Community: feminist.bloggers@brooklynmuseum

From a conversation with actor George Takei (Star Trek’s Captain Sulu) and his husband, to a discussion about love with a pair of sword swallowers, Kick My Hearts Ass: Short Films About Love, investigates the trials of love and heartbreak. Curated by Davy Rothbart, this exhibition opens February 11th at Apex Art.

(Kick My Heart’s Ass: Short Films About Love exhibition announcement. Courtesy of Apex Art.)

“Miss Taxi”, a three-channel video and photography installation by artist Cecilia Jurado, is currently featured as part of QUEENS INTERNATIONAL 4, the Queens Museum Biennale. This latest project from Jurado shows images and footage from a beauty pageant held each year in Queens for relatives of taxi workers. This exhibition will be on view until April 26th.

(Cecilia Jurado, Film still from “Miss Taxi”. Courtesy of Y Gallery.)

Our City Dreams, a new documentary by Chiara Clemente, documents the lives of five feminist artists- Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, and Nancy Spero- and is now playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan. Check it out, the last day to see it is February 17th!

(Promotional image for Our City Dreams. Courtesy of the Film Forum.)

IMMATERIAL is in its last week at Black and White Gallery in Chelsea. This show includes artists Kaoru Hirano, Tamara Kostianovsky, Kristian Kozul, Derick Melander, Jason Clay Lewis, Adam Niklewicz, Shimon Okshteyn, and Jean Shin, as well as artist Orly Cogan, whose site specific thread wall drawing, Quantum Entanglement, explores the trappings of womanhood. This show closes February 14th.

(Installation view of Quantum Entanglement, photo by Alessandra Okshteyn. Courtesy of Black and White Gallery.)

The Mood Back Home: An exhibition inspired by Womanhouse opens at Momenta Art in Williamsburg this Friday February 13. Womanhouse was a women-only art installation and performance at a 17 room mansion in 1970s Hollywood, California. Organized by feminist artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, Womanhouse used the various rooms of the building to explore household activities and spaces that had been viewed as exclusive to women. The work of Alyson Aliano, Pam Butler, Leslie Brack, Nicole Eisenman, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Karen Leo, Karyn Olivier, Tara Mateik, Bea Romeo, Suzy Spence, Kirsten Stoltmann, Jeanne Tremel, and Pinar Yolacan, as well as Johanna Demetrakas’s film Womanhouse, 1972, will be featured in this show.

(Leslie Brack, Presenting Three New Lively Ones, oil on canvas, 6″ x 8″, 2008. Courtesy of the Artist.)

Nayland Blake: Behavior, curated by our very own Maura Reilly, is in its last week at Location One in Manhattan. Head over to this great show before it closes February 14th!

(Nayland Blake, Magic, 1991. Courtesy of Location One.)

In honor of International Woman’s Day (March 8th), The Clark Museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts, will be opening Special Installation: Women’s Work on February 21st. The exhibition will feature works on paper from the collection by such trailblazers as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Berenice Abbott.

(Julia Margaret Cameron, The Red and White Roses, 1865. Albumen print. Courtesy of Scottish National Photography Centre.)

Life Has Not Even Begun, a new exhibition featuring the work of artist María Magdelena Campos-Pons, opened recently at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery in Chicago. In this new body of work, Campos-Pons uses a wide variety of media to investigate how history and memory inform identity. This show will be up until March 6th, so if you are in the area, check it out!

(Postcard Image: María Magdelena Campos-Pons, Prayer for Obama I (detail), 2008, Polaroid prints. Photo by Clements/Howcroft. Courtesy of Columbia College Glass Curtain Gallery.)

Tonight, February 10th, CUNY’s Graduate Center is holding a LGBTQ studies panel on queer South Asian art. Tell Me a Story…, presented by SAWCC (South Asian Women’s Creative Collective) and CLAGS (The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies), will feature filmmaker/photographer Sonali Gulati, visual artist Chitra Ganesh, performance artist D’Lo, as well as DJ/promoter, Desilicious.

