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The Overlooked Black Women Artists in 1970s 

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The Overlooked Black Women Artists in 1970s 

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In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization, gathered in New Jersey for their second retreat, where they worked together to formulate a collaborative letter.

The Heresies Collective, whose membership consisted predominately of white women, had just published its third feminist art journal, titled "Lesbian Art and Artists," but had neglected to feature a single woman of color. The Combahee River Collective, which was formed to raise consciousness about race and gender issues, had assembled to craft a response.

"We find it appalling," they wrote, "that a hundred years from now it will be possible for women to conclude that in 1977 there were no practicing Black and other Third World lesbian artists."

The critical debate that it provoked was an expression of the complex and often tumultuous relationship between mainstream feminism and the black women who were so often excluded from it-a tension that continues today. The activities undertaken by black women to push back against their erasure, in the late '60s through the early '80s, effectively amounted to a desire for a revolution.

It is from this fervor that a current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum gets its title: "We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85."

The show, which is one part of the museum's year-long initiative to reimagine feminist art, "A Year of Yes," highlights the work of black women artists during the height of second-wave feminism and serves as a record of their stories-to be remembered for the next hundred years and beyond.

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The Overlooked Black Women Who Altered the Course of Feminist Art

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In 1977, the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization, gathered in New Jersey for their second retreat, where they worked together to formulate a collaborative letter. The Heresies Collective, whose membership consisted predominately of white women, had just published its third feminist art journal, titled "Lesbian Art and Artists," but had neglected to feature a single woman of color.

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"Shakin' up power! Wakin' up power! Stirrin' up power! Troublin' power! Yes, Lord, power! Send power!" sings Sister Gertrude Morgan, a self-taught African American artist, musician and preacher in her song Power, released in 1970. Featuring only her voice and a tambourine, it is essentially a mantra, one which lends its title to a group show of 37 African American female artists that opened recently at Sprüth Magers, the German gallery that launched its Los Angeles branch a year ago, across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Curated by Todd Levin, the exhibition casts a wide net, spanning the late 19th century to the early 21st, and featuring painting, sculpture, photography and video. It also includes so-called "outsider" artists, such as Sister Morgan and Clementine Hunter, and "fine" artists including Lorna Simpson, Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar, though Levin bristles at the distinction. The exhibition is loosely organized thematically, with sections corresponding roughly to figuration, politics, abstraction and craft traditions, looking past distinctions in chronology, geography and media to tell a larger story.

Many of these juxtapositions are effective, such as a 1985 quilt, String by Rosie Lee Tompkins, placed near Bale Variant No 0023 (Totem) (2014), a pillar of colorful cloth by Shinique Smith, connecting the contemporary artist with the tradition of the Quilts of Gee's Bend. There are some missteps, however, such as the placement of Karon Davis's Mawu (2016), a delicate figure of a seated black woman cast in white plaster, which gazes up at Renee Cox's It Shall Be Named (1994), a photographic collage of a crucified African American man. Both works are powerful in their own right, without the imposition of an outside narrative.

"At their best, such exhibitions can function as virtual convenings, uniting artists through threads that have to do with matter," writes the artist Steffani Jemison in her catalogue statement. "And by matter, I refer not to material but rather to the stuff that makes up our work and its concerns. They propose a new way of thinking about kinship among things and people."

One of the threads that flows through the show is the painful legacy of slavery, which finds form in Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller's lifelike busts of a freedman and a freedwoman, and more recently in Kara Walker's video, National Archives Microfilm Publication M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road (2009). A departure from her stark, large-scale black-and-white silhouette wall works, the colorful video tells the true story of a black family brutalized by white men during the reconstruction era. Jemison's video Escaped Lunatic (2010-11) follows a Houston-based parkour team as they run and tumble throughout the city, recalling both fictional and historical narratives of black men running from authority, going back to runaway slave chronicles.

