Carmen Winant: Passing On @ Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Carmen Winant: Passing On 

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

Through September 25, 2025

CARMEN WINANT

Passing On [detail], 2022

Ink on newsprint

Courtesy the artist and PATRON Gallery, Chicago

Photo: Luke Stettner

The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington presents Carmen Winant: Passing On, an exhibition of works by CARMEN WINANT (b. 1983, San Francisco, CA; based in Columbus, OH).

Carmen Winant uses photography to explore collective acts of feminist care, survival, and resistance. Her work highlights the role of images in shaping feminist movements, questioning ideas about women’s power, healing, and liberation. Her large-scale photographic assemblages emerge from a research practice at the intersection of past and living archives, and contain thousands of images collected from libraries, advocacy organizations, instruction manuals, and estate sales. These works reference the importance of visual documentation, collection, and preservation in capturing everyday feminist action and care. 

The Henry presents a focused exhibition featuring works from Passing On (2022), a series of collaged newspaper obituaries of influential feminist activists and organizers. The clippings, presented with Winant’s handwritten annotations, reflect on a lineage of non-biological inheritance and how language shapes memory and history.

CARMEN WINANT is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Winant's recent projects have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Sculpture Center, Wexner Center of the Arts, ICA Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and el Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. Winant's artist books include My Birth (2018), Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and Instructional Photography: Learning How To Live Now (2021); Arrangements, A Brand New End: Survival and Its Pictures (both 2022), and The last safe abortion (2024). Carmen Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient. She is also a community organizer, prison educator, and mother to her two children, Carlo and Rafael, shared with her partner, Luke Stettner. 

Carmen Winant: Passing On is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant.

HENRY ART GALLERY

University of Washington

15th Ave NE & NE 41st St, Seattle, WA 98195

henryart.org

Carmen Winant: Passing On

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle

April 12 - September 25, 2025

Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh @ Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York - "The Human Situation" Exhibition

The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh 

Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York

April 10 – June 21, 2025

Sylvia Sleigh 

The Blue Dress, 1970

Oil on canvas, 66½ × 34½ inches (168.9 × 87.6 cm) 

Collection of Audrey and Joseph Anastasi 

© Estate of Sylvia Sleigh, 

courtesy of the Estate of Sylvia Sleigh and Lévy Gorvy Dayan

Alice Neel 

Pregnant Nude, 1967

Oil on canvas, 36½ × 57¼ inches (92.7 × 145.4 cm)

Private Collection, New York, courtesy of AWG Art Advisory

© Estate of Alice Neel, 

courtesy of the Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents The Human Situation: Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh. The exhibition, conceived by Saara Pritchard, marks the first focused presentation of Marcia Marcus (b. 1928), Alice Neel (1900–1984), and Sylvia Sleigh (1916–2010), who each worked in New York City and shared in its artistic circles in the dynamic decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. During this period, they portrayed mutual sitters, exhibited together, and participated in public discussions. Their representations of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances are distinctive in form and style, yet share in their evocation of the human spirit, capturing Sylvia Sleigh’s reflection “The human situation adds a certain poignancy to portraits...”

In 1973, paintings by the three figurative artists were on view in the unprecedented exhibition Women Choose Women, organized by Women in the Arts and presented at the New York Cultural Center. The three painters would exhibit together again in the following years, notably in Women’s Work: American Art 1974, Philadelphia Civic Center and In Her Own Image, Samuel S. Fleischer Art Memorial, administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (both part of Focus on Women in the Visual Arts, 1974)—as well as Sons and Others: Women Artists See Men, Queens Museum (1975). Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh too were early participants in the collaborative installation The Sister Chapel, PS1, New York (1978)—from which Marcia Marcus eventually withdrew due to teaching and other exhibition commitments—with Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh unveiling large-scale paintings.

In their works, each artist differentiated herself from prevailing modes of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Minimalism—capturing Neel’s predecessor Robert Henri’s principle “Paint what you feel. Paint what you see. Paint what is real to you.” Their distinguished images depicted many of the same artistic and critical figures, including David Bourdon, Sari Dienes, Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, and John Perreault, among others, as well as self-portraits. They also each painted or collaborated with writers and curators such as Lucy Lippard, Cindy Nemser, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Rose, Marcia Tucker, and Sleigh’s husband Lawrence Alloway.

While working at different phases of maturity in their practices during the 1960s and 1970s, they experienced the period’s socio-political movements, including for civil and women’s rights. This historical environment is described by Lucy Lippard in her exhibition catalogue introduction for Women Choose Women: 

“A largescale exhibition of women’s art in New York is necessary at this time for a variety of reasons: because so few women have up until now been taken seriously enough to be considered for, still less included in, museum group shows; because there are so few women in the major commercial galleries; because young women artists are lucky if they can find ten successful older women artists to whom to look as role models; because although seventy-five percent of the undergraduate art students are female, only two percent of their teachers are female. And above all—because the New York museums have been particularly discriminatory, usually under the guise of being discriminating.” 

Although the three artists aligned with and participated in feminist causes to varying degrees, the energies of the movement created a focus on women’s art, resulting in exhibitions, galleries such as AIR Gallery and Soho 20 Gallery, grassroots publications, organizations including Women’s Interart Center and Women’s Caucus for Art, and panel discussions, in which they each featured. The portraits by Marcia Marcus, Alice Neel, and Sylvia Sleigh gesture towards this critical art-historical moment, while illuminating for viewers each artist’s distinctive point of view. 

As a testament to their legacies, the exhibition features works by contemporary figurative painters Jenna Gribbon, Karolina Jabłońska, Chantal Joffe, Nikki Maloof, Wangari Mathenge, and Claire Tabouret, who carry forward the tradition of rendering lived images of self, family, friends, and the home. Presenting recent and new canvases created on the occasion of the exhibition, the contemporary artists share in the history and atmosphere of community, and expand upon the themes of womanhood, intimate portraiture, the nude, and the still life that underlie The Human Situation. 

LEVY GORVY DAYAN, NEW YORK

19 East 64th Street, New York City

www.levygorvydayan.com

Related Posts:

Marcia Marcus, Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973 @ Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, October 12 - December 2, 2017

Alice Neel: The Early Years @ David Zwirner, New York, September 9 - October 16, 2021

Alice Neel: Freedom @ David Zwirner, New York, February 26 - April 13, 2019

Alice Neel @ Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 18 - April 15, 2001

Sylvia Sleigh: Every leaf is precious @ Ortuzar, New York, February 12 – April 5, 2025

Ursula Reuter Christiansen @ ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishoj - "I Am Fire and Water" Exhibition

Ursula Reuter Christiansen

I Am Fire and Water

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishoj

22 August 2024 - 5 january 2025

Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Jeg er ild og vand, Installation photo

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art 

Photo Anders Sune Berg

Jeg er ild og vand Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Photo Kavian Borhani

Jeg er ild og vand Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Photo Kavian Borhani

Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Vred brud (angry bride), 1971

Museum Jorn

The exhibition I Am Fire and Water offers a unique opportunity to explore new works by Ursula Reuter Christiansen and reflect on how we humans navigate a world filled with both hope and despair.

