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.) 

Curator Maura Reilly installing Nayland Blake’s Untitled, 2003 in the galleries of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art with Supervising Maintainer Filippo Gentile, and Art Handler, Jason Grunwald.

New York-based artist and Nayland Blake is without a doubt one of the most compelling artists of his generation, but rarely is his work ever placed in a feminist context. In Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection curators Maura Reilly and Nicole Caruth did just that! By situating Blake’s Untitled, 2003, alongside artworks by renowned artists associated with the 1970s feminist art movement, including Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta, the curators were hoping to suggest that feminist art is not limited to a particular appearance or definition.

I had a chance to talk briefly with Maura Reilly, founding curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and curator of the exhibition Nayland Blake: Behavior, currently on view at Location One through February 14, 2009, to discuss Blake’s work. What follows is a brief segment from our conversation together!

Sarah Giovanniello: Why did you and Nicole choose to include Nayland Blake’s Untitled, 2003, in the exhibition Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection?

Maura Reilly: Untitled, 2003 is an outstanding example of the artist’s longstanding interest in the theme of the bunny–a subject that emerged in Blake’s work in the early 1990s and one that resonates with multiple connotations. Blake’s “bunnies” reference complex personal and social narratives about gender, sexual identity, and the artist’s own mixed race heritage. By stitching together the bunny costume out of fabric, a gesture to traditions of Women’s Work and craft, the piece is basically a manifestation of the artist’s take on the complications of gender and masculinity. Subsequently, the vision of the bunny hanging limp and flaccid along a wire cable in the corner of the gallery adds another dimension to this haunting effect. Inscribed on the fabric of the costume are the words “Damirifa, Due, Due!” (Great One, be comforted), a phrase that is used in Ghana as part of West African burial tradition. Blake has explained to me that the bunny also references “Brer Rabbit,” the African American folk hero of the Uncle Remus tales, a character that he uses to explore the complexities of his own biracial mix of African and European heritage.

Untitled, 2003 sits in its storage box awaiting installation.

SG: Why might Nayland Blake’s work fit in to an exhibition about feminism and feminist art?

MR: The artist has mentioned to me that one of the first art experiences to make an impact on him was an installation that was up at the Museum of Modern Art by Nikki deSaint Phalle, who is a very respected artist and feminist. In fact, one of his most famous pieces, The Big One, 2003, a large bunny that resembles the smaller one on view is, in his own words, “directly indebted to [Saint Phalle’s] hybrid of environment and sculpture, and that my body of work, like the work of a number of queer men of my generation, draws two crucial things from the feminist work of the 1970’s: the permission to articulate intimate autobiography as part of a broader social critique, and the understanding that materials and processes can be read as gendered and not as simply neutral entities. I count Lynda Benglis as one of my influences because she made it clear that there wasn’t simply a monolithic abstraction or formalism, but that there are many formalisms and abstractions, and that they have differing political positions. In the early Eighties, when I was attempting to find a way to work that both bore witness to the truth of my sexuality and to my formal training, it was to those notions that I turned.”

This quotation may come off sounding very scholarly, because Blake is himself a curator and an academic, but I think it really upholds one of the key goals of our show, which is to demonstrate that the history of feminist art is and continues to be an ongoing conversation between the past and the present, and one that is always yielding new interpretations.

Nayland Blake Heavenly Bunny Suit, nylon with metal armature, 1994. Courtesy of Location One.

Thanks for the amazing commentary Maura!! Nayland Blake performs a restaging of his well-known 1998 performance piece “Gorge” at Location One tonight! “Gorge” is an hour-long performance during which the artist sits shirtless in front of a table of food, and invites the audience to feed him. Later, Eileen Myles, Brina Thurston, Chris Cochrane, and Lauren Siberman share short performances in response to Blake’s work.

Nayland Blake: Behavior, a 25-year survey of the artist’s work, curated by Maura Reilly, is on view at Location One through February 14, 2009. Check out the artist’s sculpture Untitled, 2003 on view in Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection through April 5th (video from the exhibition below).