Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist. Spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, the exhibition unites more than fifty pieces, including Mutu’s signature large-scale collages as well as video works, never-before-seen sketchbook drawings, a site-specific wall drawing, and sculptural installations.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans five decades. She is an American feminist artist and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces which examine the role of women in history and culture. Born in Chicago, Illinois, as Judith Cohen, she changed her name after the death of her father and her first husband, choosing to disconnect from the idea of male dominated naming conventions. By the 1970s, Chicago had coined the term "feminist art" and had founded the first feminist art program in the United States. Chicago's work incorporates skills stereotypically placed upon women artistically, such as needlework, counteracted with stereotypical male skills such as welding and pyrotechnics.
The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.
Barbara Kruger was born oin Newark, New Jersey. She spent a year at Syracuse University in 1964 and a semester at Parsons School of Design in New York in 1965, where she studied with Diane Arbus and graphic designer Marvin Israel. In 1966, she took a job with Condé Nast, working in the design department of Mademoiselle. She was named that magazine’s head designer a year later. For the next decade, Kruger supported herself doing graphic design for magazines, book jacket designs, and freelance picture editing.
She began to employ found images in her art, mostly from mid-century American print-media sources, with words collaged directly over them.These early collages, in which Kruger deployed techniques she had perfected as a graphic designer, inaugurated the artist’s ongoing political, social, and especially feminist provocations and commentaries on religion, sexuality, racial and gender stereotypes, consumerism, corporate greed, and power.
Adrian Piper is a conceptual artist whose work, in a variety of media, focused on racism, racial stereotyping and xenophobia for over three decades; and now investigates the deeper spiritual and ideological pathologies that cause them.
She is a celebrated pioneer in conceptual and performance art as well as analytic philosophy. Born in New York City, Piper studied visual art and philosophy, exhibiting her work nationally and internationally from the late 1960s onward. In 1987, she became the first African American woman to be tenured as a professor of philosophy. Piper’s earliest performance works explored the constructions of identity as well as their impact on states of consciousness and perception. These groundbreaking performances introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of conceptual art, opening up this ostensibly “pure” theoretical space to real, lived experience.
Doris Salcedo is a Colombian-born sculptor. Salcedo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1980, before traveling to New York, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, and is generally composed of items of furniture. She is the eighth artist to have been commissioned to produce work for the turbine hall of the Tate Modern gallery in London. Her piece, Shibboleth (2007), is a 167-metre-long crack in the hall's floor that Salcedo says "represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe".
Marina Abramović was born into a high-profile Yugoslavian family. Her work draws its energy from this celebrity and familial culture, which has met extraordinary tests of the body over long periods of time. Her Performance Art has featured repetitive actions, physical injury (including self-mutilation) and long periods of inactivity. During her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (March 10 through May 31, 2010), she sat almost motionless opposite another participant for her piece The Artist is Present, whenever the museum was open: 736 hours and 30 minutes. Abramović's Performance work focuses on the body’s stamina, strength, ability to endure pain and powers of concentration over long periods of time. Her work also follows her family's code of ethics: the mind and body should be resilient, disciplined and able to endure extreme hardship - testing one's will to survive.
These five women artists have paved the way for future women artists. They are all well respected in the art world. They are all still alive and active. Their works will live on forever.
Work Cited
www.brooklynmuseum.org
www.wikipedia.com
www.rogallery.com
www.radicalpresenceny.org
www.arthistory.about.com
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