How can we retain our essential humanity in a world where hope and courage are constantly beset by cruelty and despair? What do we do when children are robbed of their lives in war? And how do we say goodbye to this world, poised between love and the abyss?

These are some of the weighty and highly topical questions raised by Ursula Reuter Christiansen – one of Denmark’s most significant living artists – in her installations and paintings in the exhibition I Am Fire and Water.

Says curator Dorthe Juul Rugaard: ‘Ursula Reuter Christiansen is one of Denmark’s greatest contemporary artists. She is a keen observer of the times in which we live, and she uses her art to say important and poignantly relevant things about the world we share while world history is being written before our eyes.’

Over the course of more than six decades, Ursula Reuter Christiansen (b.1943 in Trier, Germany) has enriched the art world with works in which beauty wrestles with the demonic and light meets darkness. Her narrative, expressive, and poetic works reflect the human condition while also speaking directly to the political and climatic crises unfolding in the world right now.

‘Ursula Reuter Christiansen is in a league of her own, and the rest of Europe is beginning to see that too. Her prominence as an artist is matched by her feminist credentials; for example, she was a leading activist of the Redstockings movement in Denmark. As an artist, she has upheld a feminist point of view in her criticism and her outlook on the world,’ continues Dorthe Juul Rugaard.

‘Having said that, Ursula Reuter Christiansen has also expanded her scope and reach beyond the gender debate and is now more concerned with humanity as such: in her art, she embraces our existential conditions on this globe, a world in a state of crisis – not only as regards the climate, but also in relation to atrocities such as the war in Gaza, where the children are the main victims.’

Ursula Reuter Christiansen 

Flüchte, Flige, Entrinne, 2024

Installation photo. 

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art

Photo Anders Sune Berg

Ursula Reuter Christiansen

Courage, 2023

ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art

Photo Anders Sune Berg 

The exhibition I am Fire and Water is an impressive feat on the part of Ursula Reuter Christiansen, a tour de force that presents installations and paintings from the earliest years of her career in the 1960s to the present day. Brand new works were created especially for the exhibition at ARKEN.

Ursula Reuter Christiansen invites audiences on a journey through seven installations that reflect various facets of life. The exhibition ranges from the colossal installation Rotten Eggs Against Bombs to Washed Out Faces, the latter consisting of white sheets with faces painted onto them: here, trauma and pain have been scrubbed and washed out and the demons hung out to dry. Among the new installations is Es Ist Zu Spät (It Is Too Late), which invites visitors along on the artist’s personal journey through the fog – perhaps ending in a farewell to the world.

ARKEN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj

www.arken.dk

Retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies @ Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Art Institute of Chicago

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Brooklyn Museum 

September 13, 2024 – January 19, 2025

National Gallery of Art, Washington  

March 9 – July 6, 2025 

Art Institute of Chicago 

August 30, 2025 – January 4, 2026

The retrospective exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies showcases the enduring legacy of ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915–2012) as a visionary artist and an unwavering activist. As the most comprehensive presentation devoted to Catlett in the United States, it features more than 150 works, including well-known sculpture and prints, rare paintings and drawings, and important ephemera. The exhibition is co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and presented in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elizabeth Catlett was an avowed feminist, lifelong activist, and deft formalist. Coming of age as an artist during the 1930s and 1940s, an era marked by the Great Depression and global economic turmoil, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. expansionism, which continue to shape the world today. Elizabeth Catlett passionately addressed these injustices through her politically engaged art. Her prints and sculptures draw on organic abstraction, American and Mexican modernism, and African art, centering the trials and triumphs of Black American and Mexican women.

For nearly a century—from Jim Crow segregation to the McCarthy era and the Cold War to President Obama’s first term—Elizabeth Catlett dedicated her life to the pursuit of formal rigor and social justice, which she understood to be mutually reinforcing. A transnational artist, Elizabeth Catlett worked in Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York before settling in Mexico, where she lived and taught for more than sixty years. She embraced a political radicalism that merged the goals of the Black Left in the United States with the lessons of the Mexican Revolution. Through her dual practices in sculpture and printmaking, Elizabeth Catlett remained committed to depicting the strength and struggles of both Black American and Mexican communities.

Organized chronologically and thematically, the exhibition traces Elizabeth Catlett’s career of creative artistry and bold political activism. From protests she staged while in high school against lynchings in Washington, DC, to her academic pursuits at Howard University and the University of Iowa, Catlett’s path was marked by a dedication to developing rigorous formal excellence and progressive social politics that deftly brought together issues of race, gender, and class. After becoming the first-ever recipient of a master of fine arts degree at the University of Iowa, Elizabeth Catlett continued her education studying ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago, and honing her practice in lithography at the South Side Community Art Center.

Elizabeth Catlett then spent four years in New York, where she studied the tenets of modernist European sculpture and became a part of a community of artists and intellectuals who coalesced around Popular Front politics. Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies includes a number of Catlett’s early paintings and sketches from this period, defying notions that she was exclusively a printmaker and sculptor and underscoring her versatility as an artist.

Elizabeth Catlett's early interest in art and politics was cemented in 1946 when she went to Mexico City to pursue printmaking at the highly regarded Mexican artist collective Taller de Gráfica Popular. Catlett ultimately became a Mexican citizen and an active participant in leftist cultural circles in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. While raising a family and teaching in Mexico, Elizabeth Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. As she told Ebony magazine in 1970, “I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples.”

Through bold line work in prints and voluptuous forms in sculpture, Elizabeth Catlett draws parallels between the female experience in the United States and Mexico. In Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968) and her public monument, Floating Family (1996), Elizabeth Catlett examines intersectional feminism and familial bonds through the medium of sculpture, referencing Brancusi, Henry Moore, historical African and Mesoamerican sculpture. The exhibition includes a selection of Elizabeth Catlett’s most iconic prints, from the Sharecropper and Black Woman series of the 1940s and 1950s to works such as Watts/ Detroit / Washington / Harlem / Newark, inspired by radical political activism of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Elizabeth Catlett’s artistry and activism resonate powerfully in today’s world, reminding us of ongoing national and international struggles against inequality and injustice. The exhibition not only celebrates Catlett’s contributions to the art world but also brings a historical voice into the present—showing how generations of Black feminists continue to inspire us to fight for a more equitable and just society,” says Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

“In honoring Elizabeth Catlett’s legacy, we hope that her work will resonate as a poignant reminder of art’s power to ignite change and unite communities in the ongoing struggle for equality and liberation. A Black revolutionary artist, Catlett made real, material sacrifices—including nine years of political exile—to speak truth to power and to make art for all. Her political conviction was matched by her aesthetic principles. She was capacious in her artistic influences, and while she loved abstraction, she loved her people more,” says Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition title takes inspiration from a talk Elizabeth Catlett gave in 1970, following a decade of exile from the United States in response to her political activism in Mexico. Elizabeth Catlett said: “I have been, and am currently, and always hope to be a Black Revolutionary Artist and all that it implies.” Her impassioned speech highlights the exhibition’s core themes: a commitment to formal rigor, Black empowerment through progressive activism, and a belief that everyday people deserve access to fine art. The works throughout the presentation are evidence of Elizabeth Catlett’s enduring legacy of driving social change, both through her contributions to the art world and the movements she championed.

