(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.

(Jenny Holzer, PALM LEFT 000113, 2007, oil on linen. Courtesy: Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers.)

(Kathe Burkhart, Blueballs: from the Liz Taylor Series (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), 2007, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 72 x 108 in. Courtesy: Galerie Lumen Travo.)

Four//From Istanbul opens June 14th at Inspiring Spaces Loft. This weekend-only show is co-curated by Mezze and our former graduate intern Saisha Grayson. The show includes work by Turkish artist Hayal Ponzanti, whose stark black and white prints focuses on gender roles, and sexual and moral taboos in Turkish culture.

(Hayal Ponzanti. From the series This Longing. 2008. Serigraph print. 50 x 70 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.)

A group show entitled Mahrem: Footnotes on Veiling opens June 14th at Tanas. Mahrem explores the disparity between the meanings women subjectively assign to Islamic covering and the significances projected and perceived by the public. This exhibition serves as the visual component to the first edition of “Non-Western Modernities,” an annual series of workshops and panel discussions conceptualized by sociologist Nilüfer Göle.

(Mandana Moghaddam, Chelgis I, 2003. Courtesy: Tanas.)

Also, for work that deals with veiling in a myriad of cultures and contexts, check out The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces at The Dairy through June 20th.

(announcement for The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces. Courtesy: The Dairy.)

The first Folkestone Triennial, Tales of Time and Space, has commissioned public works by 23 contemporary artists, including Global Feminisms artist Tracey Emin, Pae White, and Sejla Kameric, for its inaugural exhibition, opening June 14th.

(Sejla Kameric, 30 Years After, 2006, color photograph. Courtesy: Sejla Kameric.)

Summer, a group show that includes work by feminist artist Cyrilla Mozenter, opens June 19th at Knoedler Project Space.

(Cyrilla Mozenter, More Saints Seen #29, 2005. Courtesy: Cyrilla Mozenter.)

On June 19th, a show of work by Susan Hefuna, Knowledge is Sweeter than Honey, inaugurates Albion Gallery’s New York location.

(Susan Hefuna, Woman behind a masrhibiyya, 1997, photographic print. Image: artnet.)

Woman Made Gallery hosts both A Minyan Without Men and Tradition and Transformation: Art by Jewish Women through June 19th.

(Dorothy T. Grunes, The Centre Cannot Hold, 24 x 30 in., included in A Minyan Without Men. Courtesy: Woman Made Gallery.)

Janet Biggs’ Tracking Up: A Presentation of Six Single-Channel Videos remains open through June 21st at Solomon Projects. While Biggs has previously addressed social constructions of gender in her work, in this ambitious video installation she broadens her conceptual concerns to include complex relationships of power and control.

(Janet Biggs, Tracking Up, video stills. Courtesy: Solomon Projects.)

Portrait of Silvia Elena, a collaborative installation by Swoon and Tennessee Jane Watson, remains open through July 5th at Honey Space. This show constitutes a visceral reaction to the death of Silvia Elena; it memorializes and draws attention to the hundreds of women who have been abducted and murdered in Ciudad Juarez over the past decade.

(Swoon, Portrait of Silvia Elena. Courtesy: flavorpill and Honey Space.)

The Selling of the West, new photographs by the well-known male feminist Donald Woodman, is open now through August 2nd at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. Taken during the course of a prolonged western road trip, Woodman’s photographs challenge the notion of the west as utopian frontier.

(Donald Woodman, announcement for The Selling of the West. Courtesy: Zane Bennett Contemporary Art.)

**To learn more about one of the Sackler Center’s favorite male feminist, check out Woodman’s website.

This just in:

This weekend the Renegade Craft Fair, a multi-city organization that gives artists and artisans the chance to sell their wares in a non-corporate venue, takes place at the McCarren Park Pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Many of the vendors are female craftspeople who support themselves through consigning their works and participating in DIY craft fairs like this one. Keep it up ladies!

(Sarah Neuberger, Nesting Dolls Stamp Set. Courtesy of the Artist.)

(Tomoko Sawada, BRIDE, 2007, 1983, 19.75 x 19.75 in., Lambda print mounted on Alpolic. Courtesy: Rose Gallery.)

“Not for the prude, humor-less, or squeamish!” June 4th through 14th, apexart presents a series of free events entitled Come Out & Play. Wednesday’s event, Supermasochist, perhaps the most controversial on the week’s bill, will feature a discussion with Sheree Rose, collaborator and dominatrix of her late husband Bob Flanagan. A screening of Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist will be preceded by relevant short films by numerous artists.

(Courtesy: apexart.)

Chez Bushwick Presents Three Films by Yvonne Rainer, the final two of which occur on June 11th, with a screening of Murder and Murder (1996), and June 18th, with a screening of Privilege (1990).

