The Guerrilla Girls Talk Back - NMWA, Washington DC

The Guerrilla Girls Talk Back 

National Museum of Women in the Arts - NMWA, Washington DC 

Through October 2, 2011 

GUERRILLA GIRLS

Guerrilla Girls (active1985- )

Untitled, 1986 

From the series “Guerilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years,” 1985-1990 

Color photolithograph on paper - 17 x 22 in. 

Courtesy National Museum of Women in the Arts,

Gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore,

in honor of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay 

The Guerrilla Girls Talk Back is an exhibition featuring more than 70 works by the gorilla-masked crusaders, including posters, newsletters, stickers and erasers. The Guerrilla Girls Talk Back is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts –NMWA– in Washington DC since June 17, through October 2, 2011. 

The Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous artist-activists, critique the sexism and racism pervading contemporary culture. Through their populist art production, the group raises awareness about discrimination. 

GUERRILLA GIRLS

Guerrilla Girls (active1985- )

Hormone Imbalance. Melanin deficiency, 1993

From the series “Guerilla Girls Talk Back: Portfolio 2” 

Photolithograph on paper - 17 x 11 in. 

Courtesy National Museum of Women in the Arts,

Gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore,

in honor of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay 

Drawn primarily from NMWA’s collection, the exhibition presents posters from two portfolios, Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: The First Five Years, 1985-1990 and Guerrilla Girls Talk Back: Portfolio 2, both donated to the museum by Baltimore-based collector Steven Scott.

The first Guerrilla Girls posters appeared in 1985, pasted onto structures in lower Manhattan. Combining bold advertising-style graphics with eye-opening facts and figures, the posters detailed discrimination by the city’s art galleries against women artists and artists of color. Since then, the group has produced scores of posters, billboards, and books to promote inclusiveness in the cultural and political realms.

GUERRILLA GIRLS

Guerrilla Girls (active1985- )

Erase Discrimination, 1999

Pink rubber with ink screenprint

1 1/8 x 2 1/2 x 1/4 in. each 

Collection of the Akron Museum of Art 

Photo: Courtesy Akron Art Museum 

Humor is a vital part of the Guerrilla Girls’s art, making the serious messages of their works accessible and engaging. In addition to the wry texts in their printed materials, members of the group wear gorilla masks that protect their anonymity during the lectures and actions/protests that they present worldwide. The group produces their works in quantity to reach a broad audience. Over the years, the Guerrilla Girls have broadened their range of targets for critique to include sexism and racism in Hollywood and the mass media; art censorship; government corruption and apathy; and the battle for reproductive rights.

GUERRILLA GIRLS

Guerrilla Girls (active1985- ) 

Horror on the National Mall!, 2007 

Color photolithograph on paper 

23 x 13 in. 

Courtesy National Museum of Women in the Arts,

Gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore,

in honor of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay

National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) 

Washington, DC 

www.nmwa.org

Judy Chicago at NMWA, Washington DC - National Museum of Woman in the Arts

Judy Chicago
National Museum of Woman in the Arts, Washington DC
October 11, 2002 - January 5, 2003

Judy Chicago, one of America’s artistic trailblazers and a pioneer of the feminist art movement, is the subject of an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). The exhibition features over 90 works from the 1960s to the present, and includes selections from Judy Chicago’s best-known work as well as rarely seen early and recent autobiographical pieces.

Judy Chicago’s monumental installation The Dinner Party (1979), a symbolic history of women in Western civilization in visual and textual form, has become an icon of the 20th century. Her two autobiographies, Through the Flower and Beyond the Flower, have been sold around the world. The NMWA exhibition provides an overview of the artist’s career in the following sections: Early California Years, 1964-71; Breakthrough Years, 1972-75; The Dinner Party, 1974-79; Birth Project, 1980-85; Powerplay, 1983-86; Holocaust Project, 1985-93; and The End of the Century, 1993-2000.

At a time when women artists had very few role models and even fewer opportunities for recognition and success, Judy Chicago looked to her female forebears for inspiration and began to explore identity and other issues from a woman’s perspective. She established the first feminist art program in 1970 at Fresno State College in California. In 1972 she collaborated with Miriam Schapiro under the sponsorship of Cal Arts on the groundbreaking art/performance space Womanhouse, continuing to generate a great deal of debate with her art and activist stance. Judy Chicago’s art also underwent a transformation at this time as her early paintings and sculptures gave way in the late 1960s to large spray-painted canvases of centered geometric forms —works celebrating women’s spirit, power, and generative strength.

With The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago distinguished herself further as an artist determined to change the way women, and women artists in particular, are remembered and regarded. Going against traditional societal taboos in choosing the vulva as her main symbolic image, Judy Chicago also rejected art hierarchies by working with craft as well as fine arts, and foregrounded the idea of artistic collaboration rather than lone artistic genius. The Dinner Party solidified Judy Chicago’s place as a feminist and has become an icon of feminist art.

