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THE RALPH TORNBERG/
MUSEUM DIRECTOR'S
DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

ALSO ON VIEW:

THE ART OF RICHARD TUTTLE

POETICS OF THE HANDMADE

MOCA FOCUS: ALEXANDRA GRANT

FROM CLOSE TO HOME: RECENT ACQUISITIONS OF LOS ANGELES ART


VISIT MOCA:
MOCA GRAND AVENUE
THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA
MOCA PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER

• RESOURCES

  • 18th Street Art Center
  • A Living Library
  • ALOUD at Central Library
  • California Institute of the Arts
  • Colburn School the Herbert Zipper Auditorium
  • Echoes: Women Inspired by Nature
  • Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions
  • Faith Wilding/subRosa
  • FEM·IN·ART at UCLA
  • Getty Center
  • Japanese American National Museum
  • LA Gay & Lesbian Center
  • LACE
  • Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
  • LTTR
  • MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
  • Make / Shift Magazine
  • National Center for the Preservation of Democracy
  • New Center for Psychoanalysis
  • Orange County Center for Contemporary Art
  • Orange County Museum of Art
  • Otis College of Art and Design
  • REDCAT
  • Santa Monica Museum of Art
  • Skirball Cultural Center
  • The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson
  • The Feminist Art Project
  • The Society for the Activation of Social Space Through Art and Sound
  • UCLA Film and Television Archive
  • [From Site to Vision] the Women’s Building in Contemporary Culture

• RELATED EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS

  • (Tender) Assembly
  • A Tribute to the Women of Juarez
  • Aqui No Hay Virgenes: Queer Latina Visibility
  • Global Feminisms
  • Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, and Suzy Lake, 1972–1978
  • Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone
  • Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists, 1980–2006
  • Normalization at Outpost for Contemporary Art
  • Shared Women at LACE
  • The Moral Museum: Selections from the Bick Archive
  • The Performing Archive: Restricted Access
  • The Sculptures of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air
  • Where Did Our Love Go? film series at REDCAT
  • Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film & Video

The first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution focuses on the crucial period 1965–80, during which the majority of feminist activism and artmaking occurred internationally. The exhibition includes the work of 120 artists from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Comprising work in a broad range of media—including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art—the exhibition is organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses. Curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

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Welcome to the WACKsite, the community driven component of moca.org dedicated to enriching viewers’ understanding of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and its many supporting programs.

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WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution
edited by Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark
Co-published by The MIT Press

In the 1970s, women changed the way art was made and talked about forever. WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is a long-awaited international survey that chronicles the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring groundbreaking works by artists such as Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilman, Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Mendieta, and Annette Messager, who came of age during that period — as well as others such as Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono, whose careers were well established.

The book opens with a rich, full-color plate section in which works by over 120 artists are grouped into themes, including Abstraction, Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, and Making Art History. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz. Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information, while accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer a fresh look at feminist art practice from a cross-cultural perspective. Topics such as the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, women’s art under the Pinochet dictatorship, and mapping a global feminism provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves.

Working in a diverse range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, film, and video, the artists in WACK! made feminism one of the most important influences on art of the late twentieth century.

Essays by: Cornelia Butler, Judith Russi Kirshner, Catherine Lord, Marsha Meskimmon, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Peggy Phelan, Nelly Richard, Valerie Smith, Abigail Solomon Godeau, and Jenni Sorkin

Entries by: Esther Adler, Cornelia Butler, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane Hyun, Susan Jenkins, Lisa Gabrielle Mark, Rebecca Morse, Corrina Peipon, Alexandra Schwartz, Jenni Sorkin, Linda Theung, and Dawson Weber

Check back soon to purchase a WACK! catalogue from the MOCA store.

originally posted February 23, 2007

WACK! catalogue essayist Richard Meyer writes on the debate surrounding Martha Rosler’s collage Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain: Hot House, or Harem and the WACK! catalogue cover:

Feminism Uncovered
Richard Meyer on the WACK! Catalogue
at ARTFORUM.com

originally posted July 16, 2007

Lesbian Art Project, An Oral Herstory of Lesbianism , 1979, slide projection, dimensions variable, courtesy Jennifer Sorkin and Lesbian Art Project; installation photo by Brian Forrest

Download (mp3)

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Untitled (Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and her Master of Ceremonies enter the New Museum)

© Lorraine O’Grady, 2007

Mlle Bourgeoise Noire first won her title in 1955. After 25 years of maintaining a lady-like silence, in 1980 she began invading art openings to give people a piece of her mind.

She wore a gown and cape made of 180 pairs of white gloves, 360 gloves in all. Here is a brief version of MBN’s “backstory,” taken from the signage for the Wadsworth Atheneum installation of the performance:

On the Silver Jubilee of her coronation in Cayenne, the capital of Guyane, MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE (Internationale), who could still fit into her coronation gown and cape of 360 white gloves, celebrated by invading the New York art world. During her anniversary tournée, she attended several openings unannounced: while all eyes were on her, she smiled, distributed four dozen white chrysanthemums and removed her cape. With the whip-that-made-plantations-move, she applied 100 lashes to her bare back, then shouted out an occasional poem.

The first time MBN invaded an art opening was at Just Above Midtown/Downtown, the black avant-garde gallery, in June 1980. JAM had just inaugurated a new space in Tribeca. The invasion was her response to the tame, well-behaved abstract art that had recently appeared in the “Afro American Abstraction” show at PS 1, an exhibit to which JAM had contributed a majority of artists.