After the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art and at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Elizabeth Catlett  

A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies 

Edited by Dalila Scruggs

304 pages | 240 color plates | 9 x 11 | © 2024

Accompanying publication: The traveling retrospective is accompanied by a book of the same title, edited by Dalila Scruggs and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The 304-page publication offers a revelatory look at Catlett and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces. Essays address topics including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice. 

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies is organized by Dalila Scruggs, Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum; and Mary Lee Corlett, Associate Curator of Modern Prints and Drawings (retired), National Gallery of Art; with Rashieda Witter, Curatorial Assistant, National Gallery of Art, and Carla Forbes, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York 11238 

www.brooklynmuseum.org

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

6th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20565

www.nga.gov

ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603

www.artic.edu

Penny Slinger "Exorcism: Inside Out" Exhibition @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London + Book "An Exorcism: A Photo Romance"

Penny Slinger

Exorcism: Inside Out

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

Through 7 September 2024

“We have many works that follow The Hero's Journey, but how many that track that of the Heroine? This journey of the embodied soul is not sexist; we all, male and female alike, need to discover who we are. It is like a detective story, in which we, both protagonists and victims, must follow the clues and unravel the plot. This psychological processing is something that I have not seen tackled in any other artwork like I have in ‘An Exorcism’. 

This is not a work that exists within a time capsule - it’s a subject that is timeless and universal. It is a blueprint for transformation and sets signposts in the sand for others who wish to know themselves.”

- Penny Slinger, 2024

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents Exorcism: Inside Out, a solo exhibition by pioneering LA-based, London-born Feminist Surrealist, PENNY SLINGER (b. 1947). Spanning original photo-collage, print and video work, the exhibition coincides with the publication of Penny Slinger's iconic book, An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (Fulgur Press, 21 June 2024). After the original An Exorcism was published in 1977, the artist created this extended version, which was nonetheless withheld from being published in the UK after her other collage book, Mountain Ecstasy (Dragon’s Dream, March 1978, Holland), was seized and burned by British customs for being deemed pornographic.

After nearly 50 years, Penny Slinger’s groundbreaking project can finally be revealed to audiences in the UK and beyond. In celebration of this extraordinary moment, Exorcism: Inside Out is one of the most ambitious exhibitions ever realised at Richard Saltoun Gallery. Inspired by the artist’s project for Dior’s haute couture fashion show in Paris in 2019, it is designed as an all-immersive audio-visual environment, with the entire gallery wrapped in images from the original An Exorcism series and presenting a spectacular evolution of the artist’s vision.

Penny Slinger began her career as one of the few celebrated women artists in the late 1960s' "Swinging London." Graduating from Chelsea College of Art in 1969, she focused her thesis on Max Ernst and found her primary artistic influence in Surrealism. Best known for her photo-collages, Penny Slinger’s work foregrounds the female body and sexuality in a radical and unapologetic manner, aiming, in her own words, "to bring the inside out and the outside in" and to create "a new language for the feminine psyche to express itself." 

An Exorcism is often hailed as her magnum opus. It’s composed of a collection of erotic collages set against the backdrop of the empty mansion known to her then-partner, Peter Whitehead. Described by Penny Slinger as a "surreal romance in photo collage," this work represents the "deepest excavations" she has done as an artist, started in 1969 and completed over approximately 7 years. The narrative unfolds through biographical chapters, tracing a young woman's journey towards self-actualization; from oppressive spaces dominated by phallocentric symbolism, evident in works such as He Crows, He Crows, He Crows, with the oversized head of a cock poking out from the corner, and Tribunal, in which a naked female figure stands exposed, surrounded by an all-dressed, all-male jury, to a reality where the protagonist finally comes into her feminine power, evoked in works like A Rose By Any Other Name, with a bright red, gigantic rose spreading its petals between a woman’s naked thighs, and Through the Glass, a tender communion of entangled women. 

Through a blend of personal embodiment and imaginative transgression, Penny Slinger integrates her own body into archetypal landscapes, engaging in a cultural exorcism that explores themes of fetishism and sexploitation from a feminist perspective. This autofictional journey is staged within the Gothic ambiance of Lilford Hall, merging the evocative allure of British neo-Romantic painting with the ominousness of horror cinema. 

From the original An Exorcism, Slinger created an extended version of the book, complete with her writings and a film script, which remain unpublished. The exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a selection of Penny Slinger’s original collages from An Exorcism alongside her recent animated film An Exorcism - The Works (2019), which is shown for the very first time in the UK, and reflects Slinger’s original, filmic approach to the project. The entire gallery is transformed into an immersive environment, covered with images that mirror the surreal, decaying grandeur of the mansion, completely enveloping viewers within Penny Slinger's multifaceted exploration of desire, identity, and the subconscious.

Premiering in the UK, Exorcism: Inside Out invites visitors to "walk into the Mansion of Dreams and feel themselves part of it, from the inside out".

PENNY SLINGER

An Exorcism: A Photo Romance

Published by Fulgur Press, 2024

Hardback, Premium Italian 135gsm paper

192 pages, 188 colour printed images, with notes

12 x 9 inches / 30cm x 23cm 

© Penny Slinger / Fulgur Press

PENNY SLINGER

An Exorcism: A Photo Romance

Published by Fulgur Press, 2024

Deluxe, 49 copies only, signed by the artist - £460.00

© Penny Slinger / Fulgur Press

PENNY SLINGER

The provocative practice of London-born, LA-based artist Penny SLINGER (b. 1947) spans photography, collage, film and sculpture. Active from the late 1960s, Penny Slinger emerged into a maelstrom of political protest, social change and sexual freedom. She graduated from the Chelsea School of Art in 1969 having developed a visual language she described as 'feminist surrealism', influenced by her study of European Surrealism, her friendship with Roland Penrose and association with Max Ernst. Penny Slinger quickly began exploring and investigating the notion of the feminine subconscious and psyche, using her own body to examine the relationship between sexuality, mysticism and femininity.

