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!

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.

This month there are a fantastic crop of programs showcasing the work of Carolee Schneemann, a feminist pioneer, and one of the most influential film and performance artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Early in her career, Schneemann was a protégé of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whose signature style of scratching film emulsion and choppy editing inspired Schneemann’s films like Fuses (1965) and Kitsch’s Last Meal (1973-76). But issues of the body and female subjectivity are always more central to Schneemann’s art than mere technical prowess. Schneemann became one of the first woman artists to articulate and eroticize her own body on film, while affirming the everlasting statement of feminist discourse: “the personal is political.” This is something Schneemann has always achieved with attitude and a fierce sense of individuality. If you’re in Boston, you can see a screening of Fuses and Kitsch’s Last Meal, as well as Plumb Line (1968-71) at the MassArt Film Society on November 20th. Meanwhile PERFORMA 07 has organized a comprehensive multi-program film retrospective that includes both the classics and some more recent installation works, plus a FREE conversation with Schneemann herself on November 7th.

We mentioned earlier that the Pierre Menard Gallery is celebrating Schneemann with an exhibition titled Carolee Schneemann: a selection of recent and early work. Curated by artist Heide Hatry, early works is just that, a collection of paintings, collages, photographs, and performance footage. Look for Schneemann’s beautifully assembled box constructions (made out of materials such as old photographs, mirrors, paint, strips of cloth, feathers, and bones) which anticipate her later performance work. Soon after creating these objects, Schneemann began using her body as an extension of her paintings and constructions in works such as Eye Body (1963) and Meat Joy (1964), two performances that challenge the standard images of women as powerful agents rather than simple objects in art history.

(Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body: 36 Transformative Acts, 1963. Courtesy of the Artist)

On Sunday, November 4th, beginning at 4 pm, at Studio Soto there will be a program dedicated to Schneemann’s impact on the art of contemporary feminist performance artists that will include performances by Heide Hatry, Mari Novotny-Jones, and Theresa Byrnes. Like Schneemann, Byrnes’ work is often characterized by critics as ‘body art’–a term that describes how artists will use their bodies as a literal canvas for enabling political or social commentary. This notion is punctuated by Byrnes’ in one of her most recent piece’s called Trace (2007), a performance in which Byrnes submerged herself in a vat of crude oil, and then spent 30 minutes cleaning herself of the thick substance in front of a crowd of spectators on a New York sidewalk. In Boston, Byrnes will be performing a new work titled Theresa Tree, a piece that she writes us is based on a question from her childhood: “What is the difference between me and a tree?” A worthwhile investigation indeed.

(Theresa Byrnes, Trace, performance, 2007. Image: Andrzej Liguz.)

Boston’s Carolee Schneemann events…
Sunday, November 4th at 4pm. After the Orgy: A Tribute to Carolee Schneemann. Curated by Jed Speare and Michelle Handelman, in conjunction with the exhibition, Carolee Schneemann: a selection of recent and early work at Pierre Menard Gallery through November 25. With performances by Heide Hatry, Theresa Byrnes and Mari Novotny-Jones, and films by Lydia Eccles, Jesse Jagtiani, Michelle Handelman and Luther Price. Followed by a panel discussion with the artists. At Studio Soto. See the Studio Soto website for more details.

And…

Tuesday, November 20th at 8pm: Carolee Schneemann: a Film Tribute featuring a screening of Fuses, Plumbline, and Kitch’s Last Meal. Shown and introduced by Saul Levine. At Mass. College of Art, MassArt Film Society. See the MassArt Film Society website for more details.

New York’s Carolee Schneemann events as part of PERFORMA 07…
Remains To Be Seen: New and Restored Films and Videos of Carolee Schneemann. Programs in Remains to Be Seen include: An Artist Talk & Screening on Wednesday, November 7th at 6pm. FREE. At Electronic Arts Intermix. Restorations & New Works on Thursday, November 15th at 7pm. Kitsch’s Last Meal on Friday and Saturday, November 16th and 17th at 7 pm. Both programs at Anthology Film Archives. See the PERFORMA 07 website for more details.

Maura Reilly and Roseanne Barr, June 25, 2007. Photo © Adam Husted

Dear Feminists,

I’m giddy with excitement when I tell you that one of the greatest comic geniuses of all time visited us here yesterday at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. She came–as a self-declared, longstanding feminist–to see the Center and Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Ms. Chicago–who is an old friend of Roseanne’s–was there to give her a personalized tour of the masterpiece, after which I showed her our inaugural exhibition Global Feminisms. She was delighted with it all! As was no surprise to any of us, she was brilliant, warm, and delightful to be with.

