This fall, there are so many fascinating exhibitions that include women artists. One in particular is in San Francisco. The first major survey of Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka’s (1894-1980) oeuvre is the highlight at the De Young Museum this fall. Lempicka is known for her portraits of women, in particular idealized female portraits of the art deco period: “elegant, independent, modern, and sexually liberated.” The exhibition will be divided into four chapters, representing the names and corresponding identities that Lempicka used in her lifetime: Tamara Rosa Hurwitz (recently discovered as her birth name, which she hid in an attempt to avoid the antisemitism of early 20th-century Eastern Europe), Monsieur Łempitzky (in Paris in the early 1920s, she signed her works as a man in order to be taken more seriously), Tamara de Lempicka (she added the “de” in front of her Polish married name to denote aristocratic status), and Baroness Kuffner (Lempicka’s moniker after she married her second husband in 1934, with whom she moved to the US in 1939). October 12, 2024 thru February 9, 2025.
Tamara de Lempicka, Jeune fille en vert (Jeune fille aux gants) (Young Woman in Green, Young Woman with Gloves) (detail), 1930–1931.
IN THE GALLERIES
Meech Boakye
The Brick Gallery (Formerly LAX art and now located on Western Ave.) presents its exhibit as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, with Life on Earth: Art and Ecofeminism. “Ecofeminism is a theoretical and activist movement that locates critical connections between gender oppression and the exploitation of natural resources.” Participating artists include Alliance of the Southern Triangle (A.S.T.), Alicia Barney Caldas, Meech Boakye, Carolina Caycedo, Francesca Gabbiani, Masumi Hayashi, Institute of Queer Ecology, Kite, Leslie Labowitz Starus, Maria Maea, Otobong Nkanga, yétúndé olagbaju, Alicia Piller, Aviva Rahmani, Tabita Rezaire, Yo-E Ryou, Emilija Škarnulytė, and A.L. Steiner. Thru December 12, 2024.
Hauser and Wirth presents Firelei Báez. Among her large-scale paintings, drawings and even a bronze sculpture you will find some high energy works. Báez has achieved wide acclaim over the past decade for her rigorous paintings, drawings and immersive installations that explore the influences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Her work is highly complex and layered with fantastical hybrid figures and reimagined worlds. Báez challenges traditional representations of history, nationality, gender and race. United by common cause, the paintings incorporate a wide range of subjects including art history, science fiction, anthropology, pop culture, folklore and fantasy. Thru January 5, 2025.
Firelei Báez
In conjunction with Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, a monumental altar assemblage titled Mojotech, by the renowned artist Betye Saar can be found at Roberts Projects. Originally conceived in 1987 during Saar’s residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this installation serves as a profound exploration of the intersection between contemporary technology and ancient spiritual practices. In Mojotech, Saar interrogates the presence of the metaphysical within the realm of modern technology by juxtaposing ritualistic objects, charms, and symbols with circuit boards and electronic components.Archival materials from Saar’s MIT residency will also be featured in the exhibition, including original photographs, slides, sketches, printed materials, and the initial communal offerings from the work’s inaugural installation. These artifacts serve to connect the original manifestation of Mojotech with its present iteration, offering a critical reflection on the evolving relationship between art, technology, and spirituality. Thru February 28, 2025.
Panel Discussion: Gender, Art and Technology
Saturday, November 9, 2024, 1pm.
Betye Saar
Meeson Pae: Permeate is on view at Anat Egbi’s Wilshire location. Biomorphic paintings, sculptures, and multimedia installations fill the gallery. These works evoke the body and its ongoing relationship to technology. Her work explores the sensual architecture of organic and mechanical forms. With the assistance of 3D sculpting software, Pae renders her muscular mechanisms and fluid flesh virtually. This process allows her to exploit a limitless potential of scale, gravity, perspective, and to boundlessly ‘undo’ or ‘redo’ her subject matter until she has arrived at a moment of climactic transformation. This work explores the interplay between machine and body, complicating distinctions through the translation of these digital processes into physical objects. Across media, whether oil painting or sculptures fabricated through industrial processes. Thru November 2, 2024.