"Aesthetically and thematically, there are so many parallels generationally that need to be highlighted," says the Los Angeles-based artist Brenna Youngblood. "It's a multigenerational show, and that's almost unheard of." Youngblood's large, black wooden sculpture X (2012) references her minimalist predecessors of the 60s (most of whom were white men), while also connoting their contemporary, the black civil rights leader Malcolm X. Nearby, a work by the pioneering artist Faith Ringgold, Black Light Series #10: Flag for the Moon: Die Nigger (1969), depicts the American flag. When viewed with head cocked, the two words at the end of the work's title can be read through the stars and stripes. Sonya Clark's intimate weaving from almost 50 years later, Interwoven II (2016), also depicts the American flag, this time merged with the Confederate flag, a timely reminder of how much progress still needs to be made.

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Brenna Youngblood, X, 2012. Photograph: Josh White/Courtesy Honor Fraser Gallery

On the gallery's second floor, tucked away in a cove, is a selection of about 100 photographs from the Ralph DeLuca Collection of African American Vernacular Photography. Taken between the end of the civil war and the beginning of the civil rights era, these photos reflect a range of subjects, from weddings to musical bands, families, mothers, pornography and lynchings. It is a curious addition (would we expect the same from a survey of white artists?), but Levin felt its inclusion was important to lend the work some context, "to show what reality meant to some of these women at the time, and how they were able to still transcend that and create these amazing artworks", he says.

Power is not the first exhibition of its kind, but there is no question that artists of color and female artists are under-represented in the institutional art world. "It's not that there haven't been serious curatorial exhibitions," Levin said, "but in general it seems to be at a slower pace than it is for other genders and other colors." That it took two white gallerists from Europe to mount such an ambitious show of work by African American women in Los Angeles may seem strange to some, but it makes more sense when you look at the history of Sprüth Magers, who, for decades, has been dedicated to exhibiting the work of female artists who have not received the attention that their male peers have.

Whatever the show's curatorial weaknesses are, the bringing together of such a diverse group of black female artists, many of whose work has not been given its due, makes it an urgent and meaningful exhibition right now.
Topics

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Kara Walker, Karon Davis and the black female artists retelling US history

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"Shakin' up power! Wakin' up power! Stirrin' up power! Troublin' power! Yes, Lord, power! Send power!" sings Sister Gertrude Morgan, a self-taught African American artist, musician and preacher in her song Power, released in 1970.

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Based on handmade maquettes made with electrical wire, the sculptures are an act of upscaling playful ephemera into physically domineering artworks with a permanency and scale that transcends human limitations.

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Blain|Southern is a contemporary art gallery that occupies two spaces in London and Berlin.

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'Sprung a Leak' - Cecile B. Evans explores the movement of data, artificial intelligence, and the relationship between humans and machines.  This brand new installation examines the increasing influence that new technologies have on how we feel and act.

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Post Human DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece 1993

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Post Human DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece 1993

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The matter-of-fact acceptance of one's "natural" looks and one's "natural" personality is being replaced by a growing sense that it is normal to reinvent oneself; a sense that one can simply construct the new self that one wants, freed from the constraints of one's past and one's inherit genetic code. As radical plastic surgery, computer-chip brain implants, and gene-splicing become routine, our new technological and sociological environment is gradually shaping a new concept of self, a new construction of what it means to be a human being.

Post Human explores the new approaches to figurative art based on vital developments in biotechnology and computer science which redefine the notions of the self and of the human figure. The combination of these two sets of technologies will create not only new life forms and communication channels, but will shape new perceptions of time and space and even lead to new structures of thinking. Influenced or inspired by developments such as genetics and plastic surgery, the works in the show investigate how artists react and, at the same time, contribute to a new "post human" model of existence.

Keeping up with the social and technological trends that are inspiring it, the new artistic interest in figuration is conceptual rather than formal. Emerging through the channel of conceptual, body, and performance art of the late '60s and '70s, the artists featured in Post Human often find their subject matter in the media or in the history of art or commerce. Much of the new figurative art is reactive to and descriptive of the "real" world, but it cannot be called realistic in the conventional sense. With the concept of the real disintegrating through an acceptance of the multiplicity of reality models and through the embrace of artificiality, the new figurative art may mark the end of Realism.

