artnet reviews NMWA’s latest exhibition, Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, highlighting abstract art by black women artists.

artnet reviews Magnetic Fields

“The show’s most satisfying achievement is the duty it does in bringing representatives of several older generations of exiles in from the cold,” writes artnet. “We need to clear up the noise of art-historical stereotypes so that we can perceive the actual voices of these figures—their actual, individual passions and concerns—more clearly.”

Front-Page Femmes

Amy Sherald has been selected to paint Michelle Obama’s official portrait for Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. “Representation matters a great deal, especially in times like these,” says Sherald.

Selections Magazine interviews Hayv Kahraman

NO MAN’S LAND artist Hayv Kahraman discusses her work, violence, and the male gaze.

“Dead Feminists” series creators Jessica Spring and Chandler O’Leary release a new broadside based on Frida Kahlo.

Artsy shares findings the 2017 Culture Track Report, the seventh iteration of the national tracking survey of cultural audiences. The report found that 51% of respondents viewed a night of “food and drink” to be a cultural experience, but 37% did not think art museums were a cultural experience.

Sarah Meyohas transformed 100,000 rose petals into a critique of big data. “Yes, roses are a super symbol of love and beauty, but they are also a big business product,” says Meyohas.

“I felt like I needed to do it myself because I just couldn’t see it getting done,” says actress and playwright Danai Gurira about her desire to tell the stories of black women on stage and on screen.

Lego’s “Women of NASA” set features four essential women who made space science history.

Hyperallergic explores Mikiko Hara’s work

Mikiko Hara’s photographs of everyday life on the streets of Tokyo evoke an “unusually poignant feeling.”

Artsy highlights transgender and genderqueer artists who are reversing those so-called “soft” stereotypes of queerness.

Hyperallergic profiles Kazuko Miyamoto, one of the founding members of A.I.R. (Artists in Resistance), the first all-woman artist collective in New York.

Artsy shares six lesser-known facts about photographer Dorothea Lange.

A Google doodle celebrates Mexican-American singer and icon Selena Quintanilla.

Where the Past Begins by Amy Tan shares the artist’s deeply personal reflections about her traumatic childhood, family history, and creative struggles.

Mexican author Valeria Luiselli chronicles her experience interpreting for child refugees in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.

Shows We Want to See

Hyperallergic highlights The Oracle of Lacuna

Heather Hart’s The Oracle of Lacuna, on display at Storm King Art Center, creates a physical space to celebrate and contemplate often overlooked oral histories.

After Jaye Schlesinger donated, recycled, and sold the majority of her belongings, she painted the remaining 380 items. Possession, on view at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Common Room, highlights the complicated relationship between consumption and purging in America.

Lin Tianmiao’s installation at Galerie Lelong invites visitors to walk over dozens of antique carpets embroidered with more than 2,000 phrases used to describe women—ranging from obscure sexual slang to terms of endearment.

—Emily Haight is the digital editorial associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

The MacArthur Foundation announced the 24 recipients of the 2017 “Genius Grants.” The list includes playwright Annie Baker, painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, landscape architect Kate Orff, and fiction writer Jesmyn Ward.

Front-Page Femmes

DCist features Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, NMWA’s new exhibition featuring abstract art by black women artists.

The Art Newspaper interviews feminist artist Judy Chicago as three exhibitions open showcasing her work—including Inside the Dinner Party Studio at NMWA.

Poet Sonia Sanchez pens a new foreword to the re-release of Audre Lorde’s essay collection.

New York Times Magazine profiles actress Frances McDormand about her career and unconventional stardom.

The Guardian features Lina Iris Viktor

British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor uses digital enhancement and age-old gilding techniques to make large-scale paintings.

The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery commissions Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley to paint Barack and Michelle Obama’s portraits, respectively.

Artsy publishes “What You Need to Know about Bauhaus Master Anni Albers.”

Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the founders of Rodarte, discuss the fashion industry and movie-making in Refinery29’s UnStyled podcast.

Queens Museum Executive Director Laura Raicovich says, “To be a responsible citizen in a democracy, one has to be involved in a kind of civic engagement. . . . And museums have a huge role to play in that.”

“What is it to stare and be stared at?” asks photographer Catherine Opie.

“As difficult and divisive as [Kara Walker’s] images are, they point to a reckoning that we can no longer afford to ignore,” writes Hyperallergic.

Science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor has “emerged as one of the genre’s most innovative and visionary writers.”

The installation My Bed by Tracey Emin will return to the artist’s hometown 20 years after its unveiling.

Hyperallergic spotlights The Island of the Colorblind

Sanne de Wilde’s photographs in The Island of the Colorblind investigate a small Pacific community where a high percentage of the population has total color blindness.

The Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold features archival footage as well as in-depth interviews.

In honor of World Mental Health Day, BUST highlights 12 women of color and Native women writers who reflect on their experiences with mental illness.

The Guardian visits Patricia Piccinini’s Melbourne studio.

Bodleian Libraries digitized more than 100 photographs by 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

The New Latin Wave festival in Brooklyn celebrates contemporary Latinx creativity.

Shows We Want to See

Artlyst shares Rose Wylie’s work at Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Paintings and works on paper by 83-year-old British artist Rose Wylie are on view at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.

Hyperallergic interviews Julie Mehretu about her mural HOWL, eon (I, II), at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Diane Tuft’s large-scale photographs—on view at the National Academy of Sciences—show the rapid dissolution of the Arctic landscape.

