Urgent Museum Notice

Art Fix Friday: August 5, 2022

Blog Category:  Art Fix Friday
A black-and-white photograph of a light-skinned adult woman holding a newspaper with news about World War II. She wears a coat and her short, curly hair is caught in the wind.

Lourdes Grobet, a photographer of Mexico’s subculture of lucha libre wrestling, died on July 15. Grobet, who was not allowed to attend professional wrestling matches in Mexico because she was a girl, later became a photographer best known for her images of the body-slamming masked luchadores, both in the ring and in their everyday lives. 

A black-and-white photograph of a woman wearing a wresting mask who is bottle-feeding a baby. The mask is black and gold and masks the woman’s face except for her mouth. She is wearing nail polish, lipstick, and a floral shirt that contrasts the wrestling mask traditionally associated with male wrestlers.
Lourdes Grobet, La Briosa, from the series “La Doble Lucha” (“The Double Struggle”); Photo courtesy of the artist

In 1980 she started photographing lucha libre (“free fight”) wrestling matches, considering them an under-explored part of Indigenous Mexican culture. Grobet photographed male and female wrestlers for more than two decades, rarely depicting them without the signature lucha libre masks, which have historical links to Aztec and Mayan cultures and represent strength. As she said in 2021, “I decided that I would focus a large part of my efforts on lucha libre because here I saw what I thought was real Mexican culture.”

Front-Page Femmes

Frida, The Musical, a telling of Kahlo’s life that has been sanctioned by her family, is coming to Broadway in 2024, Hyperallergic reports.

Artnet reviews the exhibition Women at War at Fridman Gallery, featuring works by twelve Ukrainian women artists who have lived through the current conflict and its precipitating events.

Jaguar digs into gender disparities in dance music representation in the U.K. 

Charlotte Pomerantz, an author who created subversive and inventive children’s books, died at 92.

Hyperallergic highlights Leonora Carrington’s explorations of Jewish Mysticism in her designs for S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk, currently on view at Mixografia in Los Angeles.

Artnet interviews Sophie Haydock, who brings the stories of Egon Schiele’s muses to life in her novel The Flames.

A black-and-white portrait photograph of a woman’s face half merging with a cat’s face. The left side of the woman’s face is human and the right side is that of a cat, with whiskers, cat eyes, and a cat’s nose. The woman stares at the viewer, which intensifies an uncanny feeling.
Wanda Wulz, Io+gatto,1932; Photo courtesy of Archivi Alinari-Collezione Zannier, Firenze

Fotografe! Women photographers: Alinari Archives to Contemporary Perspectives, on view in Florence, uncovers female photographers from the city’s historic Alinari Archive.

Artsy reviews Clare Rojas’s L.A. exhibition The Magic of It All, which brings together the full range of the painter’s recent work—from narrative and figurative canvases to floating abstractions.

55 Walker presents the works of artist Sonia Gechtoff, who was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the Bay Area between the late 1940s and late ’50s.

Artnet talks to Ghanaian Curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim about deconstructing the colonial idea of a museum as a “universal,” monolithic institution.

The New Yorker argues that Elaine Kraf’s 1979 novel The Princess of 72nd Street deserves wider recognition.  

Shows We Want to See

Faith Ringgold: American People is on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Featuring works from across Ringgold’s best-known series, this exhibition tracks the development of her figurative style as it evolved to meet the urgency of political and social change. On view through November 27, 2022.

A man with a dark skin tone, a woman with a light skin tone, and a man with a light skin tone are painted onto the American flag. The red stripes of the flag are blood-stained, and the three people, whose arms are interlocked, are partly covered by the red stripes. The man with the dark skin tone is holding a knife in one hand and pledging allegiance with the other.
Faith Ringgold, American People Series #18: The Flag Is Bleeding, 1967; Oil on canvas, 72 × 96 in.; National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund and Gift of Glenstone Foundation (2021.28.1); © Faith Ringgold / ARS, NY and DACS, London, courtesy ACA Galleries, New York 2021

The Georgia Museum of Art has opened Kristin Leachman: Longleaf Lines. Longleaf Lines represents the second part of Leachman’s “Fifty Forests” project, which she began in 2010 to document self-organizing patterns in trees. By recording trees’ structural integrity and biological resilience, Leachman explores the intersection of painting and the natural world. On view through February 5, 2023.

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