Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Academic Programs Coordinator Eleanor Whitney and artist Jen DeNike conduct a walkthrough of the Rubin Pavillion and Lobby in preparation for TWIRL.

For months, the city has been eagerly anticipating PERFORMA, the performance art biennial that is literally “happening” all over New York for the month of November. PERFORMA was founded in 2004, with the mission to support the presentation of performance by visual artists and the efficacy of “live art” within the visual arts. The discipline and practice of performance has been important to women artists since the 1960s and 70s, when the art form began to coalesce into a movement in such downtown art pantheons (though then they were just rough spaces and warehouses) as Judson Church, 112 Greene Street and PS1. Performance, like video, is arguably one of the first art forms to be pioneered equally by both men and women artists. Now performance art is generally considered a serious medium, not unlike painting or sculpture, although critics and historians continue to explore ways of defining, codifying and mapping its history and current importance. When PERFORMA organizers approached curators and educators at the Museum last year about hosting events in conjunction with this year’s consortium of arts organizations around the city–and the representation of Brooklyn venues is stronger than ever before –we jumped at the chance to participate!

This Saturday’s program features original performances by Terence Koh, and Brooklyn based artist, Jen DeNike, whose meditative and dreamlike video, Happy Endings, 2006 is currently on view in the Center through January 10th, 2010 in Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video. Jen’s performance on Saturday titled TWIRL, will include an award-winning fifty-piece student marching band from Weehawken, New Jersey, along with baton twirler, Erica Henschel, and a few other surprises. When we met with Jen last spring, all immediately hit it off, and were thrilled at the possibility of hosting her unique spectacle in the beautiful Rubin Pavillion and Lobby. Because Jen’s performance coincides with our monthly blow-out First Saturday, we know that hundreds of people will be milling about the area early Saturday evening. We also hear that local photographers are invited to shoot the bands on Saturday and post photos to the Brooklyn Museum’s flickr group. You can shoot the performances too! Jen is enthusiastic about organizing a critical mass to capture many and varied perspectives, and crowd views of the performance as it unfolds.

Jen DeNike’s performance TWIRL begins at 6PM on Saturday, in and around the Rubin Pavillion and Lobby.

Check out this recent interview with Jen about her art and performance on ArtOnAir.org!

TWIRL artist Jen DeNike visits the Weehawken Marching Band as they prepare for a Halloween parade led by Vice Principal Steven Spinosa.

This week’s picks were researched and written by Nina Pelaez, Curatorial Intern for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center.

Racism: An American Family Value, opens tomorrow, July 8th, at The Center for Book Arts in Manhattan. The show will explore the many ways that book artists have tackled the issue of racism in their work. The exhibition will feature work by feminist artists Maureen Kelleher, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems as well as many other exciting and innovative artists. The exhibition will be on view through September 12, 2009.

(Shevrone Neckles, A Soldier’s Story. Racism: An American Family Value exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of The Center for Book Arts.)

Daughters of the Revolution: Women and Collage opened this past week at Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition features the work of over thirty modern and contemporary women artists including Hannah Hoch, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Carolee Scheemann, Miriam Schapiro and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition reveals the important contributions women have made to modern art through collage and explores the female experience through this often overlooked medium. The show will be on view through August 14th.

(Louise Erhard, So, It’s All Come to This, 2008, Mixed-media collage , 10 x 14 inches. Courtesy of Pavel Zoubok Gallery.)

Currently on view at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts are shoes and plenty of them! On view through January 3, 2010, The Perfect Fit: Shoes Tell Stories, explores shoes as more than footwear but for their potential for expressing issues surrounding sexuality, gender, class and race.

(Jan Hopkins, Orange Peel High Heels. The Perfect Fit: Shoes Tell Stories exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of Fuller Craft Museum.)

Nivi Alroy’s erupting, shattered and often precarious structures are currently on display at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn in a new exhibit: Fruiting Bodies. Her collection of sculptures and drawings investigates the tensions between inner and outer spaces. These structures ultimately become metaphors for the body and for the home and display the ongoing evolution and trauma these spaces undergo when threatened by outside forces. Alroy’s work will be on exhibit through July 19th.

(Work by Nivi Alroy. Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery)

Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art is a traveling global exhibit that recently opened at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway. The exhibition, featuring the work of 17 artists from 14 countries, addresses cultural difficulties faced by women while tackling the issue of violence against women. The show can also be seen as a virtual exhibition here.

( Yoko Inoue, Untitled, photograph of a performance. Off the Beaten Path: Violence, Women and Art exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of the Stenersen Museum.)

Picturing Progress: Hungarian Women Photographers, 1900- 1945, is currently on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. The exhibition, on view through August 30th, focuses on the way that photography allowed Hungarian women to establish themselves as professional artists during this time. The collection of work focuses on the period of political upheaval during the span in 1900-1945 and these artist’s visual interpretations of that era.

