(Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 1981, Performance at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Photo courtesy of Lorraine O’Grady.)
Young scholars of art history, and fans of performance art alike will be interested to learn that the pioneering performance artist, critic, and feminist scholar Lorraine O’Grady has recently launched a teachable website that showcases both her visual art and extensive writings. O’Grady herself is blogging too! Born in Boston, and educated at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, O’Grady pursued successful careers as a research economist, translator and rock critic for the Village Voice before she began making performance art in 1980, when she performed her most famous persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. O’Grady’s writings about race, gender, and miscegenation, have been published and anthologized widely, and are all accessible or able to be downloaded in pdf format on the site, including her influential essay, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” (1992, 1994). Check it all out here.
(Lorraine O’Grady, after performance of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline at the Feminist Art Institute, NYC. 1981. Courtesy of Lorraine O’Grady.)
Many of you have already discovered the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art page on Facebook, where you can find information about the Center, including details on the current exhibitions Ghada Amer: Love Has No End and Votes for Women, and links to the video from the Guerrilla Girls 2007 Women in the Arts Award Presentation, along with videos and artists’ talks from the Center’s opening weekend last Spring. Also, thanks to Shelley Bernstein, we’ve added some fun interactive applications like feeds to the blog, and events listings on the website, links to the Brooklyn Museum’s Flickr page, and ArtShare, a program that allows fans of the page to view feminist-related artworks in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, including many of the settings from Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Last, but not least, there is a place on the page for fans to share their own links, write reviews, and start threads on the discussion board. Check it out!
Due to crowds on opening weekend, The Dinner Party cell phone tour was inactive to give as many visitors as possible a chance to see installation without too long of a wait.
The tour is now active, so if you are coming to the exhibition, bring your phone! The tour includes commentary from Judy Chicago, various curators, scholars, educators, and others. Using the system is as easy as dialing a telephone number and then selecting the code that corresponds to The Dinner Party component you wish to hear about. The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago Cell Phone Gallery Guide is free of charge.
All the audio on each of the 39 place settings is also available on our Web site.
If you came to the exhibition this weekend, you probably missed our comment kiosk. It’s easily missed behind a shopping rack in the exhibition’s shop ;(
In the next week or so, we will be fixing this situation, but in the meantime, if you saw the show, we’d like to know what you think! Comments can be made right from our Web site.
Linda Nochlin and Maura Reilly, co-curators of the Center’s inaugural exhibition, recorded the introduction to the Global Feminisms audio tour today. This tour, free to our visitors and delivered via cell phone, will feature many of the artists in the exhibition responding to their relationship to feminism.
Cell phone audio has helped us in many ways. One of the nice things about the new production method is that tour stops can be recorded via phone, similar to leaving a standard voice mail message. Since the show consists of work by approximately eighty women artists from around the world, we found this aspect incredibly helpful in producing our tour. We could send questions to many of the artists and ask them to record their answers via phone. We didn’t have to worry about arranging for a studio offsite or asking them to make a special trip to do a recording.
If we can arrange to do the recording onsite, the quality is often more predictable, so we try and take advantage of this when we can. For this session, Maura and Linda also took the opportunity to try out a new shade of MAC Cosmetics lipstick, Plumful.
Shelley Bernstein
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum