Posts from the “Women” Category

Andrea Giunta: Radical Women – Latin American Art, 1960-1985

Posted on July 22, 2018

Paz Errazuriz (Chilean, b. 1944), La Palmera (The palm tree), 1987, from the series La manzana de Adan (Adam’s Apple), 1982-90. Gelatin silver print. 15 9/16 × 23 ½ in. (39.5 × 59.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Galeria AFA, Santiago. ©the artist.

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, the phenomenal survey of Latin American artists, enters its final weekend at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view through July 22, 2018. Accompanied by a catalogue of the same name published by DelMonico|Prestel, the exhibition is a stunning tour de force through a quarter century across the Western hemisphere showcasing an extraordinary group of women who experimented with photography, performance, video, and conceptual art to explore the issues of autonomy, oppression, violence, and the environment.

Photography plays a pivotal role in Radical Women, examining how it is both a work of art and a piece of evidence. Here archetypes and iconography are pushed to the edge as the artists featured here subvert expectations and stereotypes, offering fresh and empowering new perspectives for consideration.

Guest curator Andrea Giunta, who co-curated the exhibition with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, shares insights into the ways artists used photography to raise awareness, expose, and explore the issues facing Latin American women during a tumultuous and transformative time in history – issues that are as pertinent then as they are today.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Maria Evelia Marmolejo (Colombian, b. 1958), 11 de marzo—ritual a la menstruacion, digno de toda mujer como antecedente del origen de la vida (March 11—ritual in honor of menstruation, worthy of every woman as a precursor to the origin of life), 1981. Photography: Camilo Gomez. Nine black-and-white photographs. Five sheets: 11 3/4 × 8 1/4 in. (29.8 × 21 cm) each; four sheets: 8 1/4 × 11 3/4 in. (21 × 29.8 cm) each. Courtesy of Maria E. Marmolejo and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milan. ©the artist.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Feature Shoot, Latin America, Photography, Women

Amy Arbus: Tub Pictures

Posted on July 12, 2018

Photo: From the series, Tub Pictures © Amy Arbus, courtesy of The Schoolhouse Gallery

In 1992, Amy Arbus took a masterclass with Richard Avedon at the International Center of Photography in New York and embarked on a project that would forever change her relationship to the medium. She took a single roll of black and white self-portraits in a bathtub, where she began to confront and consider the death of her mother Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in one on July 26, 1971.

Then 38 years old, it had been 21 years since her mother’s death, and Arbus set about revisiting a scene she had never witnessed herself. The result was an intense series of eight photographs, which will be on view in Tub Pictures at The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA, from next week until August 8, 2018. We caught up with Arbus to discuss this powerful body of work, and the ways in which it transformed her life.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Photo: From the series, Tub Pictures © Amy Arbus, courtesy of The Schoolhouse Gallery

Categories: 1990s, AnOther, Art, Photography, Women

Jill Greenberg: Alreadymade

Posted on July 10, 2018

While women account for 85% of consumer purchasing power, they are woefully underrepresented behind the camera, creating the images behind entertainment and advertising campaigns. Male photographers account for 90% of the commercial work – a disparity fueled by the “boys club” mentality that is out of step with the times.

Photographer Jill Greenberg decided to address the issue head on with the creation of Alreadymade, an online directory of women photographers, which she launched in tandem with a TEDx Talk titled “The Female Lens.” Here, Greenberg shines a light on the gender gap in the photography industry and the ways in which it reshapes the way we see the world.

“Here’s a dirty little secret about what photographers do: We make image propaganda!” Greenberg said in her talk. “So what happens when our views of the world are shaped by only a male lens? We are only getting the perspective, and biases of half the population. Almost every image we are surrounded by has been filtered through a man’s eyes, a man’s mind.”

With Alreadymade, Greenberg has created a platform featuring the work of 49 women. The list will continue to expand, with the oversight of an advisory board that includes Carla Serrano, CEO of Publicis New York, Judith Puckett-Rinella, Photography Director at Entrepreneur, and Meg Handler, Editor at Large for Reading the Pictures.

