Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950 – 2000
San Jose Museum of Art
June 1 - November 3, 2002
Parallels and Intersections, which will occupy the entire Museum when it is fully installed, is divided into two parts and will be opened and closed in two phases.
Part I: Media-based Works and Performance
June 1 - October 13, 2002
Part II: Painting, Sculpture and Mixed Media
June 22 - November 3, 2002
Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950 – 2000 documents a compelling range of work produced by more than 90 women artists working in California during the last half of the 20th Century. It is the first survey exhibition to highlight the historical implications of the period and includes a range of artists diverse in age, background, and formal training. According to Guest Curator Diana Fuller, a Bay Area-based independent curator, the overarching objective of the exhibition is the consideration of the vast socio-political changes of the post-World War II era in California and how they affected these women artists and their art. “Parallels” refers to historical and separate realities experienced by each woman within the California context; “Intersections” refers to the points of contact found in the themes, issues and artmaking practices of the individual artists.
Due to its proximity to the Pacific Basin and Latin America, California epitomized the new frontier that emerged after World War II — it became a gateway to waves of immigrants that affected many aspects of life. The radical activism that resulted from these post-war conditions and subsequent technological advances, empowered such artists as Eleanor Antin, Ruth Asawa, Judy Baca, Joan Brown, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Jay DeFeo, Kim Dingle, Helen Mayer Harrison, Mildred Howard, Hung Liu, Catherine Opie, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alexis Smith, Diana Thater, Patssi Valdez, and Kara Walker, among others, who are represented in the exhibition.
Part I: Media-based Works and Performance
During the late 60s and early 70s, the art world, like the world at large, was in a state of flux. Process art, earthworks, happenings, performance and conceptual art all challenged the hegemony of modernism in the visual arts while feminism, student uprisings, the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement attacked the political status quo. Women were becoming more vocal, and women artists more visible, as they began to create and claim images of themselves that challenged traditional stereotypes.
It was also during this time period, that artists began to investigate the art making potential of new electronic and telecommunications technologies: video, fax, computers, lasers, holograms, xerography and satellite transmission. In California, home to Lockheed, Xerox Parc, the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, new technologies originally developed for defense and aerospace were starting to find their way into everyday life. Concurrently, women artists were eager to access the knowledge and facilities housed in these venerated (and predominantly male) bastions of invention and innovation.
The works presented in Part I reflect the impact of a direct engagement with technology by some of California's most inventive and adventurous women artists. They range from pioneering works by Sharon Grace, Theresa Hak Kyung-Cha, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Sherrie Rabinowitz, using early video, surveillance, image synthesizing, satellite transmission, video phone and interactive laser disc technology to contemporary works by Cindy Bernard Rebeca Bollinger, Margaret Crane, Sharon Lockhart, Jennifer Steinkamp, Christine Tamblyn, and Victoria Vesna, who use more recent technologies such as digital and computer-generated imagery, projection and the Internet. Women artists in California also had an exceptional influence on both performance and single channel video art. The exhibition includes video documentation of performances by seminal performance artists such as Nancy Buchanan, Nao Bustamente, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara McCullough, Linda Montano, Rachel Rosenthal, and Barbara Smith, and, as well as historic, single channel video works from the 1970s and 80s. Newer video works by Jeanne Finley, Tran T. Kim-Trang and Meena Nanji will also be on view.
Part II: Painting, Sculpture and Mixed Media
Part II of the exhibition focuses on painting, sculpture, and mixed media. It includes seminal works by artists such as Ruth Asawa, whose intricate woven wire shapes, created in the 1950s, reconcile aspects of nature and geometry. Also on view will be works from the late 1950s and early 1960s by such early trailblazers as Vija Celmins, Karen Carson, Jay DeFeo, Mary Lovelace O’Neil, and Deborah Remington, all of whom broke the prevailing mold of male-dominated and accepted formalist theories. Fueled by the political turmoil of the late 1960s, these pioneering artists were followed by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who together founded the Feminist Art Program at the Los Angeles-based California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. Chicago subsequently created the highly publicized collaborative installation titled The Dinner Party (1970s), which is documented in the exhibition, and pattern and decoration painter Miriam Schapiro countered dismissive criticism by incorporating blatantly feminine icons into her work. The forces of feminism within the California art scene elevated the importance of content in a work of art over the prevailing interest in abstraction. New styles and strategies put personal experience at the core: painter Joan Brown introduced the personal and figurative into her rich abstractions. Yolanda Lopez and Judy Dater explored issues of personal and collective identity.
The 1980s proved to be rich in ideas and further aesthetic exploration. The interpretation of memory and experience through narrative themes, cultural mythology, and folk/craft elements were reactivated by women such as painters Hung Liu and Faith Ringgold, photographer Linda Connor, and mixed media artists Mildred Howard, Betye Saar, and Amalia Mesa-Bains. In San Francisco, the historic Las Mujeres Muralistas collective brought muralmaking to a new prominence and in Los Angeles Judy Baca developed the “Great Wall” project. Artists like Ester Hernandez, Irene Perez, and Jean LaMarr produced politically charged printed images. The late 1980s and 1990s brought a wide range of works that include the lyrical minimalist abstractions of Anne Appleby and Ingrid Calame’s stain abstractions that document time. Countering these approaches, the 1990s also gave rise to aggressively confrontational works such Kara Walker’s wall installations, which expose racial stereotypes, and Catherine Opie’s photographs that address issues of sexual identity and marginalization.
The exhibition tracks a new and still expanding artistic vocabulary developed by women over the last 50 years. According to Diana Fuller, Parallels and Intersections gives a context to this vocabulary and recognizes the artists whose work served as landmarks representing the individual strands of self discovery that are integral to a more accurate profile of California today.
A 350-page book with full-color reproductions, Art/Women/California, 1950 — 2000: Parallels and Intersections, accompanies the exhibition and is published by the University of California Press in association with SJMA. The publication includes essays by Angela Davis, Whitney Chadwick, Rosa Fregoso, Jennifer Gonzalez, Karin Higa, Phyllis Jackson, Amelia Jones, Pamela Lee, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Joline Rickard, Tere Romo, Moira Roth, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Judith Wilson, and others.
SJMA - SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
110 South Market Street, San Jose, CA 95113
