Women Around Town, November 2026 by Karen Schifman

Don’t forget to turn your clocks back. A reminder in this painting, Kitchen Clock by Leonora Carrington, (1943).

Our community lost a beautiful and vibrant soul this past month. Gloria Orenstein passed away in New York on October 17, 2026.  She leaves a lasting legacy as a scholar, teacher, and advocate for feminist art and thought. Orenstein was a scholar in surrealism, feminist theory and ecofeminism. I feel privileged to have met her and hear about her experiences with Leonora Carrington and her Sámi shaman.

For the Southern Calrnia Women’s Caucus for Art’s 40th anniversary in 2016, Orenstein shared her journey into art, ecofeminism, and shamanism at a “Surrealist Tea.” That gathering became the seed for Gloria’s Call, a documentary directed by Cheri Gaulke.
If you have not seen this amazing film, you can view it online: Gloria’s Call.

IN THE GALLERIES

Jeffrey Deitch has an exciting new exhibition, Kiki Smith: Untethered Journey. The exhibition offers an overview of Kiki Smith’s rigorous, provocative, and poetic practice. Untethered Journey brings together sculptures of the body, from early bronzes such as Virgin Mary (1994) and Blood Pool (1992) to works in papier-mâché, beeswax, resin, and fiberglass. These unsettling forms challenge conventional depictions of the human body, often placing it in unexpected positions. The sculptures are shown alongside multimedia works that explore the relationship between private experience and collective identity. October 30-January 23.

Anat Egbi gallery presents new oil paintings by Jenny Morgan. In this series entitled Hours at the Edge, Morgan depicts women and, for the first time, birds of prey, their forms ebbing in and out of focus against atmospheric fields of color. Produced over the past two years, the exhibition extends Morgan’s longstanding investigation of portraiture and the relationship between artist and muse. Working with models whose likenesses she has returned to over many years, Morgan renders figures that seem to exist at the edge of reality, moving between precise realism and diaphanous abstraction; her paintings examine the relationship between the body and consciousness. November 13 -January 16.

False Stars, an upcoming exhibition of work by Wendy Red Star at Roberts Projects traces the Star Quilt through a series of material transformations. The title refers to a celestial formation mistaken for a fully formed star. Bringing together mirrored installations and works on paper, the exhibition considers the enduring symbolic resonance of the star. Red Star grew up with Star Quilts on the Apsáalooke reservation in Montana, encountering them at clan gatherings, powwows, graduations, and giveaways. Alongside Pendleton blankets, they were among the most prized gifts exchanged in her community. An elaborate quilt made entirely of satin carried particular status.
The Star Quilt itself has a history of transformation. In the late nineteenth century, Native women across the Plains learned Euro-American sewing and quilting techniques through missionaries, churches, and government assimilation programs. They adapted these introduced methods, making them their own. Star Quilts became embedded in existing practices of honoring and exchange, and developed distinctive approaches to color and composition. Introduced within a colonial project, the form became—through the hands of Native women—culturally specific and deeply valued within their communities.

Red Star also recognized a visual language in the Native Star Quilts around her: diamonds cut from solid-colored fabrics rather than prints, with compositional complexity generated through arrangements of saturated color. False Stars takes this relationship between diamond and color as its point of departure, asking how little of the quilt must remain for the star to persist. Working with earth pigments, mirrors, acrylic beads, watercolor, gouache, and paper, Red Star retains the quilt’s underlying structure—diamond, color, repetition, assembly—while largely dispensing with the materials of quilting itself.

November 7 – December 19, 2026

Opening this month at Craig Krull Gallery is Ann Chamberlin: Mixed Messages. This  series  of paintings follow the “dramas of people amid quiet uncertainties.”  Her figures have a mythical and naive quality partially inspired by local stories from the artistically rich area of San Miguel de Allende where she has resided for many years. However, as she states, the characters may appear naïve, “but they are never really innocent and their awkwardness affirms the value of doubt in a climate of preposterous red clouds and sometimes truthlessness.” The paintings are small gouaches on paper or book pages, and oil paintings on copper or aluminum. Her fantasy approach to visual storytelling, with elements floating in space, time and water could be compared to a type of magical realism. Mermaids misbehave, swimmers flail for survival, people wearing leopard suits cavort under tiny black rain clouds, and a merman is surrounded by the repetitive texts, me, me, me, me. Chamberlin’s scenarios are filled with unexplained, mysterious clues like a can of gasoline, an axe, a plate of nails and circular inset of knees referencing Fra Angelico. These enigmatic puzzles are usually laid out upon patchworks of color and patterned daubs that give the composition a cohesive, yet dreamlike staging. (KC) November 07  – January 09, 2027
Artist Talk, November 07, 3:30 PM,RSVP info@craigkrullgallery.com
Opening Reception: November 07, 4 – 6 PM

IN THE MUSEUMS
The Kitchen and Its Discontents is currently on view at LACMA. Historically a site of women’s labor, the kitchen has also been the subject of their design research and cultural critique. The Kitchen and Its Discontents brings two influential kitchens from LACMA’s collection into conversation: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s 1926–30 kitchen for the New Frankfurt social housing program in Germany, and Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier’s 1948–50 kitchen for L’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. These designers applied modern principles of efficiency and modularity to the home, with the aim of improving women’s lives. However, the reality was always more complicated, as revealed in photographs, prints, and advertisements from LACMA’s collection, which examine the everyday messes and simmering tensions in the domestic terrain, depicting the kitchen as a contested space for labor and living. It is presented concurrently with Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias. Thru March14, 2027. Image by Cindy Sherman.

New York-based Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña debuts a newly commissioned project at MOCA. Titled The Dream of Water: Quipu of Encounters Maricunga, the work is the latest in Vicuña’s series of collective actions developed with the participation of communities and publics, in both museums and natural sites, that she has created around the world since the 1960s. Quipu comes from the Quechua word for “knot,” and this multi-phase, collaborative “quipu of encounters” will engage local artists, youth, scientists, and Indigenous water defenders in Chile and in LA in poetic and political exchanges that confront the ongoing water crises unfolding in each region. The project culminates in a ritual quipu assembly facilitated by Vicuña in LA, weaving together the struggles for water preservation in Chile and LA and building coalitions across geographies and beyond national borders. November 15, 2026-June 6, 2027.
The Eternal Quality of Aesthetic Joy: Laura Andreson and Her Legacy continues at Craft in America. Thru 1/9/2027.

 

 A retrospective of Huguette Caland: A Life in a Few Lines continues at the UCLA Hammer Museum iThe exhibit showcases five decades of art exploring gender, humor, language, aging, and the physical body.  Thru Feb 28, 2027.

Eileen Cowin: Between Panic and Paradise highlights the career of the acclaimed multi-media artist continues at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s. Cowin is highly regarded for treating the camera lens as an unreliable narrator, utilizing carefully staged gestures, cinematic framing, and everyday props to construct psychological depth and unresolved stories. Thru January 3, 2027.

An exhibit of works on paper by Mary Cassatt and others in her circle continues at The Santa Barbara Museum of Art . Thru January 3, 2027.