We caught up with Greenberg to discuss her vision for Alreadymade, and the significance of addressing gender parity in photography.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Art, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

Erin M. Riley: Used Tape

Posted on May 30, 2018

“Things Left Behind” (2016). Courtesy Erin M. Riley and P.P.O.W.

With the election of Donald Trump, a powerful unravelling began – not just of the morals and ethics of the US government but of the tightly laced silence around sexual assault. For American textile artist Erin M. Riley, the election cycle was “a bizarre turning point,” sparking conversations with her mother and sisters about horrific encounters that they had kept secret from one another.

“It’s been a lot of sobbing,” Riley says with the calm and steady voice of a woman who has faced her demons and lived to tell the tale. “I’ve been through a lot of reflection about my experiences as well as other people: parents, siblings, family members, or in the media. I wanted to talk about how relationships start and evolve, along with the traumatic experiences that exist all at once. There’s no either/or. You can be turned on one day and then afraid the next.”

Reflecting on the multiplicity of experiences that inform identity, Riley took to the loom to weave meticulously crafted tapestries, detailing intimate scenes of womanhood in her new exhibition, Used Tape, at P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York (May 31 – June 30, 2018). Here, the artist presents a series of work that taps into memory, fantasy, masturbation, dating, self-care, food, pop culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence, to reclaim her power while simultaneously negotiating the impact of trauma with sensitivity and respect.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

“Violation” (2017). Courtesy Erin M. Riley and P.P.O.W.

Categories: Art, Dazed, Exhibitions, Women

Marina Muhlfriedel & Genevive Schorr: Backstage Pass

Posted on May 22, 2018

L to R: Backstage Pass band members Spock, Marina, Holly, and Genny (1977) © Jenny Lens, Punk Pioneers

One night in late 1975, Marina Muhlfriedel went to the Whisky a Go Go on LA’s Sunset Strip to check out the Runaways, a new girl band fronted by Joan Jett. Her excitement quickly faded when she realized their notorious manager Kim Fowley had the band playing into sex kitten stereotypes.

After the show, Muhlfriedel gathered her girlfriends at the Rainbow Bar & Grill and they decided to do better. As fate would have it, Rodney Bingenheimer—a DJ and radio personality famous for breaking bands like Blondie and the Ramones—passed by the table. “Hey Rodney,” Muhlfriedel called out, “I just started a new girl band!” He asked their name, and she blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Backstage Pass.

The band started getting buzz before they even started rehearsing. But by 1976, they were on their way, becoming one of the earliest bands in the LA punk scene and the city’s first mostly-female punk band. (Aside from a male drummer, the four main band members were women.)

In its heyday, Backstage Pass toured California, playing alongside bands like Devo, Elvis Costello, the Screamers, the Weirdos, and the Nuns. They also helped build and launch The Masque, a legendary Hollywood punk club, before the band dissolved in 1979.

VICE recently caught up with two key members of the band, Muhlfriedel (Marina del Rey) and Genny Schorr (Genny Body) about what it’s like being a punk pioneer and a woman in a male-dominated scene.

Read the Full Story at VICE Online

L: Tommy Gear (The Screamers) and Genny at Bomp Records (The Damned Instore), April 16, 1977. R: Joey Ramone, Genny, Arturo Vega Backstage at The Whisky, February 1977 © Jenny Lens, Punk Pioneers

L: Genny and Marina at Screamers Party Hollywood Hills with Billy Zoom (of the punk band X) and Top Jimmy, 1977. R: Holly Vincent backstage at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco for a Backstage Pass show with Mumps, June 1977. © Jenny Lens, Punk Pioneers

Categories: 1970s, Music, Vice, Women

Dazed Selects the Best Photo Stories of April 2018

Posted on May 3, 2018

Keyezua, “Fortia” (2017). Giclée print on Hanhemühle paper 52 1/2h x 78 3/4w. Courtesy of Keyezua

THE ANGOLAN ARTIST WHO USES THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO OVERCOME TRAUMA

Angolan artist Keyezua’s dad passed away when she was young after being diagnosed with diabetes. As a result of the illness, both of his legs were amputated. Frustrated by the amount of imagery of disabilities that only show people suffering and weak, Keyezua worked with six disabled Angolan men to create a series of masks in which she channelled her trauma – captured in a striking series of images.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Categories: Africa, Dazed, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Raquel Cecilia on the Life and Legacy of Ana Mendieta