Thank you for the visit, Roseanne. Come again–and bring friends!!!

This Saturday, June 2, 2007
2–4 p.m.
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 3rd floor

Come hear Feminist icon, Faith Ringgold discuss her groundbreaking work from the 1960s to the present!

Faith Ringgold’s inspiring and often humorous stories illustrate her personal journey and beliefs as an artist, activist, author, teacher, and parent. Her talk focuses on art and activism from the 1960s and 1970s to the present, and how she came to use painting, fabrics, quilt-making, and storytelling to create an extensive body of work containing paintings, soft sculpture, masks, and performances. And, after her talk, come be inspired by Faith Ringgold’s talk and create your very own quilt square in the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court.

For more information on Ringgold’s work, please visit her profile on our Feminist Art Base where you’ll find a biography and lots of images.

We hope to see you Saturday!

Global Feminisms Remix
On View August 3, 2007 - February 3, 2007

Forty-four works selected from Global Feminisms will once again be on view at the Brooklyn Museum in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Like its widely praised predecessor, Remix seeks to challenge the dominance of European and American contemporary art and explore such issues as racial and gender identity, politics, and oppression.

Remix assembles works by 40 women artists, who represent countries that are seldom involved in the contemporary art discourse such as Guatemala, Kenya, Pakistan, Thailand, Korea, India. The wide range of media employed in the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and video.

In this exhibition, many of the artworks are infused with political activism. From Afghanistan, Lida Abdul is represented by a single-channel video White House (2005), which shows the artist white-washing a building in bombed-out Kabul. Sigalit Landau, an Israeli video artist, swings a barbed wire hula-hoop around her naked, bloody stomach in which pain symbolizes the geographical barrier created along the West Bank. Regina José Galindo is seen making a bloody footprint with each step as she walks from the Court of Constitutionality to the National Palace in Guatemala City in memory of murdered Guatemalan women, in her performance video Who Can Erase the Traces? (2003). While other exhibiting artists’ themes are not as politically charged, they do create intense, emotive works that celebrate social freedoms or confront oppression. From Japan, Miwa Yanagi’s photograph from My Grandmothers series, depicts an elderly model with flaming-red hair riding sidecar on a motorcycle driven by her young lover. Japanese artist Ryoko Suzuki contributes a mural-sized installation of three photographs in which her face is bound tightly by pig’s intestines, where she is bullied into a kind of mute, anonymous submission.

Among the artists represented are Ghada Amer (Egypt), Arahmaiani (Indonesia), Pilar Albarracín (Spain), Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland), Tracey Moffatt (Australia), Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (Denmark), and Tracey Rose (South Africa), Adriana Varejão (Brazil).

(Images top to bottom: Miwa Yanagi, Yuka, 2000; Lida Abdul, White House, 2005)

You can also learn all about each artist’s career by reading her/his bio and CV. And, most importantly, in the artist’s own words, how s/he or her/his work relates to feminism and/or feminist art in the mandatory requirement for each profile, the Feminist Artist Statement.

The Feminist Art Base features feminist pioneers such as Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneeman, Faith Ringgold; international artists such as Tsuneko Taniuchi (b. Japan; lives in France) and Sutapa Biswas (b. India; lives in England); and a newer generation of feminist artists such as Ximena Zomosa and Aïda Ruilova.

See work from various points in a feminist career such as in Betye Saar’s, Joan Snyder’s, or Harmony Hammond’s profile; or discover someone who is new to the scene like Yun Bai or Swoon. There are also some really rare finds like impossible to locate videos by Mako Idemitsu or Joan Jonas. Where else can you see those for free?

Bottom line, feminist art rocks! And the Feminist Art Base is an ever-growing archive that demonstrates that.

Spread the word! And stay tuned!

(Images Top to Bottom: Hannah Wilke, Rosebud, 1976; Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972. Joan Jonas; Lines in the Sand, 2002.)

Thanks to everyone for making the Feminisms Without Borders Symposium such a great success! The speakers presented fantastic lectures that incited much dialogue and debate about the importance of global feminisms. My co-curator Linda Nochlin and I cannot thank them enough for their enthusiasm, expertise, and participation in what we consider one of many exciting Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art Programs!

Check out what this visitor had to say about the symposium.