female artists

Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle

beth — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

A giant hot pink book filled with nearly 500 pages of letters, emails, and images, when merely considered as an object, Kristine Stiles’s compilation of of artist Carolee Schneemann’s correspondence is intimidating, impressive, and a little bit sexy. The material is no less overwhelming.

Carolee Schneemann is an artist whose art played with the boundaries of bodies and embodiment, and of taboo and the abject. She produced physical and performance art, and used her own (often nude) body in the production of her art. She has been claimed as a feminist artistic icon (and acknowledges this herself) despite mixed reactions from feminists to her work.

Kristine Stiles offers a wonderfully clear and helpful preface in which she describes the principles she used when editing and annotating Schneemann’s letters so that they could be presented in book form. Although editing would be necessary even if Schneemann had written the most regular and conventional of letters, Stiles explains her commitment to preserving the irregularities within Schneemann’s letters. Such irregularities include those of spelling and misspelling, word and sentence spacing, and the use of columns and marginalia. Stiles makes a great effort to preserve for the reader as much of the aesthetic experience of reading letters and notes written by a prolific artist as can be preserved in book format.

The letters themselves are an education. They are an education in art, in second-wave feminism, in the changes in epistolary conventions. I confess, I haven’t read them all. It seems too cruel to have done so: dipping in and out of them, starting at the beginning, working through in order while also opening up at random and reading anything that catches my eye is so satisfying I can’t make myself speed read to the end. And I don’t want it to end. As long as there are letters to read, then it seems as though she—as the character I am coming to know, and not as the still-alive woman I will never meet—is still vibrant and alive and working and loving and creating. I am inspired to send real paper letters to my friends, hundreds of letters, so that they can experience me (and I them) through the medium of letter writing. Schneemann has a variety of artistic media at her disposal and letter writing is only one of them. This book is no less a work of art than her other artistic endeavors.

A perfect gift for art lovers, feminist artists, and art historians, this book has appeal for for those interested in seeing the way a life unfolds in the compilation of more than forty years of letters.

Written by: kristina grob, March 29th 2011

Secret Weirdo

admin — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Lauren Barnett

Well, for a twenty-page minicomic that is filled with embarrassing stories about childhood, cat police, imaginary adventures, and an opening page offering “free hugs,” artist Lauren Barnett definitely set herself up for a difficult task. One of her biggest pet peeves as a female artist is having her comics be called cute. “I think ‘cute’ is a terrible way to describe someone’s work,” she exclaims in one of the first frames.

Besides the political cry for gender equality in the artistic community in the first few pages, Secret Weirdo is an eclectic collection of stories (or rather confessions) about the artist’s endeavors as a secret weirdo. Barnett’s comical, autobiographical telling of her obsessive entrepreneurial ventures as a child, unusual birthday present request, sick day science experiment with a frozen egg, kleptomania, and more are interrupted by imaginative pages with the Cat Police and imaginary Adventures of Master Driver and Navigirl—alter egos perhaps?

What most attracts me to her style is the lack of pretentiousness in her art. The cover is a gorgeous abstract watercolor that is both lovely and haunting; the inside frames are made up of simple, flat, black and white line drawings, messy bubbles, and scribbled text that give it what one reviewer noted as a "draw now, ask questions later" style, almost as if she is making it up as she goes along.

While her comics might seem cute superficially, there is clearly a darker, deeper level to her appropriated cute imagery; her “adorable” childhood stories are intersected with short, anxiety-filled frames about adulthood: debt, apartment searches, the dangers of diet soda. These glimpses into her personal, intimate realm are quickly interrupted by embarrassed sarcasm, or more Secret Weirdo stories from childhood, because the reality is far too daunting to dwell on. It leaves the reader wishing for more of this darkness, but still leaving us with the knowledge that there is something else behind the 'cuteness'.

In short, even though the stories are oddly specific and personal, the ambition, sarcasm, curiosity, anxiety, and nostalgia of a child and young woman resonated with me strongly, and I recommend this minicomic to other adults and teens that can handle the occasional F-bomb and sarcasm. Also, although the styles and content are completely different, I enjoyed Secret Weirdo for the same autobiographical, humorous, deeply personal snippets of Erika Moen’s DAR! Comic, so if you like Barnett’s work, read some of this, too!

