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Introduction didactic to Ghada Amer: Love Has No End with packing boxes. Photo by Sarah Giovanniello

Last week we watched as the deinstallation of Ghada Amer: Love Has No End brought with it many delicious memories from the past run of the show. Included among these were the energy and joy of the installation itself, the wonderful artists’ talks, panel discussions, school groups, and tours that were organized with our colleagues in Education, and the conversations we shared with audiences that traveled from all over the world to the Museum for the exhibition.

Senior Art Handler Michael Allen preps a work by artist Ghada Amer for shipping to the artist’s studio. Photo by Sarah Giovanniello

The artist herself wanted to share a few reflections on the exhibition, and rather than try to paraphrase her in this post, I wanted to include her comments, unedited below!

“I loved the show. It is my first retrospective in a museum! I loved the way [Curator] Maura [Reilly] worked: digging in my cupboards, in my sister’s home where she made a research trip in Paris, France. In the beginning I was surprised, almost annoyed on how close and precise she wanted to be!! But then when I saw the final selection and the lay out I knew it was going to be great and it was great…I liked the way she divided my work in 5 sections, I loved the wall text, the hanging. She managed to make a show that is simple, clear and powerful.”

This is a quick “naughty” drawing of a naked woman that Ghada made for me during the installation that still hangs in my office! The text reads: “I am a feminist. Are you?” and is signed: “Ghada Amer. Feb 14 08. The worst day of the year.”

In keeping with this trend of installing shows around holidays, our newest exhibition Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection, co-curated by me and Nicole Caruth (independent curator and former Interpretive Materials Manager of the Brooklyn Museum), opens in the main galleries of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art today, on Halloween, October 31st! Stay tuned for more on this installation and opening of Burning Down the House on the blog next week!

Venus, no. 192 (August 1988). “Numero special femmes voiles pour l’été 1988” (Special issue for veiled women, summer 1988). Collection of the artist

While living in Cairo in 1988, Ghada Amer had an artistic breakthrough when she stumbled across a fashion magazine titled, Venus. The artist tells me that this magazine was a “sort of Vogue for the veiled woman,” which featured images of Western models wearing veils and modestly fashionable outfits that were photo-montaged onto their figures. The back of the publication also featured sewing patterns for readers to create their own versions of the fashions seen in the photos. Amer’s immediate response was a series of spiral notebooks with miniaturized versions of these patterns, and soon after larger works emerged, including the title piece for this exhibition, “Love Has No End,” (1990), and “Untitled,” (1990), which features a tracing paper cutout of a miniskirt pattern mounted to a rectangle of plywood.

(Ghada Amer (American, b. Egypt, 1963) Venus n. 192: Numero special femmes voiles pour l’été 1988, modèle n. 3, taille 46 (Venus No. 2: Special Issue for Veiled Women, Summer 1988, Model No. 3, Size 46), 1988; Ghada Amer (American, b. Egypt, 1963) Venus n. 192: Numero special femmes voiles pour l’été 1988, modèle n. 3, taille 46 (Venus No. 2: Special Issue for Veiled Women, Summer 1988, Model No. 32, Size 46), 1988. Both spiral notebooks with collage elements: Bristol paper on Canson paper. Collection of the artist, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery)

This piece leads into an area of Amer’s work where she begins to explore connections between presumed “feminine” techniques or craft, and “masculine” or formalized constructions. The patterning of baby clothes, and dresses influences works such as “L’Ange (The Angel),” (1991), and “Untitled,” (1991), while the subject of “woman’s work” and the figure of the “bored housewife” infiltrates “La femme qui repasse (The Woman Who Irons),” (1996), as Amer begins to reframe the narratives of feminine domesticity. In the last piece from this section, “Test Piece for Conseils de beauté de mois d’août: Votre corps, vos cheveux, vos ongles et votre peau (Beauty Tips for the Month of August: Your Body, Your Hair, Your Nails, and Your Skin),” (1993), the models of feminine behavior and improbable ideals of beauty that are championed by magazines such as Elle and Vogue are rendered powerless in the folds of four handkerchiefs delicately embroidered with the French text about grooming and proper etiquette.

La femme qui repasse (The Woman Who Irons), 1996. Acrylic and embroidery on canvas. Collection of the artist, courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Check out these works and more in Ghada Amer: Love Has No End at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center gallery through October 19th.

