body in the visual arts world. Eleanor Antin began the trend in 1986 with her work Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev, featuring a fictional persona, Eleanora Antinova, a dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. The exhibit featured photographs of Antin’s enchanting ballerina persona starring in various productions: Pocahontas, The Hebrews, Prisoner of Persia, L’Esclave and Before the Revolution.

Eleanor Antin. Pocahontas from Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev 1919-1929, 1977-1978. Courtesy: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

In this show, Antin’s prima ballerina Antinova mocks the glistening, sylph-like dancer in all of her glamorous glory. Antin pokes fun at the ballet ideal using her less than ideal ballet figure. Antin’s deliciously curvy physique and full facial features, though lusted after in contemporary society, are the ultimate “no no” in the ballet world. The ballet, to this day, is noted for its sylph-like women with ballet buns and legs for miles. Thus, Antin, or Antinova rather, infiltrates the dance world, challenging the typical dancing body and its impact on feminine ideals. Classic.

Eleanor Antin, The Hebrews from Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev1919-1929, 1977-1978. Courtesy: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

But there’s a new girl in town, and she’s depicting the ballet in a whole new light. Meghann Snow, a grad student at Parsons The New School for Design, shatters the typical depiction of the dancing body like a hammer to fine china, forcing the viewer to explore the moving female body with honesty rather than idealized societal expectations, to examine body in a grittier, more realistic manner.

Meghann Snow, The Ballet Finger, 2008. 5′x10′, acrylic house paint, oil slick, caulking on wood panel. Courtesy: Meghann Snow.

At first glance, Snow’s featured painting, The Ballet Finger, appears to be a pink, pulsing organ-perhaps a pancreas or a pair of kidneys. But when viewed with a critical eye, it becomes apparent that this work, oil on canvas, is a pointer finger,a small, but very important element in ballet technique. Snow selects certain body parts, fingers and feet, zooms in on these body parts and dissects them, revealing both the beautiful and grotesque elements of the female body. This examination lends to a sort of internal duel, a tug of war between the aesthetically appealing and the bodily blemishes.

Meghann Snow, Size 7, dimensions variable. Courtesy: Parsons The New School for Design, Department of Fine Arts.

Though not on view at The Kitchen, Snow’s work Size 7 kicks the typical ballet shoe up a notch. Snow wraps bare feet in various colorful industrial materials. They’re wrapped sort of messily in canary yellows and navy blues, patches of lime green and magenta. This messiness depicts the wear and tear of the dancing foot, the wear and tear of the dancing body and mind, the lack of glamour, the blood, sweat and tears wrapped up in one tiny shoe. Size 7 is winking with dualism: the sweet fervor of the dance world combined with the twinges of physical and emotional pain that sometimes exhaust the joy of movement.

Both Antin and Snow reveal the restrictive nature of the moving body, as well as the restrictive nature of feminine beauty ideals in general. These female artists, though from different generations, are challenging women to do away with perfection, and reclaim the beauty in those infamous measurements: 36-24-36.

Check out Snow’s work at her open studio at Parsons on Monday, May 12th from 6-8 pm! (25 E. 13th Street, Studio 31)

In conjunction with the Votes for Women exhibition in the Herstory Gallery, we are always looking for more stories about the many unsung pioneers of women’s suffrage. Long-time curatorial and library volunteer and friend of the Brooklyn Museum, Marty Levenson, has this fascinating account to share about Esther Hobart Morris, a local activist from Wyoming who’s brave efforts to promote suffrage legislation led to her appointment as one of the first female justices of the peace in the Wyoming Territory, as it was known in the mid-late 1800s. Read more of Marty’s account of Esther Hobart Morris below.

“Following years of legislative and social struggle, women received the right to vote under US Federal law in 1920. But the country’s first legislative success with regard to women’s suffrage came in 1869 in the then newly created Wyoming Territory.

