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.

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.

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.

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!

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).

Part 1: “A Global Epidemic: Human Trafficking in Your Neighborhood,” featured a discussion with Sonia Ossorio, President of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW-NYC).

Part 2: “Sex Trafficking and the New Abolitionists,” was moderated by iconic feminist and activist Gloria Steinem, and featured a discussion with panelists Taina Bien-Aimé, Executive Director of Equality Now, and Rachel Lloyd, Executive Director of GEMS, an educational and mentoring service for young women who have been subjected to sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking.

Stay tuned for more video from this ongoing series in the coming weeks!

In last Sunday’s panel discussion, “The American Hero and the American Dream: Reflections on Our Contemporary Political Narratives,” moderator and well-known author Courtney E. Martin was joined by panelists Charlton McIlwain, Assistant Professor of Culture and Communication at New York University; Gloria Feldt, author and blogger at Heartfeldt Politics; and Ramin Hedayati, associate producer of The Daily Show for an in-depth examination of the narratives and images that dominate the media, campaigns, and candidates during this election season. If you missed this important discussion, check out the program in the following video!

(Laurie Ann Farrell of Savannah College of Art and Design asks artists Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh questions about their collaborative work. Photograph by Jessica Shaffer.)

After this presentation, Amer energetically discussed how her eight year collaboration with Farkhondeh first began. In 2000, after a period of crippling depression, Farkhondeh leaned on his good friend Amer for support, and moved into her studio. Without her permission or consent, he started to literally “improve” on Amer’s works in progress while she was out, adding layers of paint to the canvases and drawings! To say the least, Amer was surprised when she discovered Farkhondeh’s additions to her pieces, but was so intrigued by her friend’s provocation on her works that she continued to let him participate, and together they coined the acronym RFGA(Riza Farkhondeh, Ghada Amer) to use as their signature.

In the years following, the artists continued their collaborations in tandem, each working on his or her own contributions in their separate locales. Farkhondeh would paint something on a piece, or use tape rather than paint as his medium, and send it off to Amer who would perhaps add an embroidered section or stencil to the work. The years of their collaboration included a stint at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, where they completed a series of drawings which were later shown at the Kukje Gallery in Seoul in 2007 and at the Tina Kim Gallery here in New York in 2008. The duo currently resides as artists-in-residence at Pace Prints in Manhattan which marks the first time they have ever worked together face to face.

(RFGA, Mosaic Memory of Tongues, 2007. Acrylic, embroidery, and gel medium on canvas. Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum in Ghada Amer: Love Has No End.Photo courtesy of the artist, and Gagosian Gallery.)

When asked how working together has changed their own individual work, Amer commented that she has definitely noticed elements of RFGA making their way into her own, individual style. In a rather poignant moment that marked the end of the discussion, Farkhondeh remarked that working with Amer has opened his mind and allowed him to become a viewer of his own work, seeing it in a different light than before the pair’s collaboration.

Two works by RFGA are featured in Ghada Amer: Love Has No End. Don’t forget to take advantage of this amazing retrospective of Ghada Amer’s work, curated by Maura Reilly, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, before it closes on October 19th!

(Ladan Akbarnia and Jina Porter explaining Ghada Amer’s photo series of her various public works installations for the crowd. Photo courtesy of Jessie Shaffer.)

Akbarnia was very insightful in her take on Amer’s work, at one point questioning the attitude of Muslim women towards their veils and other traditional head and body coverings.

(Dr. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere describing her extensive work with circumcised women. Photo courtesy of Jessie Shaffer.)

Concurrent with the gallery talk was a screening of the film Moolaadé, directed by Ousmane Sembène, which addresses female circumcision. Afterwards, Dr. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere graciously led a heated discussion of the film and female circumcision in general. Moving from semantics to female circumcision in Brooklyn and the West’s misconceptions of the practice, and emotions understandably ran high as audience members volleyed back and forth on this controversial issue.

On Saturday, July 12th, Curator Maura Reilly gave a public tour of the exhibition Ghada Amer: Love Has No End, which is on view in the Center’s main galleries through October 19th.

(Maura Reilly presenting her take on Ghada Amer’s work. Photo courtesy of Jessica Hester.)

Reilly discussed the artist’s appropriation of the aesthetics of male Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, and also suggested that Amer’s use of stitching – a traditionally-female endeavor – in some of her work is part of a reclamation of female sexuality and artistic autonomy. Like Akbarnia’s talk earlier in the month, Reilly touched on Amer’s investment in portraying both the social and political disenfranchisement and personal empowerment of Muslim women.

(Photo courtesy of Jessica Hester.)

Also on July 12th, the Center hosted filmmaker Katrina Browne for a showing of her documentary Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. Presented in partnership with PBS’s P.O.V., a showcase for independent nonfiction film, the documentary chronicles Browne’s discovery that her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in American history.

Don’t forget to stop by this Saturday at noon for the reading of excerpts from Live Through This—The Art of Self-Destruction, edited and read by Brooklyn-based feminist performer Sabrina Chapadjiev. Chapadjiev will lead a discussion following the reading with artist Fly and poet Nicole Blackman completing the panel. Thanks to everyone who came last month for your continuous support of the Center’s public programs!!