Her next large work, Birth Project, celebrates women’s role as the giver of life, with 150 needleworkers showcasing once again Judy Chicago’s collaborative interests. The Powerplay series explores the distortion that power has when it dominates men's lives and its wrenching emotional effects on both sexes. In the Holocaust Project, Judy Chicago worked with her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, to use the Holocaust as a point of departure in addressing the suffering of all victims of genocide. Autobiographical and recent work reveals the emotions of the artist at different points in her career, and includes her recent Song of Songs (1998).

Judy Chicago is presented at NMWA through the generous sponsorship of The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. The foundation seeks to raise awareness of the contributions of women in all areas of art and culture with specific focus on feminist art. According to Elizabeth A. Sackler, "This exhibition is a glimpse of the breadth and range of Judy Chicago’s oeuvre, her groundbreaking contributions to the world of art and to women. She has fought the status quo with the same single-minded tenacity, resilience, and gumption with which she has conducted her life and forged her life’s work."

The exhibition’s consulting curators are John Bullard, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Viki Wylder, curator of education at Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts. Liaison curator is NMWA Chief Curator Susan Fisher Sterling. An accompanying book, Judy Chicago, with more than 100 full-color illustrations will be available in NMWA’s museum shop. Spanning four decades of Chicago’s work, the book features an interview with the artist by renowned feminist art critic and historian Lucy R. Lippard and biographical text by Wylder.

Coinciding with NMWA’s exhibition, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party will be exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art from September 20, 2002 through February 9, 2003. This gift to the Brooklyn Museum of Art from The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation will be permanently installed in 2004.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS
1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington DC
www.nmwa.org

Updated 05.07.2019

Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, NMWA, Washington DC - National Museum of Woman in the Arts

Berenice Abbott: Changing New York 
National Museum of Woman in the Arts, Washington DC
October 22, 1998 - January 19, 1999

To put it mildly, I have and have had a fantastic passion
for New York, photographically speaking.
Berenice Abbott

Changing New York is photographer Berenice Abbott’s extraordinary documentation of New York from 1935 to 1939, when the city lost its 19th-century trappings to skyscrapers that would transform the skyline. From Oct. 22, 1998 through Jan. 19, 1999, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) exhibits 126 of the 305 unique vintage prints produced by Berenice Abbott for the project, many on display for the first time.

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) arrived in New York as an aspiring sculptor from her native Ohio in 1918, then joined the expatriate exodus of artists to Paris in 1921. She began work in photographer Man Ray’s studio, beginning as a darkroom assistant and building a reputation as a portraitist of the cultural elite that rivaled his. Berenice Abbott found her aesthetic muse in Eugene Atget, and rescued his photographs documenting the streets of Paris. When she returned to New York in January 1929 to locate a publisher for a book of Eugene Atget’s photographs, Berenice Abbott was inspired by the change: "The new things that had cropped up in eight years, the sights of the city, the human gesture here sent me mad with joy and I decided to come back to America for good."

In 1935, with the patronage of the Museum of the City of New York, Berenice Abbott received funding from the Federal Arts Project that allowed her to work for the next four years creating her masterpiece, Changing New York. She concentrated not only on new skyscrapers and mass transit but also on subjects that were disappearing because of these changes. Although people are represented, architecture is the principal subject. Berenice Abbott and an assistant transported 60 pounds of camera equipment through the city streets of New York, including a large view camera with negatives measuring 8-by-10 inches, the same size as the prints.

As the project progressed, Berenice Abbott developed a more daring, experimental style, and she returned to some sites, such as the Flatiron Building, with new compositional ideas. She exposed the last negative for Changing New York in November 1938; due to financial and bureaucratic difficulties she never finished her master plan. Because of its support of Berenice Abbott’s work, the Museum of the City of New York received a unique set of mounted prints, as well as the project’s negatives, proofs, and research files.

The prints selected for this exhibition are arranged in eight geographical sections, mirroring Berenice Abbott’s approach to her subject: Wall Street, Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Lower West Side, Middle West Side, Middle East Side, North of 59th Street, and Outer Boroughs. More than half of the project depicts sites in lower Manhattan, more due to historical importance than artistic preference.

Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York, 1935-1939 was organized by the Museum of the City of New York. It is curated by Bonnie Yochelson, consulting curator at MCNY, who will lecture at NMWA on Nov. 3 at 7 p.m. Yochelson is also the author of Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, the Complete WPA Project (The New Press), the first comprehensive catalogue of MCNY’s Abbott collection, available in NMWA’s museum shop in hardcover ($60). 

Funding for the exhibition and the accompanying book has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Furthermore Division of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and Commerce Graphics, Ltd, Inc. Presentation at NMWA is generously supported by the Women’s Committee and the Members’ Exhibition Fund.

The exhibition will travel to der Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, March 26—June 24, 1999; Musée Carnavalet in Paris, Oct. 11, 1999—Jan. 16, 2000; and the Stockholms Stadsmuseum, Feb.—May 2000.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WOMEN IN THE ARTS
1250 New York Avenue, NW, Washington DC
www.nmwa.org

Updated 05.07.2019