Urgent Museum Notice

Art Fix Friday: January 8, 2021

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.

On Jan 1, artworks created in 1925 entered the public domain, now free from their copyright restrictions. Works by women artists include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction, and Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s A Daughter of the Samurai; songs by Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith; Tina Modotti’s photograph Telephone Wires, Mexico; and more.

A sepia-toned photo shows a power line tower at the photo's bottom with many thin, straight power lines emanating from it and crossing a cloudy sky, all taking up the upper two-thirds of the photo.
Tina Modotti, Telephone Wires, Mexico, 1925; Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Artnet reflects on 1925 as a “momentous year for art, for reasons good and ill.” It was the year Frida Kahlo was in the bus accident that would shape the rest of her life and art; artist Joan Mitchell was born; and Anni Fleischmann married Josef Albers.

Front-Page Femmes

Newsone remembers Zora Neale Hurston, the celebrated writer, folklorist, and anthropologist, whose 130th birthday was yesterday.

ARTnews remembers art critic and curator Barbara Rose, who has died at age 84.

The New York Times reports on how Jean Smith is “quietly subverting art world economics” by selling her paintings on Facebook for $100.

NPR reports on the efforts to uncover the lost works of women artists of the Renaissance.

The New York Times reviews painter Leonora Carrington’s newly reissued 1974 Surrealist novel, The Hearing Trumpet.

Hyperallergic reports on the Baltimore Museum of Art’s year of collecting work exclusively by women artists, including Kay WalkingStick, Laura Aguilar, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

An abstract painting done in warm, muted tones of tangerine, pink, and beige, that depicts bodily forms. One lays down with one leg extended and the other bent--the negative space between the legs is painted in a bright lavender color. The genital area is a darkened abstract circle. In the top left green feet appear next to another form in a sitting position, the negative space painted bright baby blue and the genital area also darkened.
Kay WalkingStick, Fantasy for a January Day, 1971; The Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchase with exchange funds from the Pearlstone Family Fund and partial gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.; © Kay WalkingStick

In a Brazilian sculpture park, Juliana Notari installed a concrete crimson vulva sculpture, Diva (2020), which she hopes will spark conversations on gender.

The New Yorker publishes a poem from Patricia Spears Jones that converses with Betye Saar’s Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress (1964).

Colossal showcases the work of Caroline Harrius, who embroiders floral motifs into porcelain vases, visualizing the intersections of gender and craft history.

Hyperallergic reviews Zadie Xa’s performance Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers, an immersive production that conveys a planet in crisis.

The Guardian profiles pianist Angela Hewitt, who appeared in NMWA’s Shenson Chamber Music Series in 2018, after her piano was accidentally destroyed by movers.

Shows We Want to See

At the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa, Cassi Namoda: To Live Long is To See Much reflects on life experience, thresholds, and the passage of time in Africa. The exhibition embodies Namoda’s practice of cultural observation gained from a childhood growing up between Mozambique, Haiti, and the United States. BOMB interviewed the artist about the influence of place, recurring motifs, and more. On view through January 16.

A painting of a dark-skinned woman wearing a baby blue dress and yellow crutches that fit to her forearms and extend to the ground. She is mid-walk in a somewhat abstract cityscape, with buildings behind her painted in rectangles and squares. In front of her lays a tilted wheelbarrow with a small pile of dirt under one wheel.
Cassi Namoda, The joy of living, outweighs misery and sorrow, 2020; Oil and acrylic on cotton poly; Photo courtesy of the Goodman Gallery

At the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain, Uninvited Guests: Episodes on Women, Ideology, and the Visual Arts in Spain, 1833–1931 examines sexism in Spain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the museum’s own role in perpetuating it. The exhibition presents 130 rarely seen works from the era’s female artists—including María Roësset Mosquera, Elena Brockmann de Llanos, and Julia Alcayde y Montoya, and looks critically at male artists’ negative portrayals of women. Hyperallergic reviewed the show, which is accessible online. On view through March 14.

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