Penny Slinger’s work was recently included in Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 exhibition, currently touring at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2024/25), and The Horror Show! at Somerset House, London (2022), a landmark survey of provocative visionary British artists from the past 50 years. She featured in significant historical exhibitions such as The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art at Tate St. Ives (2009) and Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery (2009), alongside Frida Kahlo and Meret Oppenheim.

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY | LONDON

41 Dover Street, London W1S 4NS 

www.richardsaltoun.com

Judy Chicago: Revelations @ Serpentine, London - Judy Chicago largest solo presentation in a London institution

Judy Chicago: Revelations

Serpentine Galleries, London

23 May – 1 September 2024

Serpentine presents Revelations, an exhibition of trailblazing artist, author, educator, cultural historian and feminist JUDY CHICAGO (b. 1939, Chicago, USA); lives and works in New Mexico, USA). Named as one of Time Magazine's most influential people in 2018, she has garnered an enduring stature. Born Judy Cohen, and know biefly after her first marriage as Judy Gerowitz, Judy Chicago attented the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1970, the artist adopted the surname 'chicago' and initiated the United States' first Feminist Art Programme at California State University, Fresno. The exhibition Revelations, on view at Serpentine North, is Judy Chicago’s largest solo presentation in a London institution.

Judy Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective. An artistic polymath, Judy Chicago’s work is defined by a commitment to craft and experimentation, either through her choice of subject matter or the method and materials she employs.

Throughout her six-decade career, Judy Chicago has contested the absence and erasure of women in the Western cultural canon, developing a distinctive visual language that gives visibility to their experiences. To this aim, Judy Chicago has produced both individual and collaborative projects that grappled with themes of birth and creation, the social construct of masculinity, her Jewish identity, notions of power and powerlessness, extinction, and expressed her longstanding concern for climate justice.

Judy Chicago: Revelations charts the full arc of Judy Chicago’s career with a specific focus on drawing, highlighting rarely seen works. Several immersive, multi-media elements, including an AR app, a video recording booth, and other audio-visual components, set this show apart from previous surveys of Judy  Chicago’s work. With never-before-seen sketchbooks, films and slides, video interviews of participants from The Dinner Party (1974–79), audio recordings, and a guided tour of The Dinner Party by Judy  Chicago herself, this novel approach to exhibiting Judy Chicago’s work makes the artist’s presence felt throughout the gallery.

The exhibition takes its name from an unknown illuminated manuscript Judy Chicago penned in the early 1970s which will be published for the first time in conjunction with the exhibition by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson. Titled Revelations, this visionary work is a radical retelling of human history recovering some of the stories of women that society sought to erase, and one that Judy Chicago never imagined would be published in her lifetime. Audio excerpts from the book can be heard in each of the galleries through an accompanying audio guide, seamlessly creating a link between visual art and written word that has occupied the artist’s practice since the 1970s.

"Revelations, both the exhibition and book, expresses my lifelong commitment to gender equality and my deeply held belief that people must come together to change the patriarchal paradigm, which–at this point in history–has become lethal to all creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as to the planet" - Judy Chicago

Organised thematically and inspired by the chapters of the manuscript as its framework, the exhibition opens with In the Beginning (1982) which measures a staggering nine metres in length. Executed in Judy Chicago's signature Prismacolor pencils, the work reimagines the Genesis creation myth from a female perspective. As a benchmark representation of Judy Chicago's foundational philosophy, In the Beginning attempts to dismantle patriarchal structures but also draws on the ways in which feminism intersects with ecology, making this the perfect work to open both the exhibition and accompanying manuscript, which also serves as the exhibition's catalogue.

In the mid-1960s, Judy Chicago developed a significant body of abstract and minimalist drawings, paintings and sculptures that explored colour and form. Revelations brings together a focused sélection of works on paper from this period. By the late 1960s and 1970s, Judy Chicago began to expand on what she termed 'central-core' imagery whilst also developing her expertise in the male-dominated discipline of pyrotechnies. Works such as The Great Ladies Transforming Themselves into Butterflies (1973) and Peeling Back (1974} combine text and image and explicitly reflect on her experience of being "a woman, with a woman's body and a woman's point of view." An immersive video installation of footage from Judy Chicago's celebrated site-specific performances, Atmospheres (1968-74), that combined coloured smokes and fireworks is presented in one of the historic powder rooms of Serpentine North. As one of several digital and online experiences presented in the exhibition, visitors are also encouraged to interact with Rainbow AR (2020), a free downloadable app commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, Germany, which allows visitors to create their own smoke pieces.

One gallery draws on the significance of Judy Chicago's monumental installation The Dinner Party that celebrates and symbolises the heritage and achievements of 1038 women. Here, rarely seen drawings, studies and sketchbooks reveal the working process and components that led to this installation, now permanently housed at Brooklyn Museum, NY. Interviews with luminaries such as Maria Grazia Chiuri, Kevin Kwan, Roxane Gay and Massimiliano Gioni contextualise the relevance of The Dinner Party today.

Also featured in the exhibition is Judy Chicago's séries, the Birth Project (1980-85), for which the artist studied creation myths from numerous cultures to chart history's transition from matriarchal to patriarchal societies. Struck by the lack of imagery related to the subject of birth in Western art, she collaborated with over 150 needleworkers who translated her drawings, paintings and designs into tapestries, petit points, crochets and more. Central to these works is the image of the Goddess figure which has been reworked across Judy Chicago's career to present the idea of 'the divine' being female.

Whilst still engaged with Birth Project, Judy Chicago explored the cultural construction of gender and masculinity. Drawing on her continued commitment to challenging the patriarchal structures that govern society, Prismacolor studies and paintings on Belgian linen covered cavasses from PowerPlay (1982-87) highlight how the artist appropriated and reversed the male gaze. In a new drawing made especially for the manuscript, And God Created Life (2023) Judy Chicago seeks to challenge the conception of God as male and instead presents a figure that sits beyond the racial and binary gender spectrum.

The exhibition also highlights Judy Chicago's enthusiastic interest in the relationship between ecological justice and feminism. Among the works presented are a selection of mixed média drawings from the séries Thinking About Trees (1993-96) as well as studies from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015-16) that reflect on the plight of animals. Stranded (2013), depicting a polar bear, was the subject of #CreateArtforEarth, an ongoing global campaign that brought together Judy Chicago with the artist Swoon, Jane Fonda and her environmental initiative Pire Drill Friday. Alongside other partners, this project encouraged individuals to submit art or messages that respond to the climate crisis and inspire action for protecting our planet. For Revelations, visitors are invited to continue contributing to the global campaign. This is one of three ways that people Worldwide can collaborate with the artist to create change via digital projects including the most recently conceived participatory project in the exhibition, What If Women Ruled the World? (2022).

