WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (original) (raw)
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Modern women: women artists at the Museum of Modern Art
Choice Reviews Online, 2010
Because it is the first wide-ranging account of its kind to be produced by the Museum of Modern Art, I particularly wanted Modern Women to be a milestone for feminist art history. I was thus all the more disappointed when it fell slightly short of this goal. Cornelia Butler, the MoMA curator and co-editor (with Alexandra Schwartz) of the volume, encourages readers to think in such optimistic feminist terms in her introductory essay, and Aruna DʼSouza, in considering MoMAʼs feminist future, even suggests that the museum might consider how it could become a "site for community-building and for the utopian recreation of art worlds" (68). But Iʼm not convinced. Of course Modern Women is a milestone for the Museum of Modern Artʼs active engagement with (rather than resistance to) feminism, but we have barely even traveled the first mile. A sketch of MoMAʼs feminist history takes no more than two sentences. Modern Women follows-and was fundamentally shaped by-the museumʼs first feminist event, The Feminist Future (2007), a symposium featuring artists, art historians, and curators that holds the record as MoMAʼs best-ever attended single event (22). The Feminist Future set the stage for the survey exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at PS 1 (click here for review); this has been followed by retrospective exhibitions of the painter Marlene Dumas and performance artist Marina Abramovic, as well as a re-hang of the photography collection drawing on works by women, Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (May 7, 2010-April 18, 2011 [click here for review]). End of story. As the bookʼs subtitle-Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art-suggests, this publication is at its best in the essays and catalogue entries that begin to unravel MoMAʼs ambivalence about its modern women. I hope that this volume is part of a broader ongoing feminist transformation of MoMA and not the last word on our modern women.
Unusual Suspects: Global Feminisms and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
2006
Imagine a blockbuster feminist art exhibition. Probably you can readily visualize galleries of works by artists crucial to feminist-if not mainstream-art history. And this, argue the curators of two forthcoming feminist survey exhibitions, is the problem. Few major exhibitions have focused on the women's art movement, so audiences lack the familiarity with feminist art that regular viewing enables. Consequently, knowledge of the field has ossified around a limited list of projects and ideas. Maura Reilly, curator at the Brooklyn Museum, feels that, 'for a long time Western feminism has been at a standstill because it hasn't looked beyond its own familiar conceptual theoretical, and geographical borders'. In Global Feminisms, the exhibition that she is organizing with Linda Nochlin for the Brooklyn Museum next year, she wants to push feminist curating in a new direction, by radically expanding its borders and definitions. Excavating Feminism Global Feminisms coincides with another ambitious feminist exhibition curated by Connie Butler for LA MOCA, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Butler's show also rethinks feminist aesthetics and the feminist canon. Featuring over 120 artists who emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, plus a few senior figures like Louise Bourgeois and Alice Neel who made important feminist work during the period, WACK! also draws more than 50% of its artists from outside the US. When Butler proposed the idea to LA MOCA, 'as one of the only postwar art movements yet to be surveyed', she planned to focus on feminist art from the US. 'But I soon realized', she says, 'that the project would only interest me if I broadened it beyond the usual suspects and made it international'. One of the first people Butler called when she started to work on the show was the curator Catherine de Zegher, whose poetic treatment of women's art in Inside the Visible (1996) Butler especially respected. Although she declined de Zegher's advice to include men, noting 'I brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Troubling Canons: Curating and Exhibiting Women’s and Feminist Art, A Roundtable Discussion
2016
A discussion between Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Artists, Berlin; Angela Dimitrakaki, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Edinburgh, and author of books including Gender, artwork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester); Kerryn Greenberg, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, London; Koyo Kouoh, Artistic Director, RAW Material Company, Dakar, and curator of exhibitions including Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists (WIELS); Camille Morineau, Independent Curator, Co-Founder and President of AWARE, Archive of Women Artists, Research and Exhibition, and former Curator at the Centre Pompidou where she curated exhibitions including elles@centrepompidou; Helena Reckitt, Senior Lecturer in Curating, Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, and former Senior Curator of Programmes at the Power Plant, Toronto; Mirjam Westen, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, ...
s anthologies. Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany of 1982 and The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History of ten years later. These collections offered important alternatives to traditional art history textbooks. The articles served as models for our own research both in terms of content as well as methodology. We went on to use them in our classrooms, where they inspire a new generation of students for whom feminism is a historicaland often disturbing -phenomenon. It is important here to contextualize these anthologies within the classroom, now perhaps the primary ground for our rereading of the essays. The articles -written before most of our students were born -can be used today as evidence of how our discipline grew in the last decades of the twentieth century. The two anthologies act as "proof" that women artists and patrons are recent and contested additions to our studies, that images of women and representations of the female form are not mere depictions of beauty, and that the language of art and art history as it has developed in the West is neither neutral nor universal. Our discipline has, indeed, benefited from our frequent return to the contributions made by the many and varied authors in these anthologies.