A new retrospective of French portrait artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) is on view at the Grand Palais in Paris. Half of the works are from private collections and are on view for the public for the first time.
As Queen Marie Antoinette’s favorite court painter, Vigée Le Brun had to flee Paris during the French Revolution. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun 1755–1842 charts the artist’s rise to fame and her successful career. Apollo Magazine praises the exhibition for including less well-known works that offer “human insight” into the turbulence of the French Revolution.
Front Page Femmes
Actor Alec Baldwin told ARTnews how he accidentally purchased a Pat Steir painting for $95,000.
Laura Lima turns a storefront into a chicken coop—complete with hens and a rooster with brightly colored feathers.
The Plume Project, started by artist Emily Stover, uses a power plant’s steam plume to create art in the sky.
The Guerrilla Girls plan an “anti-billionaire” campaign to highlight discrimination.
An excerpt from a 100-year-old ARTnews article discusses women art dealers.
ThreeFold by Natasha Johns-Messenger is a maze of mirrors that tricks and disorients visitors.
French Photographer Valérie Belin was awarded the Prix Pictet for her memento mori project using cheap, plastic goods to expose grotesque excess.
Victorian artist Fiona McMonagle won the biennial University of Queensland National Self-Portrait Prize for her 16-second video of 100 self-portraits.
Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin also writes poetry.
Children’s book author Kate DiCamillo writes an essay for the Washington Post about reading stories aloud.
Forgotten stained-glass artist Wilhelmina Geddes is the subject of a new book.
“The Queen of Swing”—95-year-old Norma Miller—discusses her fame as a Lindy Hop dancer and her recent career in comedy.
Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho plays Zazà in an upcoming performance at the Barbican.
New York street performer Lois Evans asks passersby to nominate women who they think should be memorialized with a public monument.
Actress Krysten Ritter, recently cast as Marvel superhero Jessica Jones, says the role is “an amazing female character study that we haven’t seen before on television.”
Shows We Want to See
The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow hosts a powerful exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s Cells, which “chronicle a recursive series of anxieties, one of the last iterations in the long process of art-as-therapy that characterizes Bourgeois’s work.”
Corita Kent and the Language of Pop presents 60 screen prints by artist, activist, and nun Sister Mary Corita Kent. Hyperallergic explores how “Kent distilled a Pop narrative into a larger political and religious conversation.”
Haunting video and photographs by German artist Annina Roescheisen tell the story of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in What Are You Fishing For?
The New York Times highlights solo exhibitions in Los Angeles for video artists Simone Forti, Magdalena Fernández, and Diana Thater. About video as a medium, Thater explains, “There is no male-dominated history, so there’s more freedom.”