What if Women Ruled the World? was developed in close collaboration with Pussy Riot founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, and DMINTI (a leader in the industry that curates, produces, and positions innovative works and experiences at the intersection of art and technology). The project was first imagined in 1977 and realised for Dior's Spring-Summer 2020 Haute Couture show at the invitation of the fashion house's first female creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. Visitors are invited to enter a participatory booth to provide a video response to a series of questions. Each response becomes part of a growing international archive that is underpinned by a proof of participation token powered by Tezos, the open source project and a scalable, energy efficient, public blockchain chosen by artists across the world for their creative projects. This is the latest project in the multi-year partnership between the Tezos Foundation and Serpentine which celebrates the Serpentine Arts Technologies Team's endeavors to foster artist-led blockchain projects and educate the public, alongside the Tezos ecosystem's dedication to innovation and creativity in the arts and culture sector.

Revelations is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director; and Chris Bayley, Associate Exhibitions Curator; with Liz Stumpf, Assistant Exhibitions Curator; and produced by Halime Özdemir-Larusso, Production Manager.

Judy Chicago: Revelations 

Co-published by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson

Alongside the illuminated manuscript, the publication features an introduction by Judy Chicago as well as contributions from Serpentine Associate Exhibitions Curator Chris Bayley and scholar Martha Easton whose research centres on illuminated manuscripts, gender and medievalism. It also includes a conversation between Judy Chicago and Serpentine's Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist that traces the beginnings of Revelations and the ways in which it, unbeknownst to Judy Chicago until recently, was foundational to the work she would conceive over the following four decades. It is designed by Jessica Fleischmann (Still Room) and Phil Kovacevich.

Judy Chicago: Revelations is published in hardback by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with Serpentine and on sale in the UK on 30 May 2024 and in the US on 18 June 2024.

 

Limited Edition: To celebrate the exhibition, a special Judy Chicago Limited Edition will be available via the Serpentine Shop. All proceeds directly support the Serpentine's Exhibition, Architecture, Design, Education and Digital programmes.

SERPENTINE Galleries London

Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

www.serpentinegalleries.org

Marilyn Minter Exhibition @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

Marilyn Minter 

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul 

March 7 – April 27, 2024

Lehmann Maupin presents Marilyn Minter, an exhibition of new paintings by renowned multidisciplinary artist Marilyn Minter, marking her first solo exhibition in Seoul. The works on view depict vignettes of women’s lips and mouths, at once alluring and enigmatic.

Known for her decades-long career that encompasses photography, painting, video, and installation, Marilyn Minter creates imagery that engages both hyperrealist and abstract technique. Her work has often centered around corporeal qualities and practices typically omitted from the mass-media depictions of women that dominate contemporary consumer culture, such as body hair, stretch marks, dirty feet, or acts of grooming. Rather than conceal such realities, the artist seeks to reframe these aspects of womanhood. Minter is also engaged with the art historical cannon, often using her signature lexicon to appropriate traditional tropes like the Odalisque or the Bather.

In Marilyn Minter, the artist’s compositions depict closely-cropped images of women’s faces, their mouths, lips, teeth, and décolletages adorned or open to varied degrees. In White Lotus (2023), a figure wears thick strands of pearls and beads, her open lips and jewelry obscured by steam and water droplets. Similarly, in Gilded Age (2023), dark red lips part to reveal a jewel-encrusted grill. The imagery is intimate yet strange, luring the viewer in with the suggestion of something more. Across the exhibition, Marilyn Minter’s compositions continue her bold exploration of glamor, beauty, and representation through a feminist lens.

LEHMANN MAUPIN

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Monica Sjöö Exhibition @ Alison Jacques, London

Monica Sjöö

Alison Jacques, London

1 February – 9 March 2024

MONICA SJÖÖ 

Nordic Symphony, 1994 

© Monica Sjöö Estate

‘Witches cast spells, not to do evil, but to promote changes of consciousness. Witches cast spells as acts of redefinition. To respell the world means to redefine the root of our being. It means to redefine us and therefore change us by returning us to our original consciousness of magical-evolutionary processes.’

Monica Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother:

Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, 1987

Alison Jacques presents a solo exhibition by the late pioneering artist, activist and writer MONICA SJÖÖ (b.1938 Västernorrland, Sweden - d.2005 Bristol, UK). This exhibition coincides with Monica Sjöö’s first retrospective The Great Cosmic Mother on view at Modern Art Oxford until 25 February 2024; touring from Moderna Museet, Stockholm and travelling to Moderna Museet, Malmö from 23 March – 1 September 2024. The exhibition also coincides with Sjöö’s inclusion in Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain, on view until 7 April 2024. 

Monica Sjöö was a co-founder of the Goddess movement and this exhibition traces her deep commitment to gender and environmental justice. The artist, self-described as a ‘radical anarcho/eco-feminist and Goddess artist, writer and thinker involved in Earth spirituality’, and as an activist, co-founded Bristol’s Women’s Liberation. Sjöö protested against the Vietnam war and the US missile base at Greenham Common, among numerous other causes she embraced. Sjöö was also a prolific writer, her most well-known book The Great Cosmic Mother, written with Barbara Mor, was published in 1987. 

As an artist and writer, Monica Sjöö’s focus on feminism, peace activism, goddess worship and ecology was unwavering. In her work, she combined her personal symbology with archetypes, references to pre-patriarchal societies and the power of nature. A self-taught artist, she was a firm believer that creativity was a conduit to the wisdom of the past and to possibilities for the future.

This exhibition spans over 30 years of Monica Sjöö’s practice from 1976 up to 2003, showcasing both her paintings on canvas and paper. It reveals the artist’s sources of inspiration including pre-Aztec and monumental Aztec sculptures, Catholic art and the vibrant revolutionary paintings by artists including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The titles of Sjöö’s work in the exhibition – including Women Becoming (1976), Child of the Mother-tree (1984) and Priestess at Tarxien Temple on Malta (2003) – indicate the consistency and range of her concerns: feminism and spiritualism. Cornwall, Ancient Land of the Goddess (1993) depicts a landscape populated with stones and enigmatic characters amidst green fields, tempered with colours that evoke the sea and that possibly allude to the blood spilled for deeply held beliefs. In Sun Goddess at Stonehenge (1992) the famous giant stones are pictured beneath a floating mask, a gateway to a glowing, labyrinthine womb that shelters an embryo. Continuing the theme of the countryside as a place of profound mystery, Monica Sjöö explained that her chosen landscapes are ‘full of spirits and the haunt of the powerful and most ancient…’

Monica Sjöö moved to the UK in her 20s, living mainly in Bristol, where she dedicated her life ‘to creating paintings that speak of women’s lives, our history and sacredness’. Some of the work in the exhibition references Sjöö’s years spent travelling to ancient sites in Malta, Sweden, Wales and to Neolithic centres of the ancient Great Mother, pilgrimages to the sacred land in England, Ireland, Scotland and Brittany, ‘communing with the spirits and connecting with other women… involved in Earth Mysteries’. She communicated with what she called ‘the ancient sisterhood’ of pre-patriarchal Goddess societies and portrayed women as strong and life-giving. When Sjöö suffered from postnatal depression following the birth of her first child, she restored herself by drawing visionary pastels while listening to sacred Hebrew music. Many of her paintings and drawings are also evocations of grief. Having been devastated by the deaths of two of her sons in 1985 and 1987.

