I just came across a podcast produced by the Getty. The first one is “Radical Women: What was it like to be a woman making art during the feminist and civil rights movements? In this season of Recording Artists, host Helen Molesworth delves into the lives and careers of six women artists spanning several generations. Hear them describe, in their own words, their work, relationships, and feelings about the ongoing march of feminism. Contemporary artists and art historians join the conversation, offering their own perspectives on the recordings and exploring what it meant—and still means—to be a woman and an artist. This podcast is based on interviews from the 1960s and ’70s by Cindy Nemser and Barbara Rose, drawn from the archives of the Getty Research Institute. Enjoy!
IN THE GALLERIES
Anat Ebgi presents A Place That Has No Name: Early Works, Tina Girouard’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Girouard works with range of materials from silk fabrics, tapestries, wallpapers, to rolls of linoleum and tin tiles. She breaks away from traditional object making, her diverse range of work resists easy classification; she transforms and elevates new forms. The work is imaginative and ….Thru March 28.
Tina Girouard
Ana Rodriguez
Abject of Desire is a new body of multimedia work by L.A. based artist Ana Rodriguez at Launch LA. The artist explores themes of love, femininity, what it means to be vulnerable and how we ascribe desire in relationships through the symbolic objects. As abjects of desire, these paintings and sculptures illustrate that desire and love are not always born of happiness, but can emerge from bad experiences and are shaped by mass media and culture. The series of work includes funeral floral arrangements, bows for presents, and heart shaped sculptures. Rodriguez comments that “The ridicule that I receive as a single woman who is 38 , unmarried and, childless influenced my interpretation and making of this body of work because I found myself finding humor in objects that are usually given in order to show that we are loved.” Thru March 14, 2020.
Katharina Fritsch
Matthew Marks presents three new sculptures by Katharina Fritsch. Hahn und Podest/Cock and Pedestal (2013/2019), a twelve feet tall sculpture of a bright blue rooster atop a vivid green circular pedestal. Accompanying it, and painted the same bright blue, is Zwei Männer/Two Men (2019). Fritsch has said, “Men have women as their models, so obviously I have men as my models. They are my muses.” Like the rooster, these two men are sculpted in exacting detail, from their shoes to the smartphones in their hands, yet they are anonymous enough to stand in for a gender and a type. Completing the installation is Stern/Star (2020), an eight-foot painted-aluminum star mounted on the wall. Thru May 2, 2020.
Subliminal Projects presents Let Them Eat Cake, a photographic project by New York based-photographer Cheryl Dunn. She provides provides an arching photo survey of the current American political climate and the Americana landscape as it withstands the story of a divided country, not from the perspective of politicians and their agenda, but from the people in the streets. “A camera can be a shield and or a window. It Can be a weapon. A weapon of communication.”- Cheryl Dunn
March 14-April 11, 2020.
Cheryl Dunn
Rhetorical Landscapes at Regen Projects is a new body of work by Catherine Opie. The exhibition presents a series of animated political collages and landscape photographs. In the center of the gallery eight monitors form a closed circle. Life size in height and resembling oversized iPhones, each monitor features a screen that displays an animated film Opie calls “political collages.” Comprised of numerous magazine cuttings culled by Opie over the course of Trump’s reign, each collage represents themes articulated in the news cycle embodying contemporary political issues spanning topical subjects like nationalism, climate change, immigration, gun control, and the diminishment of natural resources. Thru April 4, 2020.
Art + Practice presents Collective Constellation: Selections from The Eileen Harris Norton Collection. This exhibition draws from philanthropist, art collector and Art + Practice co-founder Eileen Harris Norton’s collection, showcasing a selection of artworks by women of color. Together they reveal a biography of their collector and offer a deeper look into the vast creative production of women of color.Works range from painting and sculpture to video and installation, and include artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Shirin Neshat, Betye Saar, Doris Salcedo, Amy Sherald, Doris Salcedo, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems and Brenna Youngblood. Thru August 1, 2020.
Amy Sherald
IN THE MUSEUMS
The current exhibition at the California African American Museum is focused on the artist, Sula Bermudez-Silverman. Sula Bermudez-Silverman:Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl is curated by Mar Hollingworth. “Her work investigates and critiques social structures through a conceptual and multidisciplinary practice that examines economic, racial, religious, and gendered systems of power. mines her personal and familial histories as a woman of Afro-Puerto Rican and Jewish descent, transforming genetic data into colorful pie charts that call to mind hard-edged abstractions. Elsewhere, she embroiders vintage doilies with her own hair to depict the human body, as well as language that references the legacy of colorism and passing in the African diaspora. In another series, she creates quilts of clear plastic grids filled with found trash fragments from neighborhoods where she has lived, which function as markers of specific times and geographical locations. In the works debuting at CAAM, Bermúdez-Silverman addresses early global trade, the beginnings of commodification, and economic hierarchies by taking molds of her childhood dollhouse and creating casts of it in sugar, a material whose history has dictated that of her ancestors.” There are numerous programs in conjunction with this exhibit, so do check their website for more info. (CAFAM) Thru August 23, 2020.
Sula Bermudez-Silverman.
Yolanda González
The Vincent Price Museum presents Yolanda González: Sueño de Familia / Dream of Family examines the artistic legacy of one family across 150 years from Mexico to the United States. The exhibition creates a family portrait across five generations through works spanning the 1870s to the present, including drawings, paintings, ceramics, and printmaking. The exhibition considers transnational, long-term, and largely matriarchal transmissions of artistic inquiry and vocation, broadening the origin story of connected visual lineages of Chicana/o artists of González’s generation. Thru March 14, 2020.
Continuing Exhibitions
Decade by Decade: Women Artists of California continues at Long Beach Museum of Art. The artworks are all culled from the museum’s extensive collection. Thru April 26, 2020.
The Body, The Object, The Other continues at Craft Contemporary Among the participating artists are Jenny Hata Blumenfield, Phyllis Green, Raven Halfmoon, Roxanne Jackson , Anabel Juarez, Cynthia Lahti, Galia Linn, Nicole Seisler, and Meghan Smythe. Thru May 20, 2020.
Anabel Juarez
Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics continues at the Getty Center Research Institute galleries. Thru March 29, 2020.
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 continues at MOCA. Among the many artists are Merion Estes, Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Kim MacConnel, Miriam Schapiro, Sylvia Sleigh and Betty Woodman. Thru May 11, 2020.
Finally at LACMA, the exhibition of works by Julie Mehretu continues. It includes nearly 40 works on paper with 35 paintings dating from 1996 to the present by the Ethiopian-born artist. Here is a link to Art 21 to learn more about this artist. Floor 1 Thru March 22, 2019; Floor 3 thru May 17, 2020.