As the organic, naturally evolving model of human life is replaced by the artificial evolution into the post-human, art is likely to assume a much more central role. Technology will make it possible to remodel our bodies and supercharge our minds, but art will have to help provide the inspiration for what our bodies should look like and what our minds should be doing. In the post-human future, artists may no longer be involved in just redefining art, but may also be involved in redefining life.

Organized by the FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and the DESTE Foundation.

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The matter-of-fact acceptance of one's "natural" looks and one's "natural" personality is being replaced by a growing sense that it is normal to reinvent oneself; a sense that one can simply construct the new self that one wants, freed from the constraints of one's past and one's inherit genetic code.

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Mona Hatum         “Culture is beyond communication” – Mona Hatum addresses her confused cultural identity. In her work, “Measures of Distance” she reads a letter from her mother. She overlays Arabic script and in the background we hear mummers of Arabic speech. Hatum’s mother is very much involved and part of her work, which shows the bravery of Islamic women that Shirin Neshat talks of. Her mother addresses Hatum’s “identity Crisis”.

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Mona Hatum         “Culture is beyond communication” – Mona Hatum addresses her confused cultural identity. In her work, “Measures of Distance” she reads a letter from her mother. She overlays Arabic script and in the background we hear mummers of Arabic speech. Hatum’s mother is very much involved and part of her work, which shows the bravery of Islamic women that Shirin Neshat talks of. Her mother addresses Hatum’s “identity Crisis”.

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Measures of Distance is a video work comprising several layered elements. Letters written by Hatoum's mother in Beirut to her daughter in London appear as Arabic text moving over the screen and are read aloud in English by Hatoum. The background images are slides of Hatoum's mother in the shower, taken by the artist during a visit to Lebanon. Taped conversations in Arabic between mother and daughter, in which her mother speaks openly about her feelings, her sexuality and her husband's objections to Hatoum's intimate observation of her mother's naked body are intercut with Hatoum's voice in English reading the letters.

Hatoum was born in Beirut to Palestinian parents and became an exile in Britain, during a short visit to London, when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. She attended art schools in London (Byam Shaw School of Art 1975-9, Slade School of Art 1979-81), where her experience of cultural displacement, both as a woman and an Arab national, informed much of her practice. She made Measures of Distance in Vancouver during a year as artist-in-residence at Western Front Art Centre. It is a Western Front production. Hatoum has said:

Although the main thing that comes across is a very close and emotional relationship between mother and daughter, it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war. In this work I was also trying to go against the fixed identity that is usually implied in the stereotype of Arab woman as passive, mother as non-sexual being ... the work is constructed visually in such a way that every frame speaks of literal closeness and implied distance.
(Quoted in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140).

In the video the decorative Arabic script of Hatoum's mother's letters floats over the images of her body like a veil or barbed wire, preventing total visual access to the image. It both conceals and reveals the woman inhabiting that body, explicating her as an active thinking and feeling being, an image which is emphasised by the frank conversation about her sexuality with her daughter. The Arabic and English parts of the sound-track have been given equal emphasis, 'creating a difficult and alienating situation for a Western audience who have to strain to follow the ' (Hatoum in Mona Hatoum 1997, p.140). The work evokes a strong sense of intimacy between a mother and daughter and suggests a creative and transformative relationship through the breaking of taboos around the maternal body. It is through the daughter's art-making project that the mother is able to present herself freely, in a form which cements a bond of identity independent of colonial and patriarchal concerns.

Further reading:
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Milan 1999, pp.11-12
Michael Archer, Guy Brett, Catherine de Zegher, Mona Hatoum, Mona Hatoum, London 1997, pp.13-14, 53, 56, 96, 138, 140-1, reproduced (colour) p.54-5, 96
Mona Hatoum, exhibition catalogue, Arnolfini, Bristol 1993, p.22, reproduced (colour) p.29

Elizabeth Manchester
February 2000

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'Measures of Distance', Mona Hatoum, 1988 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Measures of Distance', Mona Hatoum, 1988 Mona Hatoum left Beirut in 1975 for a short visit to London. When war broke out in the Lebanon she found it impossible to return. In this video, letters from her mother in Beirut, written in Arabic, move across the screen.

