feminist art – Page 7

July 14, 2023May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby

Opinion

Left: Pablo Picasso, 1920. © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Hannah Gadsby, 2018. (Photo: Alan Moyle). — Left: Pablo Picasso, 1920. @2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Hannah Gadsby, 2018. (Photo: Alan Moyle).

In our current era where historical and critical thinking are on the wane, one can’t complain about a show being ahistorical, but one can be faulted for lacking a cogent dialogue. Consequently, though mashing things together can produce interesting results, the parts must communicate with one another in a meaningful manner. Problematically, the exhibit, It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby at the Brooklyn Museum resembles Gadsby’s stand-up comedy routine—it rambles from subject to subject, and in this case, its cohesion relies on the audience’s attempt to understand how it is all connected to the red-herring Picasso. Considering Gadsby has been put in the position of playing auteur in a medium she is unaccustomed to, one which is visual and not language-based, it might have been a more interesting exercise in a post-way of thinking to present solely the exhibition’s wall texts, or conversely just the works themselves without commentary rather than clinging to the conventions of theme based exhibitions.

July 3, 2023June 30, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

Warding Off Bitterness

Laurie Simmons Woman with Chalk Line 1976 © Laurie Simmons

Last year, I watched a TikTok video where Kiersten Lyons, an actor, was hilariously recounting all her many misfortunes in love and career. Her whole video read like a voyage of self-discovery through rejection, a tale familiar to anyone pursuing a creative life. It was part of a trend on the app that encouraged creators to pair their comeback stories with a gospel song: In the Sanctuary by the Kurt Carr Singers. In the Sanctuary is one of those songs that seems to end, but then a few moments later, starts up again. And this plays out over and over, to almost comic effect, until you don’t know if it will ever end. And it really struck me as an analogy that could be widely applied to all the arts.

May 1, 2023April 15, 2023, by Amy Talluto

Whisperings from the Wormhole with @talluts

Art Made in Kitchens

A group of people holding flags

Description automatically generated with low confidence — Luchita Hurtado Encounter, 1971, ©Luchita Hurtado

“There’s always time to do what you really want. When I had children, I worked when everybody went to bed, after 11pm. I would set up at the kitchen table and clean it very well before I would start.”

–Luchita Hurtado

Remember in the darkest, most locked down days of the pandemic, when all of us were stuck within our own walls, and many of us had kids at home too? And we found ourselves having to resort to making work at the kitchen table in between the cracks of work and school. Well, it got me thinking that this was nothing new to the history of making art: a history that wants us to think that its entire timeline is full of swaggering guys in big New York City lofts, hands-on-chins, undistracted by life’s mundanity. But, in fact, the reality of being an artist is rife with personal stories of people who had to make it work. They, like us, squeezed making art in between the oven timer and the kids’ nap, or in between the hours of a demoralizing 9-5. And quite frankly, those artists that find a way to eke through those tough years of limited space and time are the artists that have the swagger that impresses me the most.

March 28, 2023March 28, 2023, by Art Spiel

Nancy Bowen: Sometimes a Body is Not Just a Body at WCC Art Gallery

Featured Artist

Nancy Bowen with “Third Eye” and “Throat” from Chakra Series, 2009, mixed media on paper, photo by Lindsay Walt

What links Nancy Bowen’s work at Westchester Community College Art Gallery—from abstract to narrative work—is the presence of the female body in some form. “I will always be compelled to create work from a feminist point of view, work that needles or asks questions, and given our current political and social climate, that seems even more necessary than ever,” Bowen says. The show runs through April 12th, 2023.

March 22, 2023March 21, 2023, by Art Spiel

Gabriela Vainsencher: Epic, Heroic, Ordinary at Asya Geisberg

featured artist

Gabriela Vainsencher with “Epic, Heroic, Ordinary” at Asya Geisberg gallery, March 2023

In her solo exhibition at Asya Geisberg Gallery Gabriela Vainsencher exhibits wall hanging porcelain reliefs, referencing the nuts and bolts of motherhood entangled in layers of epic mythological context—Medusa reveals a worried woman with a frying pan and a baby’s pacifier as weapons at hand. The show runs through April 8^th, 2023.

