Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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.

Co-curator Maura Reilly, consultant Ellen Belcher, and the Halaf figurine.

During the planning stages of special exhibitions or permanent installations, it is a common practice in museums to involve consultants; scholars with specialized knowledge who assist the curators in researching objects. For The Fertile Goddess, we were very lucky to have Ellen Belcher as a volunteer consultant. Ellen came and spent a glorious and fun early September afternoon in storage with us looking at all the figurines and shared hours of editing with me on the labels and wall texts for the exhibition. She is an Ancient Near Eastern archaeologist and art historian whom I have known for years. We have been in classes and seminars together at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and at Columbia University, where she is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Art History and Archaeology - along with working full time as a librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Early in 2008, I attended a lecture at Columbia titled, “Embodying the Halaf: Prehistoric figurines from Northern Mesopotamia,” that Ellen gave on her dissertation topic. Co-curator of The Fertile Goddess Maura Reilly and I were already discussing the possibility of focusing on the Fertile Goddess for the next Herstory Gallery exhibition and featuring the Halaf period figurine from our collection. I came away from that lecture - and a subsequent one in May - with a greatly increased understanding of these figurines and other types that existed in Neolithic Mesopotamia. Ellen’s perspective was particularly important because of her work in the field; since 1995, she has excavated in Syria, Jordan and Turkey, where she has been a field supervisor and small finds specialist at the 6th millennium site of Domuztepe for the past decade. Many questions remain about the functions of these figurines in ancient societies and current scholarship has come to consider provenance and archaeological context crucial issues for any understanding of these objects.

Pondering the “Bird Ladies.”

I also was inspired by the work of another colleague (and good friend) in a more indirect way while I was researching our so-called Bird Lady figurines from Predynastic Egypt. Aware that other figurines types existed in Egypt during this period, I was able to see some actual examples In the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with extremely informative chat labels written by Diana Craig Patch, an Associate Curator of Egyptian Art there. I felt that Diana, like Ellen, had thoughtfully framed the questions of function and interpretation that still surround these objects. The Predynastic period is one of Diana’s specializations and, having worked extensively in the field in Egypt, she has a strong understanding of archaeological background and issues. I was therefore delighted when both Ellen and Diana agreed to speak at a panel which will take place tomorrow in the Forum. This is a chance for them to show the numerous other types that were contemporary with the two earliest figurines in the exhibition, the Halaf figurine from Mesopotamia and the Bird Ladies from Egypt and to discuss their latest thoughts about the possible functions and interpretations of these objects. Perhaps they will also share their thoughts about being a feminist archaeologist in the 21st century.

Trying to Remember What We Once Wanted to Forget opens next Saturday, January 31st, at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in León, Spain. This exhibition features the work of the Scandinavian artist team, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, and examines what happens when the public and private spheres of life begin to overlap. This show will be open until June 21st, so there’s plenty of time to get on over there!

(Trying to Remember What We Once Wanted to Forget exhibition announcement image. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León.)

Tonight (RIGHT NOW!), A.I.R. Galllery will be hosting a discussion to question how women artists see themselves through the lens of history, as well as today. REPRESENT: Intergenerational Dialogue, Feminism + Art will begin at 6pm at A.I.R. Gallery’s new Front Street location in DUMBO.

(REPRESENT: Intergenerational Dialogue, Feminism + Art, promotional image. Courtesy of A.I.R. Gallery.)

Using the lyrics of love songs (such as the Cat Power lyrics referenced below), Alyssa Pheobus plays with sexuality and expectations in her latest exhibition, Lay in the Reins. This show will be open at Bellwether Gallery until February 21st.

(Alyssa Pheobus, Good Woman, detail at right, 2008. Graphite on cotton rag paper, 96 x 53 inches. Courtesy of Bellwether Gallery.)

Feminist artists Delaine Le Bas, Josephine Meckseper, and Paula Trope, among others, will be showing at Montehermoso Gallery in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. The exhibition, titled Living Together, opens today and will be up until May 3rd.

(Josephine Meckseper, Talk to Cindy, 2005. Aluminum, Plexiglas, glass, lights, metal display stands, painted toilet plunger, ink jet print mounted on cardboard underwear box, found jewelry, gouache and tape on inkjet print mounted on cardboard, found metal scrubber, found jewelry, glass ball, gouache on plastic sign. Courtesy of Saatchi Gallery.)

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm, curated by Christopher Y. Lew, opens today at Tina Kim Gallery in Manhattan. Artists Robert Booras, Julia Chiang, Amy Elkins, Jeff Feld, Leslie Hewitt, Amy Kao, Marc André Robinson, and Kiki Smith(currently featured in Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection here at the museum) channel the decorative arts into a variety of media for this show, which ends February 21st.

(Kiki Smith, Born, 2002. Lithograph, edition 4 of 28. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund 2003.17)

The Power of Ornament just opened at Belvedere in Vienna. This show covers over one hundred years of the use of ornament in art, from fin-de-siècle Vienna to the present day. Including the work of Adriana Czernin, Carl Otto Czeschka, Parastou Forouhar, Sakshi Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Josef Hoffmann, Aisha Khalid, Gustav Klimt, Brigitte Kowanz, Shirin Neshat, Raimund Pleschberger, Imran Qureshi, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Rashid Rana, Raqib Shaw, Jörn Stoya, Philip Taaffe, and Hema Upadhya, this show will be up until May 17th. If you’re in the area between now and then, be sure to check this one out!

(The Power of Ornament promotional image. Courtesy of Belvedere.)

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!