Gender and art

Groundbreaking programs and institutions supported Feminism's Second Wave in the 1970s against a calculated system of prejudice and its patriarchal mythologies.

 

Key among the sites: the nation's first Feminist Art Programs at Fresno State College (now CSU, Fresno) and California Institute of the Arts; the Woman's Design Program at CalArts, the "Womanhouse" installation in Hollywood; and the Woman's Building -- initially located near Macarthur Park, later east of Chinatown -- which supported woman's collaboration, education, exhibition, and performance in L.A. for eighteen years.

 

Ill. Anne Gauldin as the Waitress Goddess Diana in "Ready to Order" by the Waitresses, a performance in restaurants in L.A., 1978

“Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work 1963-1974,” at the Brooklyn Museum, looks at the artist’s efforts before her most celebrated work.

"This is the year of Judy Chicago. In honor of her 75th birthday this July, the iconic feminist artist is hosting what she calls a "dispersed retrospective," scattering her life's work -- five decades of art making -- across a selection of museums and galleries from California to New York. In 2014 alone, she'll be featured in the Brooklyn Museum, MANA Contemporary, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Schlesinger Library, the Palmer Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the New Mexico Museum of Art and Denver's RedLine. She's also releasing two major tomes, "Institutional Time" and the aptly titled "The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History."."

Powerhouse meeting, Powerhouse Gallery, Montréal, 1978.

 

Forty years of feminist artistic practice at one of Montréal's oldest artist-run centres, will be commemorated in a special series of artist projects this spring. Jen Leigh Fisher discusses the impact of early feminist strategies on contemporary practice and questions the authority and status of history, the archive, the canon and even anti-canon. The year's 40th programming began with Dayna MacLeod's reperformance of Yoko Ono's 1964 work Cut Piece, continues with projects by Kirsten McCrae, Jenna McLellan, Wednesday Lupypciw, Cynthia Girard, Tanya Mars, k.g guttman, Anne-Marie Proulx, Anne Golden, Monique Moumblow, Noemi McComber, Sonja Zlatanova and many others. The series will culminate in a performative feast in which attendees are invited to come dressed in homage to their favorite feminist artist or artwork for the centre anniversary party on May 30th, 2014.

http://www.lacentrale.org/

 

See more at: http://dpi.studioxx.org/en/no/29-The-Montreal-Issue/marking-four-decades-feminist-art-la-centrale-galerie-powerhouse#sthash.jEJPLZcL.dpuf

 

"This month, a fascinating set of documents was deposited at Sheffield Archives which will be of interest to students of history, politics and art alike - the records of Wildcat Cards.

 

Wildcat Cards was founded in Sep 1988 by the Sheffield-based cartoonist and graphic designer Fi Frances in order to make women's art more accessible to the public via high quality cards promoting images and messages by women for women.  The project related Fi’s skills in graphics and cartooning to the politics of feminism and other radical campaigns which she was involved in."

 

Richard Saltoun Gallery announces a two person exhibition of works by Alexis Hunter and Jo Spence, bringing together important and rarely seen feminist work from the 70s and 80s. Hunter's series of Xeroxes and photographs are displayed alongside a selection of Spence's Phototherapy works. These illustrate Spence's commitment to the therapeutic capabilities of photography, and offered a way to reframe memory through a process of restaging personal experiences. The exhibition is an opportunity to view two artists work that have been hugely influential to the development of feminist art in the UK.

 

 

re.act.feminism #2 is a continually expanding, temporary, and traveling performance archive. Making stops throughout six European countries from 2011 to 2013, it will be coming to Berlin at the Akademie der Künste from June 21 to August 18. Re.act.feminism presents feminist, gendercritical, and queer performance art by over 120 artists and artist collectives spanning from the 1960s to the 1980s, as well as some contemporary positions. The project continually expands by traveling through cities and using local research and cooperation with art institutions and academies. Also contributing to the archive are exhibitions, screenings, performances, and discussions held in each city along the way.

 

http://www.adk.de/

 

 

 

ArtFem.TV is an online television programming presenting Art and Feminism. The aim of ArtFem.TV is to foster Women in the Arts, their art works and projects, to create an international online television screen for the creativity, images and voices of Women.

http://artfem.tv/

https://www.facebook.com/ArtFem.TV

 

Richard Saltoun Gallery announce the second of their two-part series of Viennese art: Feminism.

 

Following on from Part I: Actionism, Richard Saltoun will present the work of Valie Export and Friedl Kubelka. Both artists posited their art at the centre of artistic debates of subjects of gender, the body, and politics. The photographic images and films that result from their practices are presented through the lens of a personal reflective awareness of the body.

 

Viennese Art: Feminism

Valie Export & Friedl Kubelka

10 April - 23 May 2014

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

 

"Until the end of the 2014 Biennale of Sydney in June, Chinese performance artist Yingmei Duan will live in a small forest built inside the Art Gallery of NSW.

