NYC scenes, 2008
On a brick wall by the New Museum on the Bowery. It says “Bring Me Back,” in case you can’t read it.
The Silence=Death Project was able to display their activist graphics in the window of the (old) New Museum courtesy of curator Bill Olander. Associated with ACT Up, the graphic has appeared on T-shirts, buttons, and in now in this stair hall of the new New Museum since the late eighties.
And then there’s the graphic on the exterior of the New Museum “Hell Yes!” in bright rainbow colors, ala child’s playroom by Ugo Rondinone
Martin Puryear at MOMA
In mid-January, we made it to New York City just in time to see the Martin Puryear retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The curators really used the new museum spaces well I thought, with this ladder for Booker T. practically disappearing up into the atrium. Then one could look down on it and other pieces from the sixth floor gallery. The wood, rope, tar, wire mesh, and wool were treated with such respect and allowed to speak what they are made of, in relation to each other, and the surrounding spaces. I loved it.
And if I weren’t so tired I would write something about the two plays we saw too: “The Farnsworth Invention” by Aaron Sorkin, and Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” Another evening perhaps.
From Site to Vision
Not too long ago the women who have been working long and hard on a history of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building put it on the Web. What a gift to all of us to have this e-book! Lucy Lippard wrote the Foreward, Terry Wolverton, one of the editors, wrote the Introduction. Then there are essays by Sondra Hale, the other editor, Laura Meyer, Betty Ann Brown, Michelle Moravec, Jennie Klein, Sheila de Bretteville and Bia Lowe, and on and on. Cecilia Dougherty wrote a useful piece on early video art, and Terry Wolverton edited an interview with Arlene Raven, who succumbed to cancer in August of 2006. The essay by Michelle Moravec and Sondra Hale begins to explore the efforts to involve women of color in the Woman’s Building. This book is also a resource for the images that they’ve imported from the digital image archive at Otis Art Institute. This is linked from the Woman’s Building site. There’s a lot of interest now from us aging feminists in telling many of these stories and this is one important collection.
Of course, on the other coast, there is Rutger’s Women Artists Archive National Directory (WAAND), which is busily documenting U.S. archival collections of primary source materials by and about women visual artists active in the U.S. since 1945. There is also a show opening at the Bronx Museum of the Arts next month, “Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community.”
What a year 2007-08 has been for women in the arts, with WACK! on the west coast and “Global Feminisms” on the East Coast. I shouldn’t leave out “Claiming Space: Some American Feminist Organizers” that Mary Garrard and Norma Broude curated. I didn’t get to see it, though.