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Photo: ©Logan White, LA Nudes, Fire, 2013, Archival Pigment Print, mounted on sintra, 24" x 36", Edition 1 of 5.

Throughout the history of art, the female nude been an object of desire created by and for men for the pleasure of selling, owning, and beholding. It is only recently that female artists have reclaimed the sacred and profane flesh in order to explore the complex and intricate layers of existence. Now, a new exhibition celebrates the female gaze and the insights it holds into the mysterious being the lives inside the curves.

Curators Indira Cesarine and Coco Dolle have joined forces to created In the Raw: The Female Gaze on The Nude, now on view at The Untitled Space, New York, through June 4, 2016. The exhibition features a selection of photography, painting, sculpture, mixed media, and video by 20 female artists including Ellen Jong, Leah Schrager, Logan White, Meredith Ostrom. Kelsey Bennett, and Sophia Wallace, among others. The result is a wide array of uncensored perspectives that reveals its not uncommon for beauty and beast live together in the same body. Curator Indira Cesarine speaks with Crave about In the Raw.

Crave: How did the idea of "In the Raw: The Female Gaze on the Nude" come about?

Indira Cesarine: When I launched The Untitled Space gallery, one of my initiatives was to emphasize contemporary female artists and feminist art as a genre. The female gaze on the nude is often an examination and reflection of the artist's own personal set of experiences as a woman, versus that of the opposite sex. I think it is extremely important for women to be liberated from perceiving themselves only via the eyes of men.

Please speak about how you and co-curator Coco Dolle developed this idea for an exhibition?

The "female gaze" is a theme I have been thinking about for a long time. I was always working with the female nude as a theme in my work. When I started working full time as a photographer after graduating from Columbia University, (I graduated with a triple major from in Women's Studies, Art History and French), it occurred to me just how extreme the public is manipulated by the male gaze.

There's very little history of female artists comparatively and very little history of female artists addressing the nude of other women. When women work with nudes they are often working from their own personal experience. It's a dramatically different point of view because generally desire is not part of the equation. The visual narratives in this exhibit are inspired by challenging notions of beauty and body image. They explore female rites of passage and sexual desires. The nudes become an examination of what being a woman means to them channeled through their own personal experiences and perceptions.

Please speak about "the female gaze on the nude": how would you describe this perspective as illustrated by the works you have selected? What do you think makes it inherently female?

The female gaze really is the female perspective on life, on culture, on everything around us. They are inspired by their relationships, rites of passage, fears and fantasies, and they are relating to the subjects in a deeply personal and empowering way. It is a liberation of mind, body and spirit channeled through their own personal experience.

The female gaze relates not just to women but to humanity at large because it addresses subjects revolving around the human condition. What makes it inherently female is that for once it is female artists addressing this subject rather than heterosexual men who are forcing upon women a perspective that only relates to male desire and a male audience.

Women were not accepted as artists for the most part until the last 50 years or so and have a lot of work ahead to create any kind of real balance in the industry or our visual landscape. I felt in order for the exhibit to be powerful, it was important to present works not just with the point of view of one female artist, but of many, each with their own set of personal experiences and history.

All of the women share their own unique points of view on their experiences as women, and there are themes inspired by sisterhood, sexual desire and fantasy, female liberation and empowerment as well as the struggles women face in our society today. Overall there is a liberated personal expression that is uniquely female, but you would have to see the exhibit to experience that for yourself.

All Photos: Featured in "In The Raw: The Female Gaze on The Nude" Exhibit, Untitled Space Gallery, New York.
is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.

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Exhibit | In the Raw: The Female Gaze on the Nude

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Photo: ©Logan White, LA Nudes, Fire, 2013, Archival Pigment Print, mounted on sintra, 24" x 36", Edition 1 of 5. Throughout the history of art, the female nude been an object of desire created by and for men for the pleasure of selling, owning, and beholding.

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Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask

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Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask

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National Portrait Gallery | 9 March – 29 May 2017

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Works in this exhibition oscillate between concealment and extroversion.

Like most creative endeavours, a good exhibition needs an element of tension to keep it interesting. In the case of the National Portrait Gallery's collaboration with Gillian Wearing, we can soon enjoy the tension of a show about masks in a gallery given to portraiture.

