Fall Art in NYC: Female Artists Front & Center

Three shows prove feminist art is in a New York state of mind.

By Joanne Hinkel
Published: November 9th, 2010 | 10:00am

It’s not a new song and dance in our culture: to use the present to compensate for the tragedies of the past. The art world elevates this kind of back-pedaling to, ahem, an art. Just two years after WACK!: Art and The Feminist Revolution appeared at PS1 to school the masses on how, not even 30 years ago, women were barely acknowledged as artists and art became an integral tool of activism for the feminist movement, museums are continuing to celebrate women artists in provocative ways, with exhibits that will hopefully help to rewrite a gap-filled history where women are concerned.

This fall New York City museums host an impressive three such shows: Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968 at the Brooklyn Museum; Pictures By Women: A History of Modern Photography at MoMA; and Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism at the Jewish Museum.

Each exhibit tells a very different story about female artists in modernity and each is worthy of a visit if you should find yourself in New York in the coming months. It’s exhilarating to see so many rooms devoted to women in the arts.

Seductive Subversion, Brooklyn Museum, through Jan. 19, 2011

from Seductive Subversion: Evelyne Axell's Le joli mois de mai

Art history books regularly highlight Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist as the pivotal Pop artists and would have us think that women had been non-existent in the movement. With a campy title that acknowledges the sexual undercurrent in much of Pop Art, Seductive Subversion corrects that slight, by featuring 24 female artists in the first ever all-women survey of Pop Art. Although I had never heard of 80% of the artists in the exhibit; a few names were familiar: Rosalyn Drexler, whose comic-book style, silhouetted paintings of movie stills and newsworthy photographs have long been popular; Evelyne Axell whose psychedelic portraits of hot mamas have been widely circulated; and Martha Rosler, whose multi-media collages have been addressing sexist stereotypes in advertising and popular media since the '70s.

The less captivating displays are by women artists who dealt with similar subjects and methods as their male contemporaries. Seductive Subversion gets exciting when women artists critique the pervasive sexist cultural perspective or bring a decidedly female perspective to Pop! Some highlights of the show along this vein: Majorie Strider’s three-dimensional painting/sculpture depicting a series of a girl in a green bikini with breasts and hips jutting off the wall as if to ridicule her objectification; Dorothy Grebenak’s hand-hooked wool rugs of dollar bills and baseball cards that honor both art and traditional female crafts; and a sculpture by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (who had been an influence on Yoko Ono) of a chair covered in plushy soft phallic protuberances, “Accumulation No. 1” for being hilarious, delightfully texturous and repelling all at once.

Pictures By Women, MoMA, through March 21, 2011

Imagine a history of photography that includes only women. MoMA has done just that. Produced in conjunction with MoMA’s publication of the pivotal book Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition Pictures By Women showcases the work of 200 female photographers since the 19th century.

With very little manipulation by curators (no wall text), the chronological exhibit is all about losing oneself in the moments captured by such great image-makers as Julia Louis Cameron, Lucia Moholy, Cindy Sherman, Rineke Dijkstra, and Sally Mann, to name a few. A thematic pattern soon becomes evident: regardless of time and place, female photographers are invested in humanity, through capturing portraits, bodies, and domestic spaces—whether this has to do with logistical realities (women historically have been relegated to the home) or women’s gendered identity is open to interpretation. The similarities are both comforting and eerie. How much a wall of photos by Diane Arbus, full of transvestites and eccentric beehive-haired housewives in the 60s, resonates with a wall of Nan Goldin’s portraits of boozed-up and drugged-up Lower East Side vagabonds and miscreants in the 80s.

This is not to say the photographs have a feminine sensibility necessarily. There are several photographers who boldly venture outside their own words, such as the sadly uncelebrated New York City photographer who passed away last year, Helen Levitt, whose edgy, hilarious and touching images of NYC are some of the best street photographs around German Hilla Becher, whose sleek photos of industrial buildings are as masculine as it gets.

Shifting the Gaze, Jewish Museum, Through Jan. 30

from Shifting the Gaze: Hannah Wilke's Venus Pareve, 1982-84

Even though the Jewish Museum claims this is “not a survey of Jewish feminist art,” as not all the artists are, that’s how the exhibition mostly reads—and that is its charm. It’s interesting to consider how Jewish culture and thought may have factored into the activist thinking that motivated the feminist art movement. It was Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro who founded the first Feminist Art program at California State University.

Despite the heavy-handed title, these female artists were less invested in shifting the “male gaze” away from women as sexual objects, and more committed to their own visions. Starting with a lovely representational yet brushy portrait by Lee Krasner in 1930, more commonly known as Jackson Pollack’s wife, and ending with a painting of a charmingly cartoon-y/comical-looking family sitting down for Seder dinner, commissioned from Nicole Eisenman for this show, Shifting the Gaze is thorough but compact; there are only 32 paintings.

Drawn mostly from the museum’s holdings, the show is divided into six thematic categories—self-expression, the body, decoration, politics, writing, and satire—and carefully curated to create an educational experience. Some more highlights: a rare painting by sculptor Eva Hesse; a shiny, California sky and hotrod car-inspired minimalist painting by Judy Chicago; and Double Red Yentl, which uses Barbra Streisand’s famous character to parody Warhol’s Elvis silkscreens, by Deborah Kass.