Written by: Abigail Chance, August 8th 2010

The Love Ceiling

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Jean Davies Okimoto

Endicott & Hugh Books

As I started to write the review for this book, I realized that this is one of two books I have recently read about artists, more specifically painters—The Danish Girl being the other book that centered on artists/painters. I found the story of The Love Ceiling intriguing because the protagonist is a sixty-four-year-old wife, mother, and daughter of a famous artist father and long suffering Japanese-American mother who has recently passed away from cancer.

Like many women of the so-called sandwich generation, Anne Kuroda Duppstadt has finally given herself permission to pursue her passion—that of becoming a painter—when she finds herself once again tending to the needs of her family: her thirty-two-year-old daughter moves home after discovering that her partner, Richard, has been cheating on her with a colleague at the hospital where he’s a resident, and Anne’s husband is not handling his impending retirement well and struggles with bouts of depression. This leads her to reach the conclusion at a certain point in the novel that “there is a glass ceiling for women... and it’s made out of the people we love.” Amidst all of this, Anne finally finds the courage to stand up to her domineering father, a man who demands center stage at all times and told her many years ago that she didn’t have what it takes to be a real artist.

I’m not sure why this is the case, but I rarely have the opportunity to read a book that features a sixty-four-year-old protagonist. Being a forty-something single woman, I wasn’t sure I would relate to this character, but I found myself immediately drawn into her feistiness, sense of humor, and honesty that is revealed as the reader progresses through the novel. I also enjoyed the author’s description of the natural beauty of the surroundings through the eyes of an artist (Anne is a gifted landscape artist). Painting with words came to my mind as I was reading this book.

I also had to admit to myself that I made the mistake of assuming that the internal life of a sixty-four-year-old wouldn’t be as interesting a read as that of a younger person, but that was definitely not the case. I found myself inspired by Anne’s character as well as that of an older female artist she meets at an artists’ workshop that she enrolls in to reclaim her dream of being an artist. In that sense, reading this book was also an educational experience for me because it challenged my assumptions about what it is to be an older woman in our society—that no matter how old you are, you can still be a vibrant, active participant in life.

My only criticism of the book is that one scene involving dialogue between Anne’s daughter and a friend in a coffee shop stood out as somewhat superfluous and unnecessary to the story line. Other than that, I found The Love Ceiling to be an excellent read. The book made me realize that sometimes it may take a lifetime to confront the demons of our past, but if life is a journey, it’s not how long it takes you to reach these epiphanies, but what you learn along with way.

Written by: Gita Tewari, June 28th 2010

The Woodmans

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by C. Scott Willis

C. Scott Films

The prize-winning documentary The Woodmans chronicles the histories of a family of artists through conversations, monologues, journals, and both fine art photographs and family snapshots. The film’s narrative, from its start with the marriage of George and Betty Woodman to its finish with their lives today, is marked by their daughter, photographer Francesca Woodman, whose reputation has skyrocketed in the decades after her suicide in 1981 at twenty-three years of age.

After the Tribeca Film Festival screening, director C. Scott Willis, unfamiliar with the art world before the project, told how he met the Woodmans socially. They told him they were the parents of the famous photographer, and Willis made the embarrassing error of asking if their daughter would mind talking to his daughter, who was studying photography. Out of that situation and the Woodmans’ account of what had happened, Willis was inspired to make The Woodmans.

“Why did Francesca jump off a building?” while never voiced, and positioned as one question among many, is addressed in the pained, incomplete way suicide is usually discussed. There is no “interviewer” or even unifying message or theme, just unobtrusive aesthetic shaping of the movement forward of lives.

Francesca’s precocity—many of her photographs were made in her teens—is attributed in the film to her immersion in art as she was growing up. However, the film underplays the centrality of sexuality to her and most women’s lives (Francesca experienced a romantic break-up before her death) and ignores the sexual politics of the declining women’s movement, which coincided with Francesca’s adolescence.

Since both George and Betty have been artists all their lives, there is necessarily much about their making of art. The parental Woodmans speak loftily of exhibiting to a wider public, but there’s material here for an indictment of the art world: the winner-take-all reward system, the commodification of artistic product (Francesca’s photographs financed tuition for a collector’s children), and the competition among artist friends and, yes, family. Yet, the background of well-appointed studios and a house with a pool in Italy could fuel enough lifestyle lust to gentrify numerous bohemias.

