The Feminist Art Coalition has coordinated with more than 50 museums and institutions across the U.S. to feature feminist art in anticipation of the 2020 presidential election. The programming includes retrospectives, surveys, symposiums, and performances focused on feminist perspectives and concerns.
“The whole project is an attempt to be strategic and collaborative and collective in our institutional attempts to create a strong cultural network…in order to inspire civic engagement and critical discourse and participation in the fall of 2020,” said Apsara DiQuinzio, curator of modern and contemporary art at the UC Berkeley Art Museum.
Front Page Femmes
A traveling Yayoi Kusama retrospective in Europe will open in September 2020 at the Gropius Bau in Berlin.
The New York Times Magazine questions whether gender will always be an inherent part of the artist-genius trope in an article examining the lives and careers of Celia Paul and Cecily Brown.
The Dallas Opera and the Dallas Symphony are hosting networking gatherings for women in classical music to challenge the male-dominated world of composers and conductors.
Hyperallergic reviews At the still point of the turning world, there is the dance at the Sursock Museum in Beirut, Lebanon, which presents Helen Khal’s influence on the Beirut art scene in the 1960s and ’70s.
The Guardian reviews Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and Her Contemporaries at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, U.K., which traces the career of the suffragist and artist.
The New Yorker examines Abigail Heyman’s feminist photographs of women’s lives. “Heyman’s work is the perfect illustration of ‘the personal is political,’” says photo historian and curator Clara Bouveresse.
The Art Newspaper discusses the need for museums to engage with Indigenous peoples: “Decolonisation is not simply a question of returning bodies that have been stolen, but also restoring the Native communities that continue to survive settler invasion.”
LACMA’s ninth annual Art + Film gala celebrated renowned artist Betye Saar in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response.
Artnet News interviews art dealer Kate Shin and artist Sun K. Kwak about their non-traditional journeys into the art world.
Painter Monika Baer was awarded Berlin’s prestigious Hannah Höch Award, and Natascha Sadr Haghighian won the Hannah Höch Förderpreis.
Exhibitions We Want to See
Bridget Riley, a retrospective of the 88-year-old abstract painter’s career, is open at the Hayward Gallery in London. The Guardian called the show “seductive, erotic, piercing, tense” and noted that “the edginess of the early works gives way to calmer, richer, more contemplative works, a blaze of red gathering speed in a multi-panel painting, the delight of the great outdoors lassoed in whiplash curves.”
At the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Vivian Suter presents the artist’s layered and suspended canvases. Suter works closely with the natural environment surrounding her home and studio in Panajachel, Guatemala, often moving her vividly painted canvases between the indoors and outdoors and exposing them to the climate.