Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Trying to Remember What We Once Wanted to Forget opens next Saturday, January 31st, at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León, Spain. This exhibition features the work of the Scandinavian artist team, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, and examines what happens when the public and private spheres of life begin to overlap. This show will be open until June 21st, so there’s plenty of time to get on over there!

(Trying to Remember What We Once Wanted to Forget exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.)

Tonight (RIGHT NOW!), A.I.R. Galllery will be hosting a discussion to question how women artists see themselves through the lens of history, as well as today. REPRESENT: Intergenerational Dialogue, Feminism + Art will begin at 6pm at A.I.R. Gallery’s new Front Street location in DUMBO.

(REPRESENT: Intergenerational Dialogue, Feminism + Art, promotional image. Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.)

Using the lyrics of love songs (such as the Cat Power lyrics referenced below), Alyssa Pheobus plays with sexuality and expectations in her latest exhibition, Lay in the Reins. This show will be open at Bellwether Gallery until February 21st.

(Alyssa Pheobus, Good Woman, detail at right, 2008. Graphite on cotton rag paper, 96 x 53 inches. Courtesy of Bellwether Gallery.)

Feminist artists Delaine Le Bas, Josephine Meckseper, and Paula Trope, among others, will be showing at Montehermoso Gallery in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. The exhibition, titled Living Together, opens today and will be up until May 3rd.

(Josephine Meckseper, Talk to Cindy, 2005. Aluminum, Plexiglas, glass, lights, metal display stands, painted toilet plunger, ink jet print mounted on cardboard underwear box, found jewelry, gouache and tape on inkjet print mounted on cardboard, found metal scrubber, found jewelry, glass ball, gouache on plastic sign. Courtesy of Saatchi Gallery.)

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm, curated by Christopher Y. Lew, opens today at Tina Kim Gallery in Manhattan. Artists Robert Booras, Julia Chiang, Amy Elkins, Jeff Feld, Leslie Hewitt, Amy Kao, Marc André Robinson, and Kiki Smith(currently featured in Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection here at the museum) channel the decorative arts into a variety of media for this show, which ends February 21st.

(Kiki Smith, Born, 2002. Lithograph, edition 4 of 28. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund 2003.17)

The Power of Ornament just opened at Belvedere in Vienna. This show covers over one hundred years of the use of ornament in art, from fin-de-siècle Vienna to the present day. Including the work of Adriana Czernin, Carl Otto Czeschka, Parastou Forouhar, Sakshi Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Josef Hoffmann, Aisha Khalid, Gustav Klimt, Brigitte Kowanz, Shirin Neshat, Raimund Pleschberger, Imran Qureshi, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Rashid Rana, Raqib Shaw, Jörn Stoya, Philip Taaffe, and Hema Upadhya, this show will be up until May 17th. If you’re in the area between now and then, be sure to check this one out!

(The Power of Ornament promotional image. Courtesy of Belvedere.)

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953). Untitled (Man Smoking/Malcolm X), from the Kitchen Table series, 1990. Gelatin silver print, edition 5 of 5. Brooklyn Museum, Caroline A. L. Pratt Fund, 1991.168

The exhibition Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection is fortunate to feature one of only two photographs by prominent artist Carrie Mae Weems that are currently in the Brooklyn Museum’s Collection of Contemporary Art. This one on view in the galleries (pictured above), is from one of Weems’ best-known bodies of work, The Kitchen Table series, a group of photographs that explores human experience from the vantage point of both female subject and viewer, and also an African-American point of view. Like most of the photographs in the series, this one revolves around the figure of a woman (the artist herself) frozen in a shared moment with another individual in the room. In this mesmerizing image, Weems appears to be playing a game of cards with her male companion, while a photograph of Malcolm X hovers evocatively above the scene. The curators, Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Nicole Caruth found this image captured their goals for the exhibition so dynamically that they chose it as the signature image for the show! Fans of the Brooklyn Museum will notice it reproduced in many places on the website and throughout the Museum itself.

Carrie Mae Weems discusses her relationship to feminism and art, including the photograph featured in Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection, this Saturday, January 24th, 2009 in the Forum of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

For more information about this, and other events in the Center throughout January and February, click here. And stay tuned for several photos from this program and others on the feminist blog next week!

Curator Maura Reilly installing Nayland Blake’s Untitled, 2003 in the galleries of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art with Supervising Maintainer Filippo Gentile, and Art Handler, Jason Grunwald.

New York-based artist and Nayland Blake is without a doubt one of the most compelling artists of his generation, but rarely is his work ever placed in a feminist context. In Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection curators Maura Reilly and Nicole Caruth did just that! By situating Blake’s Untitled, 2003, alongside artworks by renowned artists associated with the 1970s feminist art movement, including Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta, the curators were hoping to suggest that feminist art is not limited to a particular appearance or definition.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and curator of the exhibition Nayland Blake: Behavior, currently on view at Location One through February 14, 2009, to discuss Blake’s work. What follows is a brief segment from our conversation together!

Sarah Giovanniello: Why did you and Nicole choose to include Nayland Blake’s Untitled, 2003, in the exhibition Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection?

Maura Reilly: Untitled, 2003 is an outstanding example of the artist’s longstanding interest in the theme of the bunny–a subject that emerged in Blake’s work in the early 1990s and one that resonates with multiple connotations. Blake’s “bunnies” reference complex personal and social narratives about gender, sexual identity, and the artist’s own mixed race heritage. By stitching together the bunny costume out of fabric, a gesture to traditions of Women’s Work and craft, the piece is basically a manifestation of the artist’s take on the complications of gender and masculinity. Subsequently, the vision of the bunny hanging limp and flaccid along a wire cable in the corner of the gallery adds another dimension to this haunting effect. Inscribed on the fabric of the costume are the words “Damirifa, Due, Due!” (Great One, be comforted), a phrase that is used in Ghana as part of West African burial tradition. Blake has explained to me that the bunny also references “Brer Rabbit,” the African American folk hero of the Uncle Remus tales, a character that he uses to explore the complexities of his own biracial mix of African and European heritage.