(Olga Mate, Still life with eggs and mushrooms, early 1920’s, Gelatine silver print, 6.57 x 4.02 in. Courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.)

Alice Wheeler: Women are Beautiful, is currently on display at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington. Wheeler’s series of photographs represent women of varying ages and contexts through the lens of another woman: showcasing them as multi-dimensional, autonomous figures. The exhibition will be on display through August 15th.

(Alice Wheeler, Girl with Stuffed Rabbit Evergreen State Fair, Monroe, WA, 2007,2009, Chromogenic Print, 40.5 x 27 in. Courtesy of Greg Kucera Gallery.)

Fusing science with sexuality: Catherine Stewart’s work, on exhibition at the New Hall Art Collection in Cambridge, UK, focuses on differences in plumage between male and female birds. The exhibition, Catherine Stewart: The Colour of Courtship, includes enlarged images of songbird specimens that highlight the intricacies and differences between the sexes, which play a crucial role in mating rituals in the avian world. The show will be on display through August 1st.

(Catherine Stewart, The Colour of Courtship # 4: Indigo Bunting. Courtesy of New Hall Art Collection.)

Opening this Saturday at Mark Moore Gallery, July 11th, is Weep and Wonder: a fascinating series of paintings by artist Jennifer Nehrbass. The series of seven highly psychological portraits, all of women, deconstruct traditional conceptions of femininity by transferring the ownership of the image from the viewer to the subject herself. The paintings will be on display through August 15th.

(Jennifer Nehrbass, Snake in the Grass, 2009, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 30 in. Courtesy of Mark Moore Gallery.)

The True Body Project. Photograph courtesy True Body Project. Copyright Esther Freeman, True Body class of 2005.

This Mother’s Day program has grown out of a yearlong collaboration between the Brooklyn Museum and the True Body Project. Originally based in Cincinnati, the organization began conducting workshops with various New York-based community organizations in 2008 including Women of Storahtelling, We Got Issues, and the Arab American Association of New York to gather stories about women’s relationships with their bodies. The organization’s goal is to utilize art and performance as a means to facilitate promoting positive body image in young girls and women. During April’s Target First Saturday, representatives from the True Body Project shared their art-making process with Museum visitors by placing journals containing workshop participants’ reflections on each chair. The visitors were encouraged to leaf through the journals and read aloud entries that they personally connected with. The audience’s response was amazing with participants ranging in age from 10 to 65 reading to the group. Innovative and inspirational, the activity created a sense of connection across age, background, and experience. The Museum is thrilled to promote art projects which have grown directly out of collective voices and community collaboration. And, in a time of limited resources, this is a wonderful model for organizing quality and meaningful public programs on a shoestring.

The True Body Project captures workshop participants’ reflections on specific prompts in these shared journals. Photograph courtesy of the True Body Project.

This Sunday, May 10, the True Body Project will premiere their site-specific performance Body Language: Brooklyn Museum throughout the galleries. The performers will be responding to different installations in the Museum - including Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Museum’s well-known female figurine (known by most as the ‘Bird Lady’) in the Ancient Egyptian Art Galleries, and the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Pavilion - with their own interpretive dance, new video, original song, and homemade replica sistra . Each piece combines Brooklyn women’s reflections on their bodies and lived experience with responses to the Museum’s artwork.

Take a sneak peak of the brilliant intergenerational theatrical work that will be in the Glass Pavilion. Here, the performers work out their spacing in advance of the program. Photograph by Cameron Anderson.

Many thanks to Lyndsey Beutin in Education for the following, and for her efforts to promote and co-organize the program. The True Body Project performs Body Language: Brookyn Museum throughout the Museum this Sunday, May 10th. For further details about the program please click here.

Tomoko Sawada (Japanese, b. 1977). Untitled, from the OMIAI series, 2001. Chromogenic photographs. On Loan from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections in honor of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, L2007.8.6.11, .16. Photographs courtesy of the artist and Zabriskie Gallery, New York.

With a little under a week left in March, the Museum ends a successful month of public programs and events in celebration of National Women’s History Month and marks the second anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art with Feminism Now: New Feminist Art Scholarship. This day-long conference highlights the work of a diverse group of emerging art historians and scholars of related disciplines whose work focuses on feminist approaches to research and analysis of contemporary visual arts and culture. Noted critic, curator, playwright, and arts activist Carey Lovelace delivers a keynote talk in the morning titled “Alternating Universes,” a discussion of how feminist theory has shaped contemporary society and what formulations we might expect it to take in the future. Following Carey’s talk will be two consecutive panels moderated by Karen Shimakawa, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Johanna Burton, art historian and Associate Director and Senior Faculty Member at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City. You can check out the Symposium’s page on the main website for more information about tomorrow’s program! RSVP to academic.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

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!