(Unknown Artist, New York Pickets at the White House, January 26, 1917, Records of the National Women’s Party, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, the popular Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses has just come down in the Herstory Gallery to make room for an exciting and timely exhibition on the suffrage movement in early 20th Century America, aptly titled Votes for Women! I chose to highlight this important milestone in American History as the second exhibition in the Herstory Gallery because I knew with a woman making a serious bid for the White House that it would be a critical year for women’s rights and women’s issues in this country. Indeed, as Senator Clinton reminded viewers earlier this week in her televised speech following the Super Tuesday primaries, her own mother was born into a time in this country when women did not have the right to vote. With this in mind, the show pays homage to our American foremothers, like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Victoria C. Woodhull (the first woman EVER to run for President of the United States—in 1872!), without whom the women’s vote today could not have been possible! Votes for Women, guest curated by Melissa Messina, opens in the Herstory Gallery on February 16th and runs through November 30th.

Check back for more from ‘behind-the-scenes’ of Votes for Women in the coming months!

Art handlers and staff go over packing details and take down wall labels. To the right, two large crates filled with works ready to be shipped back to lenders flank the empty platform where Lee Bul’s Ein Hungerkunstler (2004) once stood.

This week marks the days when both Global Feminisms Remix and Pharaohs, Queens, and Goddesses are deinstalled from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Museum’s registrar, Katie Welty, and our expert team of art handlers have already finished moving objects from the Herstory Gallery, and started taking down numerous multi-media objects from the Global Feminisms Remix show, and readying the artworks to be shipped back to the international artists and lenders.

An art handler uses craft tape to secure the wrapping on one of Tomoko Sawado’s photographs from the popular School Days series (2004).

While it’s always a little sad to see an exhibition deinstalled, and the galleries empty, I am very excited that our next exhibition, Ghada Amer: Love Has No End, will be open to the public in just a few short weeks—on February 16th!

Ghada Amer in her studio in December 2007. Photo: Maura Reilly

I’ve been working on the Ghada Amer show for a few years now. It started as a book project with Gregory R. Miller & Co. that quickly turned into an exhibition. As I researched and wrote the main essay for the monograph I realized that the sheer breadth of Ghada’s work had never really been explored in an exhibition, abroad or in the U.S. Most exhibitions of Ghada’s work focus exclusively on her exquisitely embroidered paintings with erotic motifs for which she has become internationally renowned. But, for our exhibition, I decided that we should offer a survey of her work from 1988 to 2008, in order to showcase Ghada’s talents in other media, like drawing, sculpture, garden design, and installation. The exhibition also includes many works that have never before been exhibited in the U.S.–which is really exciting!

I took the photo of Ghada above a few months ago during one of my visits to her studio in Harlem. During the planning for our upcoming exhibition, I spent countless afternoons and weekends with Ghada looking for pieces to include in the show, and digging up some of her earliest works out of her personal archives. Some of the works featured in the exhibition have literally sat in her studio for decades, and will make their “debut” so to speak when the show opens next week!

Stay tuned for a slide show of highlights from the exhibition!

Although she’s been settling into her fabulous new position as the National Programs Manager at ArtTable for a few months now, CONGRATULATIONS are past due for Melissa Messina (a.k.a. Wilma, Shirley, Susan B. Anthony), our former Research Assistant! So amazing was Melissa that there is absolutely no way that the Center could have opened in March 2007 without her dedication, good humor, enthusiasm, and, quite frankly, her workacoholism! While we miss seeing Melissa bounding around the Museum in her fashionable clothes and high heels on a daily basis, we are thrilled that she remains integrally connected to the Center as the current curator of the Votes for Women exhibition in the Herstory Gallery, opening February 16th. Stay tuned for more on this landmark exhibition, as well as some blogging from the curator herself, throughout the Spring and Summer!

Melissa posing as Wonder Woman, our favorite heroine! (Artwork by Mike Sekowsky, circa early 1970s. Copyright DC Comics)

Before coming to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Melissa Messina earned her MFA from Pratt Institute where she received the Presidential Merit Award in Painting. While there, she coordinated the 2005–06 Visiting Artist Lecture Series, which featured such artists as Vanessa Beecroft, Mariko Mori, Judy Pfaff, and Joan Snyder. During this time, she also worked as a Curatorial and Sales Associate for a private dealer in New York specializing in modern abstraction. Prior to moving to New York, Messina was hired by the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Affairs as an independent curator and executed several regional and national group exhibitions for their public art galleries, City Gallery East and City Gallery at Chastain. In Atlanta, she was also Assistant Director at Comer Art Advisory, LLC, in 2004, and a Curatorial and Marketing Associate for the art consulting firm, Barkin-Leeds Ltd., 2001–2003. She recently was the Assistant Curator to Ernesto Pujol for the exhibition Mediating America (June 2006) at the Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, and was invited to jury the exhibition Adam’s Rib Eve’s Air in Her Hair (January 2007) at the feminist art gallery SOHO20 in Chelsea. Her own artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the Southeast, New England, and New York.