Untitled, 2003 sits in its storage box awaiting installation.

SG: Why might Nayland Blake’s work fit in to an exhibition about feminism and feminist art?

MR: The artist has mentioned to me that one of the first art experiences to make an impact on him was an installation that was up at the Museum of Modern Art by Nikki deSaint Phalle, who is a very respected artist and feminist. In fact, one of his most famous pieces, The Big One, 2003, a large bunny that resembles the smaller one on view is, in his own words, “directly indebted to [Saint Phalle’s] hybrid of environment and sculpture, and that my body of work, like the work of a number of queer men of my generation, draws two crucial things from the feminist work of the 1970’s: the permission to articulate intimate autobiography as part of a broader social critique, and the understanding that materials and processes can be read as gendered and not as simply neutral entities. I count Lynda Benglis as one of my influences because she made it clear that there wasn’t simply a monolithic abstraction or formalism, but that there are many formalisms and abstractions, and that they have differing political positions. In the early Eighties, when I was attempting to find a way to work that both bore witness to the truth of my sexuality and to my formal training, it was to those notions that I turned.”

This quotation may come off sounding very scholarly, because Blake is himself a curator and an academic, but I think it really upholds one of the key goals of our show, which is to demonstrate that the history of feminist art is and continues to be an ongoing conversation between the past and the present, and one that is always yielding new interpretations.

Nayland Blake Heavenly Bunny Suit, nylon with metal armature, 1994. Courtesy of Location One.

Thanks for the amazing commentary Maura!! Nayland Blake performs a restaging of his well-known 1998 performance piece “Gorge” at Location One tonight! “Gorge” is an hour-long performance during which the artist sits shirtless in front of a table of food, and invites the audience to feed him. Later, Eileen Myles, Brina Thurston, Chris Cochrane, and Lauren Siberman share short performances in response to Blake’s work.

Nayland Blake: Behavior, a 25-year survey of the artist’s work, curated by Maura Reilly, is on view at Location One through February 14, 2009. Check out the artist’s sculpture Untitled, 2003 on view in Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection through April 5th (video from the exhibition below).

The latest exhibition in the Herstory Gallery, The Fertile Goddess, just opened on December 19, 2008. Imagine how delighted Sarah Giovanniello, Research Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and I were to see this decoration, which Museum art class students kindly made for the Museum’s Holiday Party for staff! We immediately recognized many of the figurines from the exhibition.

The art instructor for the class, Reynolds, is an artist who has always been interested in goddesses and has even made some of her own goddess figurines. We are planning to visit her studio to see them after Elinor Gadon’s talk tomorrow.

One fascinating aspect of working on this exhibition for me, as a scholar who studies ancient art, has been exposure to contemporary feminist art inspired by ancient female images. While scholars who study these ancient figurines often question their identification as goddesses, the reclamation of ancient female images and the concept of goddesses by feminist scholars and artists, beginning in the 1960s, is a rich field in itself. It is one that I have greatly enjoyed learning about from my co-curator, Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and from Sarah.

It is also a pleasure to see young artists making their own versions of these image and we hope to see more in the coming months. For more education related activities, visit the link to the Teacher’s Packet for the exhibition found here.

This weekend at the museum, Professor Elinor Gadon will be speaking about goddesses and her new book The Once and Future Goddess. This event is in conjunction with The Fertile Goddess, currently up in the Herstory Gallery. For more information, click here.

(Female Figurine. Provenance not known; type known from Cyprus. Late Bronze Age, Late Cypriot II, circa 1450–1200 B.C.E. Terracotta, pigment, 3 x 2 x 2 in.)

Kate Gilmore’s solo exhibition is in it’s last week at the Smith-Stewart Gallery in Manhattan. Gilmore uses an extreme physicality in her video art, kicking down drywall in high heels and donning a fluorescent pink bow as she smashes furniture with sledgehammers. An installation accompanies her three most recent videos in this show, which will be up until January 18th.

(Kate Gilmore, Down the House, 2008, single channel video, 17 min. 6 sec. Courtesy of Smith-Stewart.)

Re:Production opens today at Three Walls in Chicago. Featuring the work of artist Christa Donner, this exhibition re-imagines the human reproductive system via a wall installation, drawings and a zine. Donner will be giving an artist talk at the gallery on January 29th, before the show closes February 13th.

(Christa Donner, Image from Re:Production. Courtesy of Three-Walls.)

Another Chicago exhibition of interest is Girlfriends, Lovers, Still Lifes and Landscape, featuring artist Mickalene Thomas. Closing Saturday at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, this show uses rhinestones and patterning to explore the Harlem Renaissance and 1960s aesthetics.

(Mickalene Thomas, Image from Girlfriends, Lovers, Still Lifes and Landscape, Courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery)

Un Coup de Dent just opened at Galerie Lelong in Manhattan. Feminist artist Nancy Spero’s so-called “Black Paintings” from the late fifties and early sixties are featured in this show, which will be up until February 21st.

(Nancy Spero, Mother and Children (2), 1956. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.)

Erik Alos - Lauren Bergman - James Naccarato, just opened at the Cory Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. Lauren Bergman’s feminist take on pop surrealism at times takes the form of prancing housewives, synchronized swimmers, and hyena’s munching on babydolls. This show will be up until January 20th.

(Lauren Bergman, This is the Life, acrylic and litho coal on gessoed paper, 30″ x 22″. Courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery.)