The “occasional poem” she shouted at the JAM opening was:

THAT’S ENOUGH!
No more boot-licking…
No more ass-kissing…
No more buttering-up…
No more pos…turing
of super-ass..imilates…
BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!

Her next invasion was of the New Museum, at the opening of the “Persona” show in September 1981. The exhibit included nine artists using personas in their work. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire called it “The Nine White Personae Show.” When invited to give the outreach lectures to schoolkids for the show, she’d replied, “Let’s talk after the opening.”

The poem shouted on the occasion of the New Museum’s Persona opening was:

WAIT
wait in your alternate/alternate spaces
spitted on fish hooks of hope
be polite wait to be discovered
be proud be independent
tongues cauterized at
openings no one attends
stay in your place
after all, art is
only for art’s sake
THAT’S ENOUGH don’t you know
sleeping beauty needs
more than a kiss to awake
now is the time for an INVASION!

After the opening, she was dis-invited from giving the outreach lectures to schoolkids.

Click Thumbnails to view “MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE GOES TO THE NEW MUSEUM”

originally posted April 5, 2007

The following is from Lorraine O’Grady’s art talk, presented at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA on March 22, 2007.

Notes for MOCA gallery talk
March 22, 2007

© Lorraine O’Grady

Now that I have a captive audience….

First, I want to thank Connie Butler, for her ability to SEE, to see that there was, and has always been more to art and to the feminist revolution than could be contained in the now canonical but limited Anglo-American-centric version of feminist history.

I also want to thank Marsha Meskimmon for her WACK! catalogue article, “Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Feminist Art Globally,” which opens the article section and provides the subsequent theoretical spine of the show. Personally, I think everyone should memorize this article so we can just move on. It’s a brilliant piece, and one from which I’ve gained many fresh insights into the historic fate of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire.

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Visual Culture, Race and Globalization: Is Feminism Still Relevant?
Thursday, March 29
7pm
The Ahmanson Auditorium at MOCA Grand Avenue

A conversation with Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside), Judith Halberstam (USC), Phyllis J. Jackson (Pomona College), Amelia Jones (University of Machester), and Yong Soon Min (UCI). Moderated and organized by Jennifer Doyle and Judith Halberstam.

“A public conversation about the limits of feminism, and the ways in which many of us – out of a commitment to (for example) anti-racist, Marxist, anti-homophobic projects, out of a commitment to thinking outside the box of US Imperialism, push our work beyond the official and unofficial boundaries of feminist cultures.

This roundtable conversation will therefore explore the wave of renewed interest in feminist art with a critical eye, and ask questions like the following: Where is feminist critical thought and art-making now? What happened to the cutting edge of radical feminism and its intensities? What happened to the anti-racist & anti-homophobic interventions of feminists like Audre Lorde?

This event is more of a conversation than a traditional panel, and we anticipate an active & engaged audience.”

-Jennifer Doyle

This program is presented by the Center for Feminist Research in conjunction with WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.

Info 213/740-1739
FREE

originally posted March 28, 2007

Sunday, March 4
11am and 2pm
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Join us for two walkthroughs of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Using a non-traditional format, a multi-generational gathering of artists, writers, curators, and feminist-minded folk will engage in a roving discussion of the exhibition. Moderated by Jennifer Doyle and Catherine Lord. Sensible shoes recommended.

UPDATE:

A note from Jennifer Doyle:

Walks Through the Revolution: Two distinct gallery walkthroughs that honor how feminist art belongs to each of us. We hope to structure an event that creates the space to acknowledge the diverse histories both of the artists who made the work, and those who have been inspired by it.

During each walk-through, we expect to make between six and eight stops – at each stop we will ask artists in the audience to speak about the work on display. We’ll open up the floor to questions and comments from other audience, and, over the course of each walkthrough, develop a conversation about the exhibit and the current wave of interest in feminist art-making. The morning and afternoon walkthroughs cover completely different portions of the exhibit.

These are not comprehensive tours of the exhibition (see MOCA’s calendar for other gallery tours) – these are instead wanderings that mirror the thoughts and questions of the collective.

Below are some of the artists and writers who have promised to attend the walkthroughs:

Terry Wolverton, Eileen Myles, Linda Bessemer, Mary Kelly, Monica Mayer, Marta Minujin, Louise Fishman, Ming Yuen S. Ma, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lynn Hershman, Suzi Lake, Lorraine O’Grady, ORLAN, Magdelena Abakanowicz, Margaret Harrison, Nizan Shaked, Mary Bauermeister, Leah Lacy (Jay de Feo estate), Sylvia Sleigh, Mary Beth Edelson, Yvonne Rainer, Harmony Hammond, Faith Wilding, Carolee Schneemann, Suzanne Lacy, Kimberley Meyer

Other people we know will be in attendance include:
Alma Lopez, Chon Noriega, Lisa Steele, Kirsten du Four, Alison Hoffman, Erika Suderburg, Emily Roysdon, Michelle Dizon, Rachel Kushner, Lisa Bloom, Sue Ellen Case, Susan Foster, Julia Meltzer, June Wayne, Barbara Hammer

Join us!

INFO 213/621-1745 or education@moca.org
FREE with museum admission

originally posted February 23, 2007