Brooklyn Museum: Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Picks of the Week (6/27-7/3)

Pia Howell @ 4:51 pm

SWAP (Supporting Women Artists Project) hosts its Summer Auction at A.I.R. Gallery on June 26th, featuring work by both SWAP artists in residence as well as their student mentee artists from Girls Prep.

(Left: Claire Brassil, untitled, gouache and graphite on paper, 20 x 20″, 2007. Courtesy: Claire Brassil. Right: Announcement for SWAP’s Summer Auction. Courtesy: SWAP.)

Artistic Production and the Feminist Theory of Art: New Debates, an exciting three-day course to assess the state of feminist art and art history, runs June 26 through June 28th at the Montehermoso Cultural Centre. “The objective of this course is to propose a panoramic view of the main contributions of feminist art history, delving into the theoretical and political problems feminist researchers must face in order to continue developing knowledge freed of sexist structures that have guided the construction of social and human sciences.” New Debates features numerous world-renowned feminist art and gender studies scholars including Judith Halberstam and Griselda Pollock.

Opening June 27th, the Guggenheim presents a full-career retrospective of the divine Louise Bourgeois as well as A Life in Pictures: Louise Bourgeois, a collection of images and objects from the artist’s personal archives.

(Louise Bourgeois, circa 1980. Photo: Louise Bourgeois Archive. Courtesy: Guggenheim Museum.)

**Also, on June 28th, Bard College art history professor Susan Aberth will lecture on Bourgeois at Dia:Beacon.

Jackie Gendel: Does She Know? closes June 29th at Moti Hasson Gallery. Gendel forges a new kind of portraiture in which her subjects resist categorization according to physical context, gender, and era.

(Jackie Gendel, At the Beach, 2008, oil on canvas. Courtesy: Moti Hasson Gallery.)

Caterina Bertolotto’s Dresses of Transformation closes June 30th at the Italian American Museum. Bertolotto’s dresses celebrate the “joy, creativity, and playfulness” of the feminine spirit.

(Caterina Bertolotto, Dresses of Transformation, photograph: T. Inagaki & N. Veronesi. Courtesy: Italian American Museum and Caterina Bertolotto.)

Like the Spice Gallery hosts Gay Directions in New Art, a group show of work by gay artists in the “post-everything society,” through July 6th. With all due respect to their predecessors, the gay artists who have greatly influenced the course of art history and pop culture alike–Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and John Waters, to name a few, these artists explore what it means to be gay in a new era, one of integration rather than “hermetically sealed gay culture.”

(Jesse Finley Reed, The Cock: Bathroom, view #1 and #2, New York, NY, 2002. Archival Ultrachrome Digital Inkjet Prints. Courtesy: Like the Spice Gallery.)

Sleep in Spite of Thunder, works by Exene Cervenka, remains open through July 18th at DCKT Contemporary. Widely known as an icon of 1970s L.A. punk and a founding member of the band X, Cervenka here infuses her image and word collages with a punk aesthetic.

(Exene Cervenka, Thesp, 2008, mixed media on canvas panel. Courtesy: DCKT Contemporary.)

For more art by and about the fierce women of the L.A. punk scene, check out VEXING: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk, now open at the Claremont Museum through August 31st.

(Left to right: Shizu Saldamando, Cindi and Asma in the Ladies Room, 2007, colored pencil, collage on paper, Collection of Sam Lee and Karen Rapp. Louis Jacinto, The Bags, 1979, Hong Kong Café, Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA, black and white C-print, Courtesy: drkrm Gallery. Dawn Wirth, Alice Bag, Jensen Rec Center/Silver Lake Film Festival (detail), 2007, silver-halide/C-print, Courtesy: Dawn Wirth. All, Courtesy: Claremont Museum.)

Cancelled, Erased & Removed is open now through August 1st at the Sean Kelly Gallery. With a concept extrapolated from Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning (1953), this group show explores creation borne from negation, featuring innovative and non-traditional artists such as Ana Mendieta, Janine Antoni, and Jenny Holzer.