 

Visitors – as they have since the start of the Biennale – will have the chance to meet Duan and interact with her as she dispenses wishes and prophecies written on small pieces of paper.

 

And this is only the latest example of renewed interest in performance art that draws on the rich history of feminist art. Indeed, it’s part of a resurgence in performance art that looks a lot like a backlash against the ascendancy of the digital in the 21st century – and like a revitalisation of feminist concerns in contemporary art."

Alexis Hunter. Approach to Fear XIII: Pain - Destruction of Cause, 1977.

 

Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa:

"Te Papa is saddened to hear about the death of London-based New Zealand artist Alexis Hunter on 24 February 2014.

 

Three years after completing her studies at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1969, Hunter relocated to England and established herself in London. She was an active participant in the women’s art movement and her art works in a range of media express a powerfully feminist viewpoint.

 

Hunter continued to exhibit in New Zealand and in 1989 a survey exhibition of her work titled Fears / Dreams / Desires was held at the Auckland City Art Gallery. The exhibition included her photographic series ‘Approach to Fear’ 1976-77, and a selection of painting and prints made between 1981-89. [...]"

The Suzanne Geiss Company presents a selection of Anita Steckel’s works from her Giant Woman  (1970-1973) and New York Landscape (1970-1980) series.

 

Steckel’s large-scale New York Landscape collaged paintings fuse imagery inspired by the human, art historical, and urban bodies. Supine female figures, erect phalluses, dollar bills, the Mona Lisa, and other massive cultural symbols are inserted into the skyline. They sit on skyscrapers, make love, even battle in a humorous take on the city’s fraught, psychosexual sense of identity.

 

Anita Steckel at the Suzanne Gleiss Company until December 13, 2013.

Janet Bloch. Self Portrait as Shakti, 2004.

 

"Full Disclosure:  I am a feminist.  It never crossed my mind that there might be anything problematic about labeling myself this way since I have openly articulated my interests in gender issues and social, political, and economic equality since my early undergraduate days.  Of course, I knew that researchers had shown women today often reject the term “feminist” (McRobbie 2004; Rowe-Finkbeiner 2004; Levy 2006). However, I somehow had convinced myself that these individuals were just not informed.  I truly believed that if men and women could critically examined the social construction of gender, see the ways in which gendered notions impact their lives, and take the time to critique these forces there could be greater understanding, acceptance, and embracement of feminist politics.

 

Last fall I found myself working on a project on women’s art.  I met with several female artists whose work examined, questioned, and challenged cultural gender expectations.  What I found utterly shocked me; within the art world, there are a number of female artists that use art as a vehicle to challenge gender inequality but are cautious, hesitant, or dismissive of being labeled as “feminist artists.” I found that many female artists believe that term “feminism” is so deeply connected to a stigmatized social movement that strongly reject the label even while creating feminist art."

Roxy Farhat, Housekeeping 2009, video still

 

"The Exhibition is the first broad presentation of an actively feministic art scene in Scandinavia. Over 40 artists from Denmark, Sweden and Norway are represented through a selection of works ranging from sculptures, photos and installations to videos, live performances, books, archives, activism and teaching. [...]

 

With great seriousness and much humour, the exhibition challenges our assumptions about gender, roles, stereotypes, power, minorities, culture, history, and rights. With this exhibition, we aim to shed light on the development of feminism and feminist art in general, but also seek to portray the conditions, aspirations and rights of women in our own era.

 

 

The Beginning Is Always Today. Contemporary Feminist Art in Scandinavia

21 September 2013 - January 2014

SKMU - Sorlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand, Norway

http://skmu.no/english/bottom-slider/the-beginning-is-always-today-feminist-art-in-scandinavia-from-1990-till-today/

 

 

 

Marianne Wex, Let's take back our space

 

"The exhibition The Second Sex – a visual footnote is a visual essay inspired by the book of the same name by French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, whose existentialist take on many of the issues of feminism first emerged with the publication of Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949. [...]

The Second Sex – a visual footnote presents installations by three woman artists spanning a variety of media, from film, sculpture, and photography to collage. Originating in the 1970s, Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Marianne Wex and Ilene Segalove’s work can be considered a visual articulation of the intrinsic ideas of second-wave feminism. Launched during the late 1960s, critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, the woman’s role as wife and mother as well as the relations between race, class, and gender oppression were major topics. Active until the present day however, the concepts in the artists work selected for The Second Sex – a visual footnote also relate to a more inclusive third-wave feminism, which began in the mid-1990s and deconstructed notions of the body, gender, sexuality and hetero-normativity."

 

The Second Sex - a visual footnote

May 25–July 13, 2013

La Galerie, Contemporary Art Centre, Noisy-le-Sec, France

https://www.facebook.com/pages/La-Galerie-Centre-dart-contemporain/207850822591156?ref=hl 

 

Further reading:

http://moussemagazine.it/the-second-sex-noisy-le-sac/