For Monica Sjöö, who died in 2005 aged 66, the land was never simply an arrangement of earth and sky; rather, it pulsated with memories and otherworldly beings. She immersed herself in its symbolic, as well as its life-giving properties, and it inspired both her visions and activism. By digging deep into the history of cultural communion with the natural world, she believed she could release long-repressed energies back into the ether and so begin the necessary process of human healing. Rejecting abstraction because she felt it was impossible to represent the complexities of a woman’s life ‘in stripes and triangles’, Monica Sjöö’s imagery evolved in a combination of symbols, both universal and personal, and through stories that fuse mythology and autobiography. Her palette ranges from the earthy to the psychedelic; she drew in swift, bold strokes. She loved making physically big pictures, statements that couldn’t be ignored. Despite a life scarred by poverty and personal tragedy, Monica Sjöö’s art is one of hope.

In addition to the current travelling retrospective at Modern Art Oxford, past solo exhibitions include Monica Sjöö: The Time is NOW and it is Overdue!, Beaconsfield Contemporary Art, London (2022); Blessed Be, Konstnärshuset, Stockholm, Sweden (2006); Through Space and Time the Ancient Sisterhoods Spoke to me: A Monica Sjöö Retrospective, Hotbath Gallery, Bath (2004).

Selected group exhibitions include Women in Revolt!, Tate Britain, London (2023); Radical Landscapes, Tate Liverpool (2022); A Batalla dos Xeneros, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2007); Art Feminism: An exhibition of Swedish feminist art from the 1960s until today, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden (2006).

ALISON JACQUES

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG

alisonjacques.com

Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke @ Acquavella Galleries, NYC - Erotic Abstraction - Curated by Eleanor Nairne

Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke

Erotic Abstraction 

Curated by Eleanor Nairne 

Acquavella Galleries, New York 

Through June 18, 2021 

Acquavella Galleries presents Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, the first exhibition to present these two pioneering artists side by side. Curated by Eleanor Nairne of the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the show features 23 works made between 1965 and 1977, including foundational works in the history of post-Minimalist and feminist art. 

Living in New York in the 1960s, Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke seemed at times to be working on parallel, if not entirely synchronized, tracks. Both turned to sculpture in the mid-1960s, and both became renowned for their experiments with form and materials, teaching sculpture at the School of Visual Arts at different times. Neither artist felt fully at ease with the language of Minimalism, which was ascendant in the New York art scene. As Eleanor Nairne writes, “Hesse and Wilke shared in the desire to adopt and subvert the strict geometries of Minimalism; softening the language of cool detachment with a sense of physical touch.” Bringing a bodily sensibility to the rigid and sterile structures of Minimalism, each artist in her own way created work that was evocative, organic and sensual. 

Central to this pursuit for both artists was the embrace of materials not widely used in sculpture in the 1960s, such as fiberglass and liquid latex. Erotic Abstraction features groundbreaking works from each artist in this highly expressive medium, as well as hybrid relief paintings and experimental works on paper. Ringaround Arosie (1965), made the first year that Hesse became fully engaged in sculpture, features a pair of mounds coming to a point at the center, each made of a spiral of electrical wire. Wilke’s Ponder-r-rosa 1 (1974) is the earliest work still extant by the artist made of liquid latex, a then newly-available industrial material whose use Hesse had pioneered a few years earlier. Presenting blooms made of folded circles of the soft black material bound together by metal fasteners, Ponder-r-rosa 1 shares not only innovative construction techniques with Ringaround Arosie, but also playful titles hinting at the works’ corporeal forms.

The exhibition includes important loans from The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Williams College Museum of Art, The Hannah Wilke Collection and Archive, Los Angeles, as well as many private collections.

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue accompanies the exhibition featuring critical essays by curator Eleanor Nairne, professor and author Jo Applin, art historian Anne M. Wagner, art historian and curator Amy Tobin, and gallery director Michael Findlay.

ELEANOR NAIRME joined the Barbican Art Gallery in London as Curator in 2015. Her exhibitions include Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep (2016), Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017-18) and, most recently, the acclaimed retrospective Lee Krasner: Living Colour, which was shown in 2019 at the Barbican and the Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and in 2020 at the Zentrum Paul Kee, Bern, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She has just opened Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty. Nairne is also a writer for publications including the London Review of Books and The New York Times.

EVA HESSE was born January 11, 1936, in Hamburg. Her family fled the Nazis and arrived in New York in 1939. She attended the School of Industrial Art, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and Cooper Union before receiving her B.F.A. from the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University in 1959. After returning to New York, Hesse worked as a textile designer, and in 1961 she was included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and at the John Heller Gallery, New York. Her first solo show of sculpture was presented at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 1965. Hesse began to use latex to make sculpture in 1967, and then fiberglass the following year. By the late 1960s, she gained critical recognition with solo shows at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and inclusion in many important group exhibitions. In 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after three operations within a year, she died on May 29, 1970.

Related Post:

Eva Hesse: Sculpture, Jewish Museum, New York, May 12 - September 17, 2006

HANNAH WILKE was born Arlene Hannah Butter in 1940, in New York. She attended the Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, graduating with a BFA in 1961 and B.S. in Education in 1962. She used various mediums to challenge prevailing notions of femininity, feminism, and sexuality, and was one of the first artists to use vaginal imagery in her work with the purpose of directly engaging with feminist issues. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Wilke worked on creating a type of female iconography based on the body, constructing abstract, organic forms, often displayed in a highly organized and repetitious manner that recalled Minimalism. A large selection of her early terra cotta sculptures was first shown in 1971 at Feigen Downtown in Ten Painters, One Sculptor, curated by Michael Findlay. During the 1970s, Hannah Wilke began to use her own body for performance pieces as well as photographic work that she called her "performalist self-portraits." She exhibited widely both in the United States and abroad during her lifetime. In the late 1980s Wilke was diagnosed with cancer and struggled with the illness for the last years of her life. Before her death, she documented the ravaging effects of her illness and cancer treatments on her body in a series of self-portraits. These large, color photographs were some of Hannah Wilke's last works before she died on January 28, 1993.