(Sonali Gulati, Film still from Out and About, to be released in 2010. Courtesy of the artist.)

Carolee Schneemann: Painting, What it Became opens Saturday, February 21st at P.P.O.W. in Chelsea. Curated by our very own Maura Reilly, this exhibition explores how Schneeman’s work in a variety of mediums (including performance) remain true to her pictorial, painterly approach to art. This show will be up until March 28th - don’t miss the opening reception this Saturday from 6-8pm!

(Carolee Schneeman, Meat Joy, 1964, gelatin silver print, 23 3/4 x 20 1/4 inches. Courtesy P.P.O.W.) 

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!

This weekend at the museum, Professor Elinor Gadon will be speaking about goddesses and her new book The Once and Future Goddess. This event is in conjunction with The Fertile Goddess, currently up in the Herstory Gallery. For more information, click here.

(Female Figurine. Provenance not known; type known from Cyprus. Late Bronze Age, Late Cypriot II, circa 1450–1200 B.C.E. Terracotta, pigment, 3 x 2 x 2 in.)

Kate Gilmore’s solo exhibition is in it’s last week at the Smith-Stewart Gallery in Manhattan. Gilmore uses an extreme physicality in her video art, kicking down drywall in high heels and donning a fluorescent pink bow as she smashes furniture with sledgehammers. An installation accompanies her three most recent videos in this show, which will be up until January 18th.

(Kate Gilmore, Down the House, 2008, single channel video, 17 min. 6 sec. Courtesy of Smith-Stewart.)

Re:Production opens today at Three Walls in Chicago. Featuring the work of artist Christa Donner, this exhibition re-imagines the human reproductive system via a wall installation, drawings and a zine. Donner will be giving an artist talk at the gallery on January 29th, before the show closes February 13th.

(Christa Donner, Image from Re:Production. Courtesy of Three-Walls.)

Another Chicago exhibition of interest is Girlfriends, Lovers, Still Lifes and Landscape, featuring artist Mickalene Thomas. Closing Saturday at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, this show uses rhinestones and patterning to explore the Harlem Renaissance and 1960s aesthetics.

(Mickalene Thomas, Image from Girlfriends, Lovers, Still Lifes and Landscape, Courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery)

Un Coup de Dent just opened at Galerie Lelong in Manhattan. Feminist artist Nancy Spero’s so-called “Black Paintings” from the late fifties and early sixties are featured in this show, which will be up until February 21st.

(Nancy Spero, Mother and Children (2), 1956. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong.)

Erik Alos - Lauren Bergman - James Naccarato, just opened at the Cory Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. Lauren Bergman’s feminist take on pop surrealism at times takes the form of prancing housewives, synchronized swimmers, and hyena’s munching on babydolls. This show will be up until January 20th.

(Lauren Bergman, This is the Life, acrylic and litho coal on gessoed paper, 30″ x 22″. Courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery.)

Cindy Sherman, the incomparable feminist photographer will be honored tomorrow as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s annual Women in the Arts Luncheon! Sherman’s work was invaluable to the feminist art movement in the late seventies, forcing viewers to consider the significance of “the gaze” in Western culture. Through the use of costumes and role-play in her self-portraiture, Sherman helped to redefine the notion of gender as something performed rather than innate. Women in the Arts 2008 will celebrate her contributions to feminist art during the awards presentation tomorrow, followed by a reception and luncheon.

This event coincides with the current exhibition here at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection, which includes Sherman’s Untitled (detail), 1975/2004, an early photograph that precludes Sherman’s famous Untitled Film Stills series by two years and references the gender bending, surrealist photographer Claude Cahun. For information on Women in the Arts 2008, click here.

(Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954). Untitled (detail), 1975/2004. C-print. Printer Charles Griffin, Inc. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Linda S. Ferber, 2005.10. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.)