(Courtesy: Chez Bushwick.)

Work by abstract artist Carol Ross, Paintings 1988-1990, remains on view through June 14th at Janos Gat Gallery. In this collection, one can sense Ross’s unique, often feminine approach to the transition from the modernist, flat, painted canvas to a minimalist unified object.

(Carol Ross, Arch, 74 x 68 inches. Courtesy: Carol Ross.)

Also through June 14th, Global Feminisms artist Lee Bul presents an exciting installation of work at Lehmann Maupin in her first solo exhibition in New York.

(Lee Bul, Sternbau 4, 2007, crystal, glass, and acrylic beads on nickel chrome wire, stainless steel, and aluminum armature. Photo: Patrick Gries. © Lee Bul, © Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Courtesy: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, and Lehmann Maupin.)

Andrea Meislin Gallery currently hosts Gender This, a show of paintings by Shelley Adler, through June 21st. Adler’s portraits of ambiguously-gendered figures invite the viewer to question her assumptions about the gender of Adler’s other subjects as well.

(Shelley Adler, Untitled (Blue Woman), 2007, oil on canvas. Courtesy: Andrea Meislin Gallery.)

Jack *%SS is now open, through June 28th, at Susan Inglett Gallery and includes work by Marina Abramovic, Sophie Calle, Carolee Schneemann, and Sara Greenberger Rafferty. The exhibition takes its title from the MTV show of the same name which features stunts and pranks acted out by and upon its cast of characters; Jack *%SS explores the value of similar tactics executed in the realm of contemporary art.

(Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Lucky Not Funny, 2006, C-print, 24 x 16 in. Courtesy: Sara Greenberger Rafferty.)

He/She Series - Sequel, paintings by Rachel Friedberg, is open through June 28th at Kouros Gallery.

(Rachel Friedberg, Kayla’s Skirt, 2008, encaustic on panel, 30 x 20 in. Courtesy: Kouros Gallery.)

Trappings: Stories of Women, Power and Clothing by Two Girls Working: Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki opens at 516 Arts on June 13th and remains open at Nicolaysen Art Museum through July 27th. Trappings, which now includes over 600 participants, is an ongoing documentary and oral history project that poses the question “What do you wear that makes you feel powerful?” to women across the country.

(Two Girls Working: Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki, Trappings, Stephanie Rivera, 2005, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Courtesy: Two Girls Working: Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki.)

Keith Haring’s Houston Street and Bowery Mural has been recreated through the collaborative effort of the Keith Haring Foundation, Goldman Properties, and Deitch Projects. Though Haring’s mural existed for only a few months in 1982, its recreation embodies the bold vitality of Haring’s oeuvre and echoes Haring’s interest in the public visibility of his art.

(Mural at Houston and Bowery Street by Keith Haring, ©1982 The Estate of Keith Haring. Photograph by Tseng Kwong Chi ©1982 Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York. Courtesy: The Keith Haring Foundation and Deitch Projects.)

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.)

(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.

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.

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!

(Sarah Chuldenko, Beirut (detail), 2008. Courtesy: Fake Estate.)

April 25th-27th, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council opens its doors for Open Studio Weekend. Look for work by artist and feminist Simone Leigh.

(Announcement for Open Studio Weekend. Courtesy: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.)

Xenia Hausner’s You & I opens April 25th at Forum Gallery. Hausner combines painting and photography in her compositions, effectively challenging the assumption that photography presents reality.

(Xenia Hausner, All of Me, mixed media, 2008. Courtesy: Forum Gallery.)

Alice Anderson’s new film The Dolls’ Day opens at Espace Croisé on April 26th. Inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s novel Morella, The Dolls’ Day is an allegorical tale of a daughter’s restrictive relationship to her parents.

(Alice Anderson, The Dolls’ Day, 2008. Courtesy: Espace Croisé.)

Ephemera, work by Marie Sivak closes April 26th at A.I.R. Sivak’s carved alabaster and limestone sculptures combine with projected or embedded film to create a ghostly effect. Her work appropriates materials traditionally associated with male artists and introduces them to materials and techniques historically confined to “women’s work.”

(Marie Sivak, Pneuma, carved alabaster, video, stainless steel, mixed media. Courtesy: A.I. R Gallery.)

April 27th through June 8th, take a stroll in Williamsburg, Brooklyn for Artwalking: Bedford Avenue. Over thirty artists have been invited by eyewash gallery to create storefront installations in a marriage of Art and Commerce. Feminist artist Catya Plate is included in the show.

(Announcement for Artwalking: Bedford Avenue. Courtesy: eyewash gallery.)