Francesca, who with little success tried commercial fashion photography and worked as a photographic assistant, does “talk” about money through a chorus of friends and her fashion photographs. Indeed, her parents bicker about whether being rejected for a National Endowment of the Arts grant contributed to her suicide. (George does mention that his father “helped the couple financially” but disapproved of his son’s marriage to a Jewish woman.) In a film about questions, some fall away in the family drama.

Yes, artists will find much to like in this film—sumptuous art, the quotidian discipline and physicality of art-making, a compelling score by David Lang—but the film also has much for feminists to ponder about the choice to parent.

The mother, Betty, emerges as the hero, directly addressing the responsibilities of mothering as they intersect with the self. She wanted to “experience” childbirth and mothering, but was terror struck when presented with her infant son, Charlie, Francesca’s older brother, who became a videographer; Betty says baldly, “Maybe I’ve been an absolutely horrible mother.”

She made her pots, used in the household but not to be broken, behind the family house while mothering young children. (Avoiding interruptions presents a challenge for any parent, or anyone, working at home.) Visiting art museums, the Woodmans habitually set the children loose with pads for copying art, while they looked at art uninterrupted. When Betty talks about her daughter, she seems more mother than artist. In contrast, George admits that his daughter’s intensity was what made her interesting to him. Originally an abstract painter, he is now working in photography. Near the end, Betty becomes the triumphant artist, when a commission is installed in the American embassy in Beijing.

The Woodmans started with a faux pas and records a generous baring of lives and scars. Finding answers is left for the audience—like life, or art.

Written by: Frances Chapman, May 28th 2010

2010 Wall Calendar: Anne Taintor

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:50:00 +0000

By Anne Taintor

Chronicle Books

“She was one cocktail away from proving his mother right” is the text accompanying a modestly dressed, yet sexily posed, 1950s woman that adorns the cover of the 2010 Wall Calendar by Anne Taintor. Why is it that these satirical sentences bring a smile to our faces? Why does it give us such pleasure to poke fun at these Leave it to Beaver prototypes? Whatever the analysis, it works. It’s downright funny, as is Taintor’s calendar.

When you open up to January, two “perfect” housewives are looking at a ham that is fresh from the oven. “Ta-daa! Now let’s have a cocktail...” reads the caption. I can just imagine my college roommate, now a few decades later, saying the same thing. Although I’m not sure she’d wait until the ham finished baking.

The Women’s History Month scene is hysterical: “If by ‘happy’ you mean 'trapped with no means of escape' then yes, I’m happy.” I suppose considering marriage a trap is women's equivalent of men calling their wives a ball and chain. Marriage, of course, isn’t the trap it used to be, but there are some who would like to wind back time to when it was—perish the thought!

Turning the pages of the calendar, I am most amused at the jokes centered on drinking (“Why do dishes when you can do daiquiris?"), and I decided to take a look at Taintor’s web site. The tag line—“Making smart people smile since 1985”—greets me on her home page. Wow, in a split second I’m feeling like a smart woman who laughs at drinking, domesticity, and dumbness.

While I love the retro images paired with witty captions, I have to point out that the calendar isn’t very functional. The size allotted for the days of the month is small, and it doesn’t allow much room to write notes, like I usually do. The fonts for the days and holidays are also very small. While it’s a large wall calendar with full size images, the calendar itself has a lot of white space that could have been better utilized. That said, I expect a full year of laughs to compensate for this shortcoming, a problem which could easily be solved by pairing it with Anne Taintor's 2010 Engagement Calendar.

Written by: Joan Dawson, November 5th 2009

The Artist's Mother: A Tribute by History's Greatest Artists to the Women Who Created Them

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:44:00 +0000

By Overlook Duckworth, Judith Thurman

Overlook Press

The artists featured in The Artist's Mother share three confounding commonalities. First, they paint; second, they have mothers; and third, they have painted their mother’s portraits. (Hope you’re still with me.) Apparently, this last trait was the key criterion for inclusion in this nifty thirty-six artist collection. Portraits appear in chronological order by the painter’s date of birth, making the arrangement educational as it shows the evolution of styles and customs through different artistic periods.

The essays that accompany each painting are well written and taken from various historical works. Rich in research, they share stories full of intimate family details. Judith Thurman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, who in the 1980s won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction for “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” penned the introduction.

On the cover of the book is a painting known as "The Mother", and although this portrait of his mother made him famous, James Abbott Mac Neil Whistler was not too fond of it. "Arrangement in Grey and Black" was how he coldly referred to it. And against his wishes, the painting became a symbol of graceful and dignified aging and a flag for Mother's Day in Britain first, and then all over the World. This greatly frustrated a particularly smug Whistler, because what he really wanted was for critics to celebrate his careful technique.