December 20, 2022December 20, 2022, by Art Spiel

Saba Farhoudnia: Reflection at Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning

In conversation with Adèle Eisenstein and Saba Farhoudnia

A picture containing text, scene, gallery, room

Description automatically generated — *No Signal,* 2022, acrylic on acrylic mirror sheet, 7 panels, 48×16” ea., 48×112”. Photo: Farzan Ghasemi

Reflection, the solo show of Saba Farhoudnia in Jamaica Center for Art & Learning, highlights the cruel and tragic practice of so-called “honor” killing, by way of individual stories which give the victims their voice back, and shed a light on this reality for far too many women, girls and LGBTQ+ (taking at least 5000 lives annually per the United Nations Population Fund). The ensemble of individual panels and stories welcomes the visitor into a colorful and intriguing landscapes. Adèle Eisenstein, the curator of the show, says that the layers of paint reveal a reflective surface, which delivers a direct message to the observer—this might have been you. While dishonor killing is the most extreme end of the spectrum, the subject addressed also touches upon and exposes stratified layers of gender-based violence.

December 14, 2022December 12, 2022, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Mary Ann Unger: To Shape a Moon from Bone at WCMA

A picture containing indoor, wall, floor, room

Description automatically generated — Installation view of Mary Ann Unger, WCMA

Power. Power, not bravado, not ego, but the power of intelligence, skill, fortitude, and vision is what Mary Ann Unger possessed and that is what is on exhibition at Williams College Museum of Art (referred to as WCMA). Throughout her life she defied limitations frequently imposed overtly and subconsciously on women. Attending Mt Holyoke College in the mid-60s, she studied biochemistry when few women were found in science departments, then transferred to studio art taking up welding, casting and carving. This was not the typical route for women during the mid-to late 60s. She traveled on her own to North Africa and this journey greatly influenced her work. Returning to New York she completed an MFA at Columbia and launched her career as a post minimalist sculptor, finding herself in the minority amongst a sea of men.

November 14, 2022December 6, 2024, by Sally Brown

Feminist Connect

Curator Sally Brown in conversation with artists Marie Bergstedt, Amy Chaiklin and Laurence de Valmy

In conversation with the artists

A picture containing text, fabric

Description automatically generated — Marie Bergstedt: *Fading*, Hand embroidery on cotton fabric, 2017, 22”H x20”W x 1.25”D

Marie Bergstedt, Amy Chaiklin and Laurence de Valmy were featured artists in Feminist Connect, on view at Charles Adam Studio Project in Lubbock, Texas, in March, 2022 and as part of a larger online exhibition by the same name, running through February 2023. The artists Bergstedt (fabric), Chaiklin (drawing/painting) and deValmy (painting) discuss their processes, concepts and relations with the co-curator, Sally Brown, expanding on the discussion the exhibition provokes around the feminist lineage of art.

November 7, 2022December 30, 2022, by Saul Ostrow

Emily Mae Smith: Heretic Lace at Petzel

Emily Mae Smith, Heretic Lace, 2019, Oil on linen, 48×37 inches

Walt Disney has taught us that cartoons can be used to distract us while conveying the most serious of subjects. Understanding this Emily Mae Smith in 2014, introduced into her developing iconography an anthropomorphized, androgynist broom consisting of a featureless phallic shaft attached to a twig brush. This broom, a descendant of the demonic mops portrayed in sorcerer’s apprentice section of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), has become a signature image in her work. Joined with icons associated with desire and fear, Smith has used this figure as both a male and female trope, as well as an alter-ego. To greater and lesser degrees Smith uses her glossary of icons in some cases to engage in heady meditations on such topics as death, vanity, desire, history, etc. and at other times to enigmatically introduce such subjects with little or no commentary.

September 2, 2022November 2, 2022, by Anna Mikaela Ekstrand

Lesley Bodzy’s Sculptural ‘Paint Skins’

Lesley Bodzy. *I knew better*, acrylic, 66” x 34” x 15”, 2022. All photographs are courtesy of the artist.

Wall sculptures by Lesley Bodzy will be on view during Armory Week 2022 at SPRING/BREAK in Leftover and Over curated by Giovanni Aloi and Erica Criss. Anna Mikaela Ekstrand interviewed the California-born Houston and New York City-based artist about her evolving practice.