Posted on May 1, 2018

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972. (estate print 1997). Suite of seven estate color photographs. Four sheets: 13 ¼ × 20 in. (33.7 × 50.8 cm); three sheets: 20 × 13 ¼ in. (50.8 × 33.7 cm). © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

During an era of rebels and revolutionaries, Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta (1948–1985) was a singular figure carving her own path, fearlessly speaking truth to power about subjects like campus rape and domestic violence at a time when these conversations were still taboo.

Hailing from a prominent political family in Havana, Mendieta and her older sister Raquelin were sent to America in 1961 after Fidel Castro came to power. At just 12 and 14 years old, the sisters were on their own until their mother and younger brother arrived in the US five years later. Their father, who was jailed for 18 years in the wake of the Bay of Pigs revolt, was finally reunited with his family in 1979.

Through her art, Mendieta transformed fear, pain, and rage into powerful and provocative meditations on gender, identity, assault, death, place, and belonging. Using her body as a vessel of flesh, bone, and blood, she immersed herself in performance art, body art, and land art to create raw, visceral work that channeled the rituals of her native land and questioned society’s treatment of women.

But Mendieta’s groundbreaking career came to a sudden and violent end when she died falling from the 34th floor of her New York apartment at the age of 36. The circumstances of her death are still shrouded in controversy. Her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre, was charged with Mendieta’s murder, but he was ultimately acquitted on the grounds of reasonable doubt.

Because much of Mendieta’s work was ephemeral, her process and the documentation of her art was as significant as the final work itself. It is these photographs and films that remain, reminding the world of her brief but powerful career. During Mendieta’s life, she produced more than 200 works, selections of which are currently on view in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin.

In a rare interview, Raquel Cecilia, the artist’s niece and the Associate Administrator for the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, spoke with VICE about Mendieta’s life and legacy.

Read the Full Story at Vice

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Sangrienta, 1975. Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent. Running time: 1:51 minutes. Edition of 8 with 3 APs. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Ana Mendieta, Sweating Blood, 1973. Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent. Running time: 3:18 minutes. Edition of 6 with 3 APs. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Exhibitions, Vice, Women

Jocelyn Lee: The Appearance of Things

Posted on April 23, 2018

Dark Matter 8, decomposing Dahlia, 2017.

Barberry and Joyce, 2016. © Jocelyn Lee

For American photographer Jocelyn Lee, the most exquisite depths of beauty can be found within the fundamental vulnerability of life itself. Here, within the strength and fragility of the physical world, Lee looks at the subjects of sexuality, family, aging and death to express the transitory feelings of joy and melancholia that are inherent to the ephemeral nature of existence.

In The Appearance of Things, the artist’s first UK solo show at Huxley-Parlour Gallery, Lee uses portraiture, landscape and still life to explore the tactile qualities of the living world, juxtaposing foliage, fabric and flesh to capture the transitory beauty of a moment that arrives as quickly as it disappears. Here, Lee discusses how the cycle of birth, blossoming and death can be a source of glory, power and strength.

Read the Full Story at AnOther Online

Dark Matter 13, Sinking Rose, 2017. © Jocelyn Lee

Categories: AnOther, Art, Exhibitions, Photography, Women

Remembering Peggy Cooper Cafritz

Posted on April 18, 2018

Jas Knight, “Summer” (2015). Oil on linen 18 × 22 inches. Photography Jeremy Lawson.

Never let it be said that one person can’t change the world. African-American philanthropist, activist, and collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz (1947–2018) did just this, over and over again. As a doyenne of arts and education in the nation’s capital, Cooper Cafritz was a force of nature.

Hailing from Mobile, Alabama, Ms Cooper Cafritz moved north in 1964 to attend George Washington University, with a mission to fight against segregation at the tail end of Jim Crow. As a senior in 1968, she had a vision of what would become one of her greatest accomplishments: a public high school that served artistically gifted students of colour from disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

In 1974, Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Ellington officially opened, providing professional training in music, theatre, paintings, and dance, along with an academic curriculum. Notable alumni include comedian Dave Chapelle, singer-songwriter Me’Shell Ndegéocello, and operatic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves.