Some of these paintings have a very self-portrait-like feel, maybe because of the close relationships that most of the artists had with their mothers. (Hello Freud!) They are also personal and not always very honest. Such is the case of Sofonisba Anguissola, who painted her mother twenty years after her passing away. Looking at this vivid painting it is almost impossible to believe she had such a clear memory of her.

The second of the Frida Kahlo’s portraits of her mother is particularly somber. Just a few months before her beloved mother passed away, Frida had suffered a miscarriage. She captured the sadness of both her mother’s passing and that of her unborn child in "My Birth", a portrait of herself, a stillborn baby, and the tragic face of her mother. Who better than Kahlo to illustrate the duality of maternal love, half joy, and half pain? Just tell that to Arshile Gorky's mom who starved to death during the Armenian genocide because she sacrificed her bread ration to keep her children alive. The things parents will do.

As much as I liked this book, I cannot fail to mention that it reads in a rushed fashion. Like a tabloid. It has plenty of editorial errors. The coup de grace concerns Giorgio de Chirico, who apparently was some sort of Benjamin Button. In the book he died in 1878, ten years before he was born in 1888. He then came back to life again in 1919 to paint his mother. Astounding! I say transport his “Portrait of the Artist and His Mother” immediately to the Paranormal Mystery Museum in case he feels like surfacing again.

Written by: Laura Koffler, September 11th 2009

Birds of Paradise Earrings

admin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 08:25:00 +0000

By Stars + Rocks

Not ever being one to splurge on jewelry, I’m often times frustrated by the cheap and mass produced items I find myself buying off racks in department stores. I am no stranger to a green finger, a necklace that breaks as I’m putting it on for the very first time, or an earring that manages to fall off in transit, which always provides for a few strange glances once I arrive at work. I have also suffered the mortification that comes when you realize someone is wearing exactly the same bracelet, in exactly the same color, from exactly the same place.

So I was both surprised and delighted to find the Birds of Paradise earrings made by jewelry designer Jazmine Bowe for her “urban gypsy” Stars + Rocks jewelry line. At an incredibly reasonable price, these handmade earrings are intricately detailed and visibly of quality. I love wearing large earrings, and these lightweight pieces don’t leave your ears feeling as if they’re hanging two inches lower after you wear them for a day.

These earrings are versatile enough to be worn during day or night. So far, I’ve sported them—and received compliments doing so—with a black strapless dress and a t-shirt and jeans. They have an ethnic vibe that goes well with many current trends, and their size is big enough to grab attention, but not so large that I would recommend those with smaller faces not wear them.

But the greatest part comes back to knowing I won’t go out and find myself surrounded with twenty other girls wearing forty of the same earrings. There’s a pride that comes from supporting an artist and getting to look good doing it. I’m excited to have found unique and beautiful jewelry that didn’t come at a price I couldn’t afford. I will most definitely be looking at Bowe’s inexpensive and creative creations for gifts, self-indulgences, and fashion sense, instead of chunks of plastic on the racks of a department store.

Written by: Melissa Ablett, August 30th 2009

Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Directed by Barbara Caspar

Fragile Films

Finally, a documentary on legendary writer Kathy Acker, whose influence on sex-positive, brazen, post-modern feminist literature and art is unsurpassed. Perhaps there would have been no Riot Grrrl movement if Acker had not spoken to a young Kathleen Hanna. Hanna recalls that “Acker asked me why writing was important to me, and I said, ‘Because I felt like I’d never been listened to and I had a lot to say,’ and she said, ‘Then why are you doing spoken word?? No one goes to spoken word shows! You should get in a band’.”

Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker? contains interviews with well known icons like Hanna and Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvere Lotringer, yet also features young female students who all give different interpretations on Acker’s work and influence on their writing. There are also, of course, family members, ex-lovers, friends, and peers who all give insight into the life, work, and early death of Kathy Acker, who died in 1997 from breast cancer.

Acker, covered in tattoos and piercings, with her shaved head and a gold tooth, was a punk rock literary genius. Her experimental, post-modern writing reflected the anger, struggle for power, vulnerability, and schizophrenia of being a strong, sexually deviant woman in a patriarchal society. She turned male literature on its head by re-writing several misogynist texts from the perspective of women. Her characters blur gender and are not constrained by space, time, or death. Acker saw language as a system similar to capitalism and patriarchy—therefore, one to be deconstructed. Her work was cut-up, non-linear, sexually explicit, offensive, and sometimes nonsensical. Banned in some countries and derided by some feminists, the true genius of Acker’s work emerges in the differing of opinion and interpretation of it.