David Zwirner’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Ruth Asawa is a “crucial re-contextualization of Asawa’s work which belatedly reassesses her legacy within 20th-century art.”

—Emily Haight is the digital editorial associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Hyperallergic discusses Ruth Asawa’s woven wire sculptures and calls the artist “a pioneer out of necessity.”

Hyperallergic delves into the life and career of Ruth Asawa

Asawa, whose works are featured in an exhibition at David Zwirner gallery, is the “latest postwar American artist to be rediscovered by an establishment still waking up to its racist and sexist biases,” writes Hyperallergic.

Front-Page Femmes

Hyperallergic discusses the importance of protest art in today’s world, including Fresh Talk speaker Emma Sulkowicz’s acclaimed Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight).

Pat Steir, best known for her Waterfall series, broke her auction record three times this year.

San Francisco Chronicle reviews Woodshock

Fashion designer sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, known for their acclaimed fashion line, Rodarte, wrote and directed Woodshock—their first feature film. “The parallel between fashion and film reveals itself in Woodshock’s rich tactility,” writes W magazine.

Linda Nochlin’s landmark essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” inspires Dior’s new collection.

artnet interviews Tedi Asher, the neuroscience researcher at the Peabody Essex Museum.

“The skin in the drawings I create was initially an investigation into what skin felt like…how it creates parameters for movement and possibility,” says painter Toyin Ojih Odutola.

The Sixth Annual Feminist Art History Conference, which will be hosted at American University in 2018, is accepting proposals.

NASA dedicates a new research facility after Katherine Johnson, NASA engineer and subject of Hidden Figures.

Creative Boom highlights a new book

Illustrator Ellen Weinstein teamed up with (MoMA) for the first children’s book on Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

An outdoor sculpture in Germany by Nicole Eisenman was vandalized for the second time.

The New Yorker explores how Nebraska’s landscape influenced Willa Cather.

At the age of 90, Rosalyn Drexler reflects on her career, creativity, and stint as a professional wrestler.

McSweeney’s lists stereotypes for female characters in romantic films and TV shows written by men.

Julie Taymor will direct a film adaptation of Gloria Steinem’s memoir My Life on the Road.

Journalist and Shanghai resident Lenora Chu discusses her book Little Soldiers.

Shows We Want to See

artnet highlights Jenny Holzer’s work

Jenny Holzer’s solo exhibition SOFTER at Blenheim Palace, explores power, conflict, and the aftermath of war.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby “establishes painting as a medium with the capacity for new and multi-dimensional life” with her works on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped is the artist’s first major survey and chronicles over 20 years of her work in ceramics—on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Katharina Grosse’s exhibition This Drove My Mother Up the Wall is “an effective takeover of the environment, it torpedoes, one by one, the assumed limits of painting.”

—Emily Haight is the digital editorial associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Last Sunday’s Emmy Awards celebrated female-driven stories. HBO’s Big Little Lies won multiple awards, as did Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The New Yorker shares Emmy news

The Washington Post writes, “The winning drama series and limited series…focused on issues of women—rather than defaulting to the male point of view—as a vivid way to explore the human condition.” Julia Louis Dreyfus also won her sixth consecutive Emmy for her role in Veep.

Lena Waithe became the first black woman to win for comedy writing for Master of None. The Lily celebrates Waithe’s success and reflects on the black women previously nominated for Emmys.

Vulture and the New Yorker also discuss the triumph of women in television, while the Los Angeles Times points out that an imbalance remains. Only 18% of the 114 nominated writers were women and three of the 25 nominated directors were women.

Front-Page Femmes         

Gillian Wearing reveals her design for the likeness of suffragist Millicent Fawcett for London’s Parliament Square.

Murals by street artist Hyuro delve into social and political controversies.

The New Yorker shares Iris van Herpen’s designs

Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen draws inspiration from science for her “strangely gorgeous garments,” incorporating unusual materials and 3-D printing.

Recent studies suggest that women may become more creative after having kids.

In her documentary The Town I Live In, artist Guadalupe Rosales speaks out about gentrification in Boyle Heights.

New York-based artist and educator Imani Shanklin Roberts created a street mural inspired by South African artist Esther Mahlangu.

Nikon chose 32 male photographers to promote their new camera, claiming that no women photographers responded to the casting calls.

Actress Nadine Malouf plays an unnamed Syrian-American who tells stories of Syria’s civil war in Oh My Sweet Land.

London’s Frieze Art Fair will feature nine radical feminist artists whose work was considered too graphic during the 1970s and ’80s.

Amaka Osakwe has become West Africa’s most celebrated designer.

NPR interviews Danielle Allen about her memoir, centered on her cousin, who was sentenced to a long prison term for carjacking and was shot three years after his release.

Shows We Want to See

The Guardian highlights prints by Louise Bourgeois

MoMA showcases nearly 300 works by Louise Bourgeois, including 265 prints, to show the central role printmaking played in Bourgeois’s practice. The Guardian highlights several prints focusing on issues of patriarchy, sexuality, and womanhood.

Carolyn Case’s paintings in Homemade Tattoo involve abstraction through dots, lace, and mark-making.

The Pre-Vinylette Society at the Chicago Art Department contains a “vibrant display of over 60 women sign painters from nine countries around the world.”

—Emily Haight is the digital editorial associate at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.