Related Posts:

Hannah Wilke: Friendship, LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston, February 18 - April 10, 2021

Hannah Wilke, Alison Jacques Gallery, London, 27 September - 21 December 2018

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES

18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075

www.acquavellagalleries.com

Hannah Wilke @ LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston - Friendship

Hannah Wilke: Friendship

LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston

February 18 - April 10, 2021

For the first time in more than 20 years, LaiSun Keane presents an exhibition of an exclusive group of works by Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) to Boston titled Hannah Wilke: Friendship. The exhibition illuminates the friendship between Hannah Wilke and Deena Axelrod.  

Hannah Wilke and Deena Axelrod’s youths were informed by 60s feminism, which was foregrounded by huge social and cultural shifts. Their lives converged in many ways which impacted their family, friends and most importantly, Hannah Wilke’s art making. The works in this exhibition show how Hannah Wilke’s art and their personal lives were intertwined. Hannah Wilke’s art WAS very much her life and it seeps into every aspect, be it through friends and family members or famous lovers. 

A pertinent example of the Deena Axelrod’s connection to Hannah Wilke’s work is Bar Mitzvah, 1985 which was produced by repurposing Mayan Axelrod’s Bar Mitzvah invitation into her famous chewing gum artwork. Notably, in a beautiful gesture, Hannah Wilke re-gifted the work to Mayan Axelrod hence making it a forever memento for the bond between her and the Axelrod family. 

Together with the exhibition, is a catalogue essay by Anya Ventura who conducted a lengthly interview with Mayan Axelrod for her piece. In her essay, she discussed the importance of the women’s friendship with tender anecdotes. This allows us to see a side of Hannah Wilke in a deeply personal and meaningful way. It is undeniable that Hannah Wilke was very much a formidable force but she had a strong support system in this friendship. Deena Axelrod was there all along, to inspire, to support and to comfort until Hannah Wilke’s premature death at 52.  

This solo exhibition in Boston is the first since her group show at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, in 1996. Her one and only solo exhibition in Boston was at the now defunct Genovese Gallery in 1990. 

LAISUNE KEANE

460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118

www.laisunkeane.com

___________________

Rachel Feinstein @ The Jewish Museum, NYC - Maiden, Mother, Crone

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone
The Jewish Museum, New York
November 1, 2019 – March 22, 2020

The Jewish Museum presents Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone, the first survey of the New York-based artist in the United States. Three decades of Rachel Feinstein’s work in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, and video, as well as a newly commissioned wall-relief, a panoramic wallpaper, and the artist’s sculptural maquettes will be brought together to emphasize her fascination with the dualistic nature of cultural expression and everyday life, how fundamental yet oppositional concepts coexist and are ceaselessly negotiated in art and the construction of identity. From Rachel Feinstein’s earliest to her most recent works, female figures and protagonists dominate — a distinguishing feature of both the artist’s practice and this exhibition. Rachel Feinstein probes how notions of “the feminine” manifest in the popular imagination, an investigation that pulses through and binds together Maiden, Mother, Crone.

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone is organized by Kelly Taxter, Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum. Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects is contributing the exhibition design. A companion monograph, designed by Richard Pandiscio and published by Rizzoli Electa, will be available this October, with a lead essay by Taxter and contributions by Marc Jacobs, Florence Welch, Sofia Coppola, Tamara Jenkins, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Sarah Sze, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others.

Sculpture is Rachel Feinstein’s primary medium, but her process comprises and retains the visual traces of diverse methods. She realizes her large-scale forms by transforming preparatory drawings and paper maquettes into three dimensions, or fusing painting with object-making. Rachel Feinstein also draws upon incongruous sources, time periods, and ideas such as religion and fairy tales, high European craft and American kitsch, or her experience of motherhood and feminist ideologies. She weaves together and deconstructs these perceived binaries, underscoring that there is no reality without fantasy, lightness without darkness, perfection without chaos.

Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone will be presented in the Museum’s first floor gallery. The exhibition design plays upon the latent theatricality of that plain space, where the scaffolded ceiling suggests an empty soundstage. Works will be grouped and paired thematically, arranged within four distinct areas meant to evoke a stage, a Rococo interior, a stately park, and a womblike chamber.

The exhibition begins with three sculptures drawn from spiritual sources. All-white, gesturally figurative interpretations of St. Sebastian and St. Michael (both 2012) flank Model (2000), an abstract, voluptuously proportioned white tower dotted with circular mirrored discs. The variously angled, mirrored surfaces are positioned to destabilize, fragment, and unite; they reflect the sculpture, the viewer, the room, or all three. Model is based on the Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net, which posits that all mankind, past and present, are interconnected and inextricable. The sculpture also points to the artist’s own origin story: Feinstein worked as a fashion model throughout her teenage years. From a young age she was both acutely aware of the power of her own image as well as the problematic repercussions of its circulation.

Spring and Winter (1994/96), the earliest piece in the exhibition, will be presented in the centrally located chamber alongside Feinstein’s most overtly sexual sculptures. In this video, the artist costumed herself as a series of one-dimensional, female tropes pulled from fairy tales and children’s literature: a paper doll, a sleeping beauty, a maiden, and a crone. The doll introduces the narrative — a dream within a dream — which follows a slumbering girl who imagines herself as an old woman. The crone falls asleep in a snowstorm and dreams she is a young maiden, cavorting against a backdrop of vivid color. The dualities of young and old, verdant and barren, underscore Feinstein’s early and ongoing commitment to uncovering the complexities of seemingly innocuous stories, particularly those told to women and girls. Spring and Winter was partly drawn from the original source of the popular fairy tale Sleeping Beauty: Giambattista Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia (1634), a dark story centered around violence against women. While Feinstein has moved away from performance, she continues to turn to fantastical narratives and characters, suggesting that both fiction and fact constitute perception and reality.

Rachel Feinstein was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona in 1971. She received her BA from Columbia University in 1993, where she studied studio art and religion and worked closely with Kiki Smith and Ursula von Rydingsvard. That same year she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Beginning with the group exhibition Let The Artist Live, at New York’s Exit Art in 1994, Feinstein has continued to exhibit her work internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: Folly, Madison Square Park, New York; The Snow Queen, Lever House, New York; and Tropical Rodeo, Le Consortium, Dijon. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at the Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai; The Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, New York; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; and the Barbican, London. Rachel Feinstein is represented by Gagosian Gallery.

THE JEWISH MUSEUM
1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City
www.thejewishmuseum.org

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote @ Library of Congress, Washington DC

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote
Library of Congress, Washington DC
June 4 - September 2020

Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote

© Library of Congress, Washington DC

Handwritten letters, speeches, photographs and scrapbooks, created by American suffragists who persisted for more than 70 years to win voting rights for women, are featured in a new exhibition at the Library of Congress. “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” tells the story of the largest reform movement in American history with documents and artifacts from the women who changed political history 100 years ago.

