Nancy Spero, 2003. Photo: Abe Frajndlich. Courtesy Galerie Lelong.
This week’s roundup is dedicated to the ladies:
- On Sunday, April 18, a public commemoration will be held for Season 4 artist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. Spero was a pioneer of feminist art. She is remembered for work that, among other things, made unapologetic statements against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance. Spero lived and worked in New York, where she passed away last October. (See Marc Mayer’s post, In Memoriam: Nancy Spero.) Speakers at her commemoration will include Kiki Smith (Season 2), Jon Bird, Benjamin Buchloh, Donna De Salvo, Christopher Lyon, Bartomeu Marí, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert Storr, Nora York, and others. The service begins at 3pm.
- On April 16, Season 2 artist Maya Lin will lecture at the Sleeping Lady Chapel Theater in Washington. The event is held in conjunction with Lin’s ongoing Confluence Project, a multi-site artwork that memorializes the Lewis and Clark expedition, highlights the tremendous changes it brought to the Pacific Northwest, and encourages action to create a future that preserves and protects the area’s natural and cultural resources. One of the seven sites in the project, the basalt sculpture “Story Circles,” will be dedicated April 17 in Pasco. Other sites are at Chief Timothy Park, Celilo Park, the Sandy River Delta, Fort Vancouver, Ridgefield and Cape Disappointment. Lin’s lecture begins at 7pm.
- David Weinberg Gallery will present Chicago’s first solo exhibition of works by Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff. Pfaffʼs current body of work, contained in deep shadowbox titanium frames, consists of various assemblage materials from her studio, monoprint paperwork, and a combination of hand painting and drawing. According to the gallery, “Pfaff is clearly inspired by the fields outside her studio at the foot of the Catskill Mountains…One will [also] find her reverence for oriental calligraphy, Japanese scrolls and eastern philosophy…” The exhibition runs April 16-May 29.
- Works by Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Carroll Dunham, Philip Guston, and Peter Saul are on view in iconoGRAPHIC at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. The exhibition connects the work of these artist’s through their individual use of cartoon-like and/or political narratives. Via the press release, “These artists use exaggeration of recognizable forms, the symbolic meanings of color, and altered scale as the components of a new language; a visual vocabulary that transcends generations.” iconoGRAPHIC closes May 8.
- Through May 1, Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston is exhibiting works by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois. Tufts Daily says, “…Experiencing this exhibition is more like a meditative practice of active contemplation, in which viewers read a story between the works, rather than anything close to the shock and awe generally associated with Bourgeois’ most celebrated art.”
- Opening April 16, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) celebrates its new commitment to contemporary art with Until Now: Collecting the New (1960–2010). The exhibition is organized around general themes and includes more than 75 works of art by artists who have “altered the direction of art over the past five decades, and in some cases challenged our basic conceptions about art.” Kara Walker (Season 2), and Cindy Sherman (Season 5) are include in the show. Until Now mixes objects from the museum’s collection with works borrowed from artists, collectors, and galleries. Selected works will be scattered throughout the museum and juxtaposed with the MIA’s encyclopedic holdings. Until Now closes August 1.
- Season 5 artist Carrie Mae Weems currently has work on view in the Sheldon Museum of Art’s biannual invitational exhibition, Shrew’d: The Smart and Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, as well as in their concurrent exhibition Better Half, Better Twelfth: Women Artists in the Collection, a rehanging of the museum’s permanent collection. Weems recently visited the Sheldon (located in Nebraska) and sat down for an interview with L. Kent Wolgamott of the Journal Star — read it here.
- In the April issue of Brooklyn Rail, Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard talks to editors Irving Sandler and John Yau about her life and work. In the interview von Rydingsvard says, “One of my nightmares would be to have my brain clamped to a final look or a final image, it would be torturous. I think it’s the wandering through the possibilities and the record of that wandering. I have a feeling that this is one of the reasons why the large pieces have more possibilities for me … I like the idea of a piece having a rich history of coming upon it every day for a month, for three months, for five months. And a record of that history, a record of the pencil marks, a record of the sweat of the hands, of the grinder, of the saw, and in that layered, recorded history is a part of the visual richness of the piece.”
- “Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was,” writes art journalist Linda Yablonsky for the New York Times. Click here to read more of what Yablonsky had to say about the Season 1 artist and her multichannel installation, The Globe Shrinks, now on view at the Chelsea location of Mary Boone Gallery in New York.