Like all good biographical documentaries, we see glimpses of Acker’s early life through photographs and archival footage as well as interviews. We also get to see her naked and masturbating in an art film she made in college! But this documentary is experimental in its own right, reflecting the cut-up, post-modern nature of Acker’s writing, through techniques like animation and voice-overs, arty shots with text across them while interviewees talk behind it, pornographic clips, and ambient electronic and punk music. It all combines to create a non-linear telling of Acker’s life story and brilliant mind.

At eighty-four minutes, it is a long biographical documentary, sometimes meandering in repetition and its own artfulness. A straight-up story of Acker’s life could have been contained in less time. Yet anyone familiar with Acker’s work knows that would not have been an appropriate homage to a writer whose work is still a huge influence on experimental writing and feminist theory.

My only irritation with the film was the interviews with the young students, which, although interspersed within the entire documentary, open the film, creating a vague and confusing introduction to an extremely dynamic person’s life. The presence of the students also breaks the flow and feels disconnected from the rest of the documentary. Perhaps, as a nod to Acker, that was intentional. In any case, as with Acker’s work, you may get confused, annoyed, enthralled, offended, and turned on by this documentary. It is a great portrait of a life and mind that should never be forgotten.

Written by: Jyoti Roy, July 19th 2009

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine

admin — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:09:00 +0000

Directed by Marion Cajori, Amei Wallach

Zeitgeist Films

“You have to be very aggressive to be a sculptor,” Louise Bourgeois announces at the start of The Spider, The Mistress and The Tangerine, a fascinating, but flawed, ninety-nine-minute documentary about the Parisian-born artist’s life and work.

Later, she confesses that aggression alone is insufficient and implies that trauma and loss are equally essential. “I make in my work unconscious connections. All of my work of the last fifty years has found inspiration in my childhood,” she says. Indeed, as the now ninety-seven-year-old Bourgeois ruminates on the past, her pain is obvious, clearly visible to the viewer. Robert Storr of the Yale School of Art says it best: “She generates energy, psychological energy, and she sucks up psychological energy.”This makes Bourgeois a complicated character. A wildly successful artist and sculptor—she was the first woman to have a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; she represented the U.S. at the 1993 Venice Biennale; and she was the first artist to fill Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern—her work has been exhibited throughout the world, from Havana to Tokyo.

That her impetus to create comes from emotional turmoil wrought eighty-plus years ago, is surprising—and revealing. In fact, her father’s incessant womanizing, including a ten-year relationship with the family’s live-in nanny, continues to wound his disappointed daughter. In addition, a memory involving her father’s running commentary—in which he compared a beautiful tangerine to the daughter he found less than comely—still has the power to bring Bourgeois to tears.

As we voyeuristically watch this response, the elegant Bourgeois we see on screen is juxtaposed with the person she sees in her mind’s eye—a tiny being filled with insecurity, self-loathing, and doubt. That said, Bourgeois can also be imperious, and we simultaneously hear her sharp-tongued replies and demands. “You need to read between the lines when I talk,” she quips, her impatience evident.

And herein lies the film’s major flaw. In allowing viewers to read whatever they want into her statements, we’re left to wonder about an enormous number of things. How, for example, does Bourgeois feel about the feminist art movement and groups like the Guerrilla Girls that have made her an icon of female ascension? Her thoughts on women’s liberation and other 20th and 21st century movements would have allowed her on-screen persona to become more fully-dimensional. In addition, she says virtually nothing about either motherhood—she bore three sons—or marriage, leaving the viewer to wonder how she juggled the multiple demands on her time. A passing comment about her career taking off after the deaths of her father and spouse is not explored, leaving a crater where explication could have gone.

These flaws are substantial. Nonetheless, Bourgeois’ sculptures—whether constructed of cloth, glass, metal, stone, or wood—are so majestic that spending time in their presence is enriching. The film ends with a panoramic look at her world-famous Maman pieces, enormous spiders Bourgeois says represent her mother. The magnificent giant arachnids combine playfulness with something terrifying, emblematic, perhaps, of the artist herself.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, July 15th 2009