Ms Cooper Cafrtiz did not stop there. Her dedication to cultivating talent extended far beyond the school grounds as she took a hands-on approach in developing one of the largest private collections of African-American and African art that includes work by Kehinde Wiley, David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Emory Douglas, Barkley L. Hendricks, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, to name just a few.

Tragically, more than 300 pieces of the collection were destroyed in July 2009 after a fire at her home. It was a loss that would have devastated many, but Ms Cooper Cafritz, in her inimitable grace and determination, soldiered on. Working with co-editor Charmaine Picard, Ms Cooper Cafritz created Fired Up! Ready to Go!; Finding Beauty, Demanding Equality: An African American Life in Art (Rizzoli), a stunning volume that showcases 200 of the lost works.

On February 18, just five days before the book’s official release, Ms Cooper Cafritz died at the age of 70. Her death came as a shock to the artists whose careers she helped to nurture and cultivate. Two months on, Ms Picard and a host of leading artists remember the life and legacy of Peggy Cooper Cafritz.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is… (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/2009). C-print in 40 parts 16 × 20 inchesCourtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © 2017 Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Peggy Cooper Cafritz. Copyright Marquéo

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Dazed, Painting, Photography, Women

Patrick Willocq: Song of the Walés

Posted on April 16, 2018

The Bantu (Pygmy) tribes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are among the oldest peoples living on earth. Believed to be the direct descendants of Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers of the central African rainforest, they have maintained traditions and rituals that date back thousands of years.

When women of the Ekonda pygmy tribe become first-time mothers, they become Walés (“nursing mothers”), living in seclusion with their children. Here they are tended to by other women who teach them about their health and that of their children, who regardless of gender are the heir of the family and sometimes the entire clan.

Here, the Walés are given the respect and care otherwise reserved for the king, devoting their energies exclusively to themselves and their children. Adopting elaborate grooming rituals including coating themselves in ngola, a red powder from a tree of the same name that is believed to chase evil spirits away, and donning heavy brass bracelets known as kongas that restrict their movements along with nkumu, the skins of carnivorous animals, the Walés are follow strict rules in seclusion until the time arrives for liberation.

Liberation requires the women to learn a song and dance that will be performed in a three-hour ceremony that commemorates their experiences. The ritual is highly competitive and requires each Walé to compete for prestige and power by outshining her rivals. At the end of each performance, the Walé is led to bamboo scaffolding built for the occasion, where she is launched into the air or dropped to the floor, symbolically being released from her period of seclusion.

Read the Full Story at Feature Shoot

Categories: Africa, Art, Feature Shoot, Photography, Women

A Portrait of Mickalene Thomas

Posted on April 5, 2018

Imagine a radiant black woman pictured larger than life, her eyes, lips, and afro exquisitely detailed in rhinestones so that she sparkles and shines. She is a vision of luminosity that draws you in, set upon a pastiche of vintage patterns that evoke the spirit of the 1970s. She is the Foxy Brown and Beverly Johnson residing within black women everywhere.

She is the vision of African-American artist Mickalene Thomas, whose magnificent portraits have been taking the art world by storm for the past two decades. Drawing from a wealth of art historical and pop culture sources, Thomas creates mesmerising paintings, collages, photographs, videos, or installations that stand as a testament to female beauty, sexuality, and power.

Thomas’ layered portraits, interiors, and landscape works explore the relationship between representation, identity, and gender, providing a dynamic space for reflection, contemplation, and celebration of the female form – one that is infinitely attuned to the ways in which a work of art can become both a public and private space for communion.

Here, Thomas shares the people and experiences that informed her work, providing insight into her process and perspective that has made her one of the most influential artists of our time.

Read the Full Story at Dazed

“Portrait of Lovely Six Foota” (2007). Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel 152.4 x 121.9 cm. © Mickalene Thomas

Categories: Art, Books, Dazed, Exhibitions, Women