Though not a member of the Territorial legislature, Esther Hobart Morris has been given major credit for supporting that bill and other laws that allowed married women to control their own property, and provided equal pay for women teachers.

Mrs. Morris was appointed a justice of the peace in 1870 and was the country’s first woman to serve in a judicial office. Afterward, she continued to be active in political affairs and during Wyoming’s statehood celebration in 1890 she was honored for her suffrage activities. In 1895, at age 80, she was elected a delegate to the national suffrage convention in Cleveland.

A life size statue of Mrs. Morris stands directly in front of the Wyoming state capitol in Cheyenne and a copy of the statue was donated to the national statuary hall in the US Capitol when she was designated Wyoming’s representative in that exhibit.”

– Marty Levenson.

(Statue of Esther Hobart Morris by Avard Fairbanks in front of Capitol Building, Cheyenne, WY. Photo: Einar Einarsson Kvaran.)

(Yayoi Kusama Painting 1989 - 2005, 2006. Print archival ink on canvas, 24.5″ x 46″, Edition 1/5. Courtesy: Diane Althoff Alysia Duckler Gallery.)

Sotto Voce, an exhibition of works related to the idea of one color as object, subject, idea, and ultimately a presence, opens at Yvon Lambert, New York on Saturday, May 3, and includes work by innovative feminist artist and performer, Yayoi Kusama.

(Tamara Kostianovsky, Actus Reus, 2008. Courtesy: Black & White Gallery.)

Tamara Kostianovsky’s Actus Reus continues through May 24 at The Black & White Gallery in Chelsea. Kostianovsky examines human consumerism through the slaughtering of animals. Actus Reus, Latin for “the guilty act,” employs beef carcasses made from discarded human clothing. Brooklyn-based artist Tamara Kostianovsky’s Actus Reus is the second segment of the three-part series, “The Proper Animal.”

(Anne Hardy, Centre, 2007. Courtesy: Bellwether Gallery.)

London-based artist Anne Hardy continues her debut New York exhibition at Bellwether Gallery through May 17. Hardy employs used and discarded materials to create interior installations. These photographed installations lend to ideas of human life and human narratives, though human beings are never photographed in her works.

(Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher, The Searchers, 2008. Courtesy: The Front Room Gallery)

The Searchers, by Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher, continues through May 4th at The Front Room Gallery in Brooklyn. This exhibition of photographs explores Western tourism in India, specifically focusing on spiritual tourism. Both Bezzubov and Sucher, artistic partners since 2002, examine themes of politics, tourism and spirituality.

(Fara’h Salehi, Female of the Species, 2008. Courtesy: Art 101)

Artist, metal fabricator and welder Fara’h Salehi continues her exhibition, Female of the Species, through May 11 at Art 101. In this exhibition, Salehi examines the hierarchies and survival methods in insect life as commentary for the many hierarchies in human life.

(Dawit L. Petros, Proposition 1: Mountain, 2007. Courtesy: Studio Museum Harlem.)

Flow, an exhibition featuring seventy-five works by African artists under the age of forty, continues through June 29 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In Flow, the twenty featured artists employ sculpture, painting, video, digital photography and installation art to examine and comment on global, environmental and economic issues facing human beings in contemporary society.

(Theatre ALFORT, Lilliput, 2008. Courtesy: gallery hanahou.)

Lilliput, My Little Friends, by Theatre ALFORT, continues through May 14 at gallery hanahou. ALFORT, a Japanese avant-garde art cooperative, creates an installation based on popular fashion doll Blythe.

(Judith Supine, Dirt Mansion, 2008. Courtesy: English Kills Gallery.)

Judith Supine, the self-proclaimed “street art-ist” and “psych-collage provocateur,” continues to show his art at Dirt Mansion through June 8th at English Kills Gallery in Brooklyn.

**Many thanks to interns Lauren Nicole Nixon and Jessie Shaffer for helping to compile this week’s Picks!