Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña opened the major commission Brain Forest Quipu in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall on October 11. Her multidisciplinary piece features two vast hanging sculptures accompanied by sound and video. Vicuña, a practicing artist for five decades, addresses political and cultural issues in her work, including feminism, the environment, and social justice.
For her work at London’s Tate Modern, Vicuña worked with teams of women from local Latin American communities, using Indigenous Amazonian craft techniques with foraged and found items. The Andean tradition of quipu used in the piece, a combination of knotting and weaving, was created as a complex system of communication. The soft sculpture contrasts the industrial museum, a former power station on the bank of the Thames. “Why does the quipu feel good there? It feels good, because it’s bringing the breeze in, it’s bringing the sound, the touch, the softness. And soft and hard work well together,” Vicuña says.
Front-Page Femmes
Kiki Smith and Yayoi Kusama were chosen to create floor-to-ceiling mosaics for the new Grand Central Madison Terminal in New York City, which opens in December.
The Agnes Gund Foundation is selling a Roy Lichtenstein work to support the reproductive rights movement, the Art Newspaper reports.
Barbican curator Lotte Johnson comments on highlights from Body Politics, a new retrospective about pioneering feminist artist Carolee Schneemann, currently on view at the Barbican in London.
Experts are restoring Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination (1616), using technology to remove the draperies that have censored the artist’s nude female subject for hundreds of years.
An exhibition featuring Rosa Bonheur’s naturalist paintings opens in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay, bringing together around 200 works.
ARTnews features artist and writer Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose abstractions confronting racism are currently on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis.
Artsy explores interdisciplinary artist Nikita Gale’s Frieze London installation honoring Black women musicians.
Bernice Bing, known for her trailblazing Northern California abstractions, is being discovered as museums are beginning to focus on long-overlooked Asian American artists.
Artnet reviews Amy Sherald’s first show outside the U.S., The World We Make, which opened on October 12 at Hauser & Wirth in London.
Shows We Want to See
Ink, Paper, Stone: Six Women Artists and the Language of Lithography at the Norton Simon Museum exhibits prints by six artists who visited Los Angeles in the 1960s to explore lithography: Ruth Asawa, Gego, Eleanore Mikus, Louise Nevelson, Irene Siegel, and Hedda Sterne. The exhibition surveys the works and lives of these groundbreaking women artists. On view through February 13, 2023.
Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum presents more than 200 works include painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from several films for which Didion authored screenplays. What She Means is curated by writer and New Yorker contributor Hilton Als and includes works by artists such as Betye Saar, Vija Celmins, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. On view through February 19, 2023.