Sculpture (Sculpture)

Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles. By 1968, the year she began creating Domes , the twenty-nine-year-old artist had moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, graduated from UCLA, and was part of a generation of artists whose work was characterized by of the masculine overtones of Southern California’s flourishing car culture. Inspired by new technologies in the auto manufacturing, these “Finish Fetish” artists appropriated industrial materials such as car paint or lacquer to create artwork with pristine finishes.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control. The color blue is a proxy for both sadness, and a color that is emblematic of American law enforcement services. I Am Blue, 1 by American Artist is a sculpture that fuses a school desk with a ballistic shield.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Photography (Photography)

Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity. Matt Lipps created this diptych by photographing a single arrangement of cutouts. As in his analogous portrait of men, the middle section appears twice, on either side of the split, signaling a stutter, a caesura, or a schizophrenic break.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.

Photography (Photography)

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

Photography (Photography)

Collier Schorr’s prints upend conventions of portrait photography by challenging what it means to “document” a subject. American Flag (Scratch) (1999), for example, depicts an unidentified male subject clad in an American flag-print singlet. With his head and extremities out of frame, the camera focuses on his flush-red torso, his left nipple protruding from the singlet’s strap.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This dyptich installation is coming from a research/ installation Sa koša ke lerole (2016 – ongoing) started during the Montreal biennale (curated by Philippe Pirotte), then recently exhibited at Grahamstown National Arts Festival. The Polokwane Chorale Society, which was previously called Seshego Chorale Society, is based in Polokwane, Limpopo Province, South Africa. It has been in existence since 1978 – the first and longest livingadult choir in the Limpopo region.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video work Si Señor by Abigail Reyes is about the typical representation of women in Latin American office culture. Collaging together a chorus of subservient snapshots of women responding to an off-screen man with “si señor”, the accumulative effect of these spliced together scenes weighs heavy as the film plays on both humour and collective discomfort. In order to complete the work the artist watched hours upon hours of telenovelas, the impact of which on the collective consciousness is explored through her film.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

By Way of Revolution is a series that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For the work Wigan Pit-Brow Women: Intersections with the Caribbean (mobile) , Candice Lin studied English Victorian Arthur Munby’s racialized and masculinized drawings of working-class white female miners. Specifically, Lin’s work critically addresses Munby’s observations about the laborers’ femininity that was more concerned with the modesty of the women, than that they toiled in life-threatening situations. “Pit brow women” or “pit brow lasses” were female surface laborers at British collieries.

Photography (Photography)

Having a press card allowed Viktor Kochetov to photograph freely in public places, access to which was strictly regulated for amateurs. Seeking a way to transgress the reportage canon, the Kochetovs employed a method of taking images of large gatherings that emphasize the structure and “patterns” of the imaginary collective body. His 1978 photo of women sorting corn, titled Working women, builders of communism, are sorting corn… , is organized on this principle: the scarfs on the workers’ heads are perceived as an element of uniform, which creates a visual rhythm.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The installation work Men from Hyperion and Women from Phoebe (2011), for examples, features six guitars mounted on steel crossbar stands and connected to one another with slack wires. The electric guitars’ faceplates have been removed, revealing the built-in circuitry and electric pick-ups hidden under the surface. A DIY electronic circuit controls various sounds produced by the installation, while a pair of headphones allows participants encounter the work to engage on a different sensorial level.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) (2023) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Photography (Photography)

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .

Photography (Photography)

Vision (Bump’n’Curl) by Dannielle Bowman is from a series of photographs titled What Had Happened . The series blends a major historical event with small, personal images. The photographs retain fragments of the artist’s own heritage and investigate the concept of home, while gaining inspiration from the Great Migration, a movement in which African Americans from the South (including Bowman’s grandparents) moved to the North, and also the American West from 1916-1970.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices describing histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints. This work by Jane Jin Kasen and Guston Sondin-Kung explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The chapter Ayousha , of Judith Barry’s Cairo Stories , is a portrait-like work that consists of one plasma screen and one framed photograph. The project developed out of oral archives made from 215 interviews, which Barry conducted with women of varying social and economic classes in Cairo between 2003 and 2011. Her research started at the beginning of the Iraq War and concluded just after the Arab Spring.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In her new series titled Ninas Peruanas Cusquenas , Teresa Burga depicts young indigenous women from Peru’s Andean region, dressed in traditional garments. Sourcing imagery from the internet, the drawings recall an untitled series of drawings from 1974, in which Burga selected images of women at random from various print media, and then rendered the images on paper. Those drawings, like the newer ones, suggest the perils of images without context––how assumptions are made, stereotypes are formed, and knowledge is gathered.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream . This series by artist Chitra Ganesh comprises a large-scale narrative suite inspired by a 1905 feminist utopian (eponymous) text written by a Bengali writer and social reformer, Rokeya Sakhhawat Hossain. Educated thanks to the support of her elite family, Hossain was one of the few Bengali women of her generation writing in English.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

If one had been guessing at Takeshi Murata’s criticism of American consumerist culture up until watching Infinite Doors , it would be solidified after hearing the announcer from The Price is Right squawk prizes one after the next. In the two minutes of the film’s runtime, can count the word “new” used twenty-eight times, and “car”—the holy grail of prizes on that show—used eight times. The bodacious women introduce free prizes, the doors slide open repeatedly, and the crowd cheers with an insatiable appetite in a clear signal of an American propensity for numbing overconsumption.

Painting (Painting)

Got Your Back by Gisela McDaniel depicts two women of color from different ethnic backgrounds who share similar violent experiences. However, the sitters never met and were depicted separately by artist Gisela McDaniel. The painting is thus an artificial construct, whose warm, gentle and seemingly benign look Is undermined by the accompanying soundtrack detailing their horrific experiences.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct. The video features a group of women as they tenderly cradle lifelike baby dolls atop their rocking chairs. Although at first, the video might appear as a celebration of the maternal bond, the scene soon becomes eerie and unsettling as we see milk spilling out of the mothers’ mouths.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Erin Jane Nelson’s 2019 body of work Av, panels are covered in collaged images and shellacked with resin or epoxy: photographs of plants intermingle with pictures of men and women engaging in various spiritual activities, cartoons of mothers and their children, or black and white images of window panes. The panels and ceramics act as backdrops upon which Nelson attempts to establish connections between the natural world and the various cultural and religious orders we impose upon it. She incorporates Jewish symbolism and archival photographs alongside her ongoing photographic practice documenting the environmental collapse of her home region.

Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Horseback is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Horseback is a black and white photograph that depicts the arched shoulders of a horse, its slick mane splayed across its neck.

Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Oil is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Oil features a hand in front of an open hood of a car, checking the oil.

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*. He elaborates a historiographic narrative of this place and switches it into the domain of science fiction by proposing a photograph of the Memorial as it should appear in 500 000 years. The effigies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt become unrecognizable.