Drawing from the personal collections of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Harriet Stanton Blatch and others, along with the records of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and National Woman’s Party – all donated to the national library years ago – the exhibition explores women’s long struggle for equality. “Shall Not Be Denied” will trace the movement from before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, through the divergent political strategies and internal divisions the suffragists overcame, the parades and pickets they orchestrated for voting rights, and the legacy of the 19th Amendment that was finally ratified in 1920.

“As institutions in Washington and across the country mark the centennial of women’s suffrage, now is a great time to learn more about women’s history. At the Library of Congress, we are so thrilled to share this new exhibition at this moment of national reflection,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “Through the personal collections of many extraordinary women who helped shape this country, you will get a more intimate view into the struggles, the rivalries and ultimately the triumphs of this 70-year movement.”  

The exhibition is part of a yearlong initiative in 2019 inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers. It will explore the stories of dozens of diverse women who shaped the suffrage movement and made history.

Highlights of the exhibition include marquee records, images, music, merchandise, cartoons and ephemera of the movement. Key items include:  

- Abigail Adams’s letter from 1799 refusing to consign women to an inferior status;

- A rare printed version of the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a listing of demands Elizabeth Cady Stanton read to more than 300 at Seneca Falls, and the proceedings of a larger national women’s rights meeting two years later in Worcester, Massachusetts, that drew more than 1,000 suffrage supporters;

- A sculpture of Susan B. Anthony (portrait bust) that she hoped would one day be displayed in the Library of Congress, now on loan for the first time from the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument;

- An original broadside of the Declaration of Rights for Women that suffragists distributed in Philadelphia in 1876, disrupting the nation’s centennial celebration when Anthony presented the declaration on stage to acting Vice President Thomas Ferry;

- A draft manuscript of Stanton’s controversial and best-selling “The Woman’s Bible” that paired Biblical text with feminist commentary;

- Suffrage sheet music and merchandise used to “sell” the idea of suffrage;

- Images and film footage of political activity on the streets, including the first national parade for suffrage in 1913 in Washington, D.C., which exposed racial divides in the movement and was disrupted by an unruly mob;

- Banners, pins and a cap and cape worn by suffragists during parades and demonstrations;

- Photographs of early picketing at the White House and documentation of suffragists’ subsequent arrests, imprisonment and force feeding;

- Carrie Chapman Catt’s Ratification Notebook with notes on her strategy to win ratification of the 19th Amendment in each state; and

- An interactive display on suffragists who helped win the vote state by state.

“Shall Not Be Denied” is part of the national commemoration of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, marking major milestones in 2019 and 2020. The exhibition opens on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Senate’s passage of the suffrage amendment that would become the 19th Amendment once it was ratified by three-quarters of the states on Aug. 26, 1920.

An online crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe documents within the Library’s unique suffrage-related collections to make them more searchable and accessible will be ongoing during the exhibition. For more information go to the By the People website: crowd.loc.gov.

“Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” is made possible by the Library of Congress James Madison Council, with additional support from 1st Financial Bank USA, Democracy Fund, Thomas V. Girardi, AARP, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Fund at the Boston Foundation, HISTORY® and Roger and Julie Baskes.

The Library is inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers through a series of exhibitions, events and programs. Exhibitions drawing from the Library’s collections will also explore Rosa Parks’ groundbreaking role in civil rights history and artists’ responses to major issues of the day. Other events throughout 2019 will explore changemakers through music, performances and public programs. 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
101 Independence Ave., SE - Washington, D.C. 20540
www.loc.gov

Rose English @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

Rose ENGLISH: Form, Feminisms, Femininities
Richard Saltoun Gallery, London
Through 13 April 2019

'Form, Feminisms, Femininities' is Rose ENGLISH's first solo exhibition with Richard Saltoun Gallery. The exhibition shines light on two moments from the early stages of the artist's career, beginning with her experimentation with emergent processes and materials as a young artist in the early 1970s and culminating with a focus on her 1983 performance Plato's Chair, a work that marked an important turning point in Rose English's extensive interdisciplinary practice. The exhibition presents for the first time several early works in photography, ceramics, collage and performance to camera, providing a unique opportunity to more fully engage with different aspects of the artist’s work.

The 1970s was an era of political and social upheaval, and it was within this cultural milieu that Rose English first emerged as an artist. She has developed a unique artistic vocabulary that has consistently analysed and commentated on aesthetics, politics, philosophy and form, including aspects of Rose British pop culture, from show girls and show horses to magic acts and pantomime. Rose English's work challenges conventional understandings of both feminism and femininity through the combination of forms with which she engages, including theatre, circus, poetry and fine art, producing acclaimed performances but also works in other media such as film and installation.

Artistically reflexive and self-reflexive, the artist's work has paid close attention to the conventions and histories of these forms. This is evident in early work such as Untitled (Miss O'Murphy) (1969), a collage that incorporates a cut-out of the floating body of Boucher's eponymous painting (1752). For the young Rose English, the sensual exuberance of the baroque is an important site of feminist investigation, as she tenderly sends up its extravagant constraints. The two collage series, Baroque Harriet and Baroque Ruby, reflect the recumbency and horizontality of Boucher's Miss O'Murphy, humorously incorporating Rose English’s own photographs of 20th Century women into rococo settings.

A set of vintage performance to camera photographs entitled Bed in Field (1971), document an early conceptual and performance piece with the artist and her then partner tucked up and sleeping under the wide undulating duvet of a ploughed field. Photographs and ceramics made for and deriving from another early performance, A Divertissement (1973), are also elements of this exhibition and offer insights into the origins of making things that lies at the root of the artist's oeuvre.

The final room of the gallery is given over to one of Rose English's most important early monologue performances, Plato's Chair (1983) and features a video of the performance staged at the Western Front in Vancouver, Canada in 1983. Rose English interrogates a range of words and questions relating to the stage and the conventions of its forms – theatre, opera, dance and spectacle – and their relation to existential thought. The list of keywords and other ephemera, including original collages the artist created as 'audience programmes', feature in the exhibition alongside a sound installation of multiple variant audio recordings of Plato's Chair performed in other venues. The installation extends the artist's interrogation of the idea of 'the repertoire' – evident in Plato's Chair – to a current meditation on the histories of her own work.

___________

References:

Abstract Vaudeville: The Work of Rose English, Guy Brett, Rose English & Anne-Louise Rentell. London: Ridinghouse, 2014

A Chaos of Possibilities, Jennifer Kabat. The Believer, Issue 116: December/January 2018

RICHARD SALTOUN
41 Dover Street, London W1S 4NS
www.richardsaltoun.com