Feminine Transcriptions, recent work by Olga Alexander, will be open through May 5th at the Koussevitzky Art Gallery at Berkshire Community College. (For more information contact bchilla@berkshirecc.edu)

(Olga Alexander, Feminine Transcriptions (series, detail), mixed media with collage on paper, 2007. Courtesy: Artists Space.)

Phyllis Rosser’s solo show Nature Reassembled is now open at Ceres Gallery through May 17th. The show includes sculptural work comprised of river-washed roots and branches as well as paintings of flowers magnified in up-close compositions.

(Phyllis Rosser, Weaving Fence. Courtesy: Phyllis Rosser.)

Then and Now and Forever, images by Boo Ritson, is now open, through May 17th at BravinLee programs. Though Ritson’s subjects are caricatures, her unconventional working method dismantles all presumptions. By styling and literally painting her models in order to ultimately photograph them, she invokes performance, photography, and painting all at once.

(Boo Ritson, The Sunbather, archive digital print, 2007. Courtesy: BravinLee programs.)

Look At Me!: The Performative Impulse in Recent Chinese Photography remains on view at the Williams Center Art Gallery of Lafayette College through May 24th. Curator Dan Mills states that the exhibition does not claim to comprehensively represent its subject, but to merely present 15 artists who are the subjects of their art in various ways.

(Chen Qiulin, Ellisis’s Series No. 3, color photograph, 2002. Courtesy: Chen Qiulin, Max Protetch Gallery, and Lafayette College.)

Read Lauren’s commentary here

(Penny Arcade, photograph by Bob Gruen. Courtesy: Penny Arcade.)

Opening April 18th, Galerie Lelong presents Touch Me, Yoko Ono’s first solo New York show since 2003. Ono will present film, conceptual photography, sculpture, and an interactive painting in order to comment on different facets of female experience. The interactive painting requires viewer participation; viewers will be encouraged to insert body parts through cuts in the canvas in a performance reminiscent of Ono’s now canonical Cut Piece, originally performed in 1964.

(Yoko Ono, Sky TV, 1966. Courtesy: Imagine Peace, www.imaginepeace.com)

During the Salem Film Festival, April 18-20th, Alexandra Opie will exhibit two video installation works. Opie’s three-dimensional arrangement of multiple projection screens initiates filmic phenomenology by allowing viewers to walk around and within the installations.

(Alexandra Opie, video installation. Courtesy: Salem Film Festival.)

Voice & Void opens April 19th at Galerie im Taxispalais. This group show dedicated to exploring representations of the human voice, and its absence, in the visual arts addresses the difficulty of translating expression from one medium to another. Included in the show is feminist VALIE EXPORT’s 1969 Tonfilm (Sound Film) and work by Global Feminisms artist Anna Gaskell.

(John Cage, cover of Silence (paper mock-up for cover of book), 1959. Courtesy: Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections and Archives, © 1959 by John Cage; Galerie im Taxispalais.)

Don’t miss your chance to see feminist artist Martha Wilson’s early and little-known Photo/Text Works, 1971-74 at Mitchell Algus Gallery. By repeatedly depicting her own image in myriad forms, including drag, Wilson plays with the presentation and transformation of subjectivity. Closing April 26th.

(Martha Wilson, announcement for Photo/Text Works, 1971-74, Posturing: Age Transformation, 1973. Courtesy: Mitchell Algus Gallery.)

Serial Meditations, co-curated by feminists (and former Sackler Center Research Assistants!) Melissa Messina and Amy Brandt, remains open at Nurture Art through May 3rd. In an attempt to consider serial artistic production outside of commodity production, this exhibition presents meditative aspects of repetition and seriality indebted to a minimalist aesthetic.

(Rita MacDonald, Wall Drawing 69-72 (detail), 2006. Courtesy: Rita MacDonald.)

Through June 1st, Figureworks juxtaposes paintings of the male figure, by McWillie Chambers, with others of the female figure, by Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn.

(left: McWillie Chambers, Collins 12, oil on canvas, 2007. right: Ingrid Capozzoli Flinn, nude with double V, oil on canvas, 2005. Courtesy: Figureworks.)

The Way That We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics remains open through June 29th at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, YBCA, in San Francisco. This exhibition, while emphasizing performance and collaborative projects, showcases work that has been influenced by feminist ideologies and that addresses topics relevant to women today.

(Nao Bustamante, America, The Beautiful. Courtesy: Nao Bustamante.)

Last but not least, we want to pass on news of a kindred new blog with a feminist bent, The American Virgin. Created as a companion project to the work-in-progress documentary of the same title (directed by Therese Shechter, who also directed I Was A Teenage Feminist,) this blog keeps readers up-to-date on all the fascinating tidbits these filmmakers discover about virginity and American attitudes about sex.