Meeson Pae
Vielmetter Projects presents Andrea Bowers: Recognize Yourself as Land and Water. “In the exhibition Bowers mourns the loss of old-growth forests due to industrial logging practices in the Pacific Northwest, where Humboldt and Mendocino counties in Northern California are critical sites in the fight to save the planet. Over decades, Bowers has visited this area and witnessed the destruction of the temperate rain forests, many of which include the stumps of 1,000-2,000-year-old trees. Visualizing themes of eco-grief and ecofeminism, the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, and video that situate Bowers’s work in the legacy of conceptual feminism’s merging of art and social activism. In Recognize Yourself as Land and Water, Bowers demonstrates how global ecosystems are interlinked…” (VP) Thru November 2, 2024.
Andrea Bowers
At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World curated by Hilton Als continues at David Zwirner Gallery. The works on view will include paintings of politicians, philanthropists, writers, performers, and artists, as well as friends and neighbors—together forming a collective portrait that both embodies and complicates an understanding of the queer world of Neel’s moment and the artist’s place within it. Thru November 4, 2024.
IN THE MUSEUMS
Christina Ramberg
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is one of the upcoming exhibitions at the Hammer Museum. Ramberg is best known for her stylized paintings of fragmented female bodies. In her work, she develops a visual vocabulary of fetish objects from hands, torsos, shoes, and locks of hair. Over time these images become increasingly abstract, eventually reduced to a set of simple geometries. The first comprehensive retrospective devoted to Ramberg in almost 30 years, the exhibition presents approximately 100 works including paintings, quilts, and archival ephemera. October 12, 2024 thru January 5, 2025.
Paper and Light at the Getty Center is an exhibition of drawings that charts some of the innovative ways in which the two media were creatively used together. Works include the Museum’s extraordinary 12-foot-long transparency by Carmontelle—essentially an 18th-century motion picture—which will be shown lit from behind as originally intended. Drawings by more contemporary artists including Vija Celmins will join sheets by Tiepolo, Delacroix, Seurat, and Manet to portray the themes of translucency and the representation of light. October 15, 2024 -January 19, 2025.
Vija Celmins
One of LACMA’s current ongoing exhibitions features the work of Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (b. 1929). L.A.-based and Venezuelan-born artist was trained in painting, print-making, and sculpture in Venezuela, Chile, and New York. The nonagenarian is mostly known for her works in clay. The exhibit, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard features ceramics, paintings, and drawings, including an important selection of works made collaboratively with her husband, Michael Frimkess spanning over a 50-year period. The Finest Disregard offers insights into the artist’s fascination with art history books, popular media, cartoons, animation, autobiography, and the humor found in the folds between the layers of everyday life. Thru January 5, 2025.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion is the upcoming exhibit at the Skirball. It will explore the remarkable life and work of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. The exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of Diane von Furstenberg’s iconic wrap dress (I did own on these long ago). Organized in four thematic sections, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman Before Fashion includes a selection of over sixty pieces drawn from the DVF archives along with ephemera, fabric swatches, media pieces, and information on her philanthropic work. The Skirball’s presentation of this exhibition will also include new images and audio that shed light on von Furstenberg’s personal biography as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a war refugee, offering additional perspective on the factors that shaped her life and work. October 17, 2024-August 31, 2025.
Diane von Furstenberg
CONTINUING MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability continues at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla , first exhibition to survey themes of illness and impairment in American art from the 1960s up to the COVID-19 era. The exhibit narrates the history of recent art through the lens of disability—a term used inclusively—recognizing the vulnerable body to be a crucial throughline for art in the United States amid the upheavals and transformations of past decades. The artists whose work is in the exhibit includes many familiar names including: Laura Aguilar, Ida Applebroog, Rina Banerjee, Barbara Bloom, Beverly Buchanan, Lisa Bufano, Patty Chang, Anna Halprin, Liz Larner, Carolyn Lazard, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Riva Lehrer, Simone Leigh, Zoe Leonard, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Senga Nengudi, Alison O’Daniel, Pauline Oliveros, Carmen Papalia, Howardena Pindell, Yvonne Rainer, Niki de Saint Phalle, Judith Scott, Kathryn Sherwood, Hollis Sigler, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kiki Smith, P. Staff, Liza Sylvestre, Mary Ann Unger, Kaari Upson, Catherine Wagner, Charles White, and Hannah Wilke. Note: This exhibit is part of the Getty-led initiative PST Art: Art & Science Collide. Thru February 2, 2025. 
A comprehensive survey of the work of Simon Leigh continues at LACMA. Note that Leigh’s survey is concurrently featured at the California African American Museum thru January 20, 2025.
Simone Leigh
