A survey of 18th-century French portraitist Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Times writes that Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France—featuring 79 works—is the first retrospective and the second exhibition of Vigée Le Brun’s work in modern times.
Katharine Baetjer, curator in the Met’s department of European paintings, said that “this was the first monographic exhibition devoted to a woman during her 40 years in the department.”
Front-Page Femmes
Cindy Sherman creates satirical self-portraits as a street style star and a four-decade survey of Sherman’s works will be on view at the Broad museum.
ARTnews shares behind-the-scenes photos from Chicago-based painter Mika Horibuchi’s studio.
Assemblage artist Betye Saar is the focus of Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes Podcast.
artnet highlights 16 female curators who are changing the arts scene.
Marta Kuzma is named the first female dean of the Yale University School of Art in its 147-year history.
Pioneering conceptual artist Susan Hiller discusses her search for the right medium and her attempts to overcome the “cultural sense that women’s art was deficient.”
Juxtapoz interviews $200,000 art prize recipient Adonna Khare about her large-scale carbon drawings.
In a review of Saatchi Gallery’s Champagne Life, the Guardian asked, “What’s the point of having this all-female exhibition?” Forward answers, “cultural survival.”
Facebook removed an image of Evelyne Axell’s Ice Cream from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s page for being “too suggestive.”
Misty Copeland reimagines Edgar Degas’s famous ballet works.
In an article for NPR, National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward praises Beyoncé’s “Formation” as a song for “those of us who grew up black in the American South.”
South Korean writer Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is “a triptych that moves its title character closer and closer to a destructive transcendence that, in turn, infects those closest to her.”
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be published this summer.
Novelist and biographer Margaret Forster dies at age 77. Forster wrote more than 40 books before her 1965 novel Georgy Girl became a sensation.
The Guardian discusses how women creators are shaping the future of comics.
Deniz Gamze and Liz Garbus—the only two women directors nominated for this year’s Oscars—discuss the status of women in film.
Shows We Want to See
Rebecca Campbell tells Hyperallergic “I wanted these women to be seen, so I painted their pictures.” On view at the LA Louver Gallery, You Are Here features 19 portraits of female artists rendered in gestural brushstrokes.
Derby Kisses, an “investigation into the psychology of bruises” by Helsinki- and London-based painter and derby skater Riikka Hyvönen, is on view at Gallery Saariaho Järvenpää.
Vashti DuBois builds community and pride in underserved neighborhoods by creating a pop-up culture center and art exhibition, the Colored Girls Museum.