Indeed portraits can be as formal and public as a royal commission, or as intimate and raw as a nude by Lucien Freud. But Wearing oscillates between these poles; in the past she has filmed confessional accounts by subjects in masks; she has worn a latex mask herself for photographic self-portraits; and she has hit the London streets to entreat the public to reveal secrets for her lens.

Claude Cahun, meanwhile, is one of those figures with whom the art world has an enduring interest. Wearing contends there is something masklike, and perhaps anonymous or at least mysterious, in her portraits. Cahun performs for the camera; it's a performance of androgyny or what's now called gender neutrality.

Cahun is no shrinking violet. Her silvery black and white images from the 1920s and 1930s are as bold as anything around today, so their historic effect must have been as profound as work by any of the Surrealists with whom she associated.

Wearing, by contrast, seems less outgoing. Despite the fact that she made her name with a film of herself dancing in a Peckham shopping centre, she gives few interviews and somewhat guards her own identity. So what Cahun can tell us about the former Young British Artist and vice versa will both be of great interest in this show.

Get free entry to over 240 museums, galleries and historic houses and 50% off major exhibitions

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Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask

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Works in this exhibition oscillate between concealment and extroversion. Like most creative endeavours, a good exhibition needs an element of tension to keep it interesting. In the case of the National Portrait Gallery's collaboration with Gillian Wearing, we can soon enjoy the tension of a show about masks in a gallery given to portraiture.

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is a collection of objects of varying sizes, made of various rough-hewn fabrics and stuffed. When installed, the boulder-like forms are accumulated into large group environments that the viewer can walk into and around. The objects inhabit an ambiguous, disturbing place between bodies, organic matter and rock. While they appear firm and weighty, the seams and slashes in the fabric betray their softness. Their shapes are evocative of cocoon-like forms, something also suggested by the series title, Embryology. Magdalena Abakanowicz made these works to reflect on regeneration and the development of human and animal nervous systems, topics she discussed with scientists in Poland during the early 1970s. The materials and scale of this work exemplify Abakanowicz's preoccupation with surface, texture and seriality.

Abakanowicz began her earliest cycle of these artworks, called the Abakans, during the 1960s. These objects were the product of the conditions in which the artist lived in Soviet-controlled Poland: in one room, with limited access to materials, the soft objects were woven using threads pulled from discarded ropes. Having previously made gouaches on canvas which she kept folded under her bed, Abakanowicz was able to store the large-scale sisal pieces in the same way. The artist's active use of a technique more commonly associated with a craft tradition is a central concern of these works, which stage the tension between hard and soft as well as monumentality and a poverty of means.

The artist has described the Abakans as 'Monumental, strong, soft and erotic' (Magdalena Abakanowicz, 'Reflections', in Institut Valencià d'Art Modern 2008, p.97). Historically they have been shown individually or installed in groups to create an environment. Resembling both organic and bodily forms, they vary in colour and shape. Made in 1969, Abakan Red (Tate ) is suspended from the ceiling, falling in folds that appear both vaginal and suggestive of a great protective cape. Abakan Orange 1971(Tate ) consists of a long orange rope-like form hanging from the ceiling, gradually diminishing in width to a thin thread connected to a large, roughly circular shape draped on the floor. Here the horizontal and vertical are held in tension in a dramatic interdependent connection.

The seriality of Embryology is also replicated in Backs 2009(Tate ), a group of humanoid figures shown hunched over, their spines towards the viewer. The figures appear pensive but also abject; it is unclear if they are bent in prayer or subjugation. The artist has described the work: 'people who saw the Backs would ask: "Is it Auschwitz?" "Is it a religious ceremony in Peru?" "Is it a dance of Ramayana?" The answer to these questions is affirmative, because it speaks about the human condition in general' (Abakanowicz, 'Reflections', in Institut Valencià d'Art Modern 2008, p.98).

Further reading
Magdalena Abakanowicz, 'Confession: Excerpts from My Autobiography', Sculpture, vol.24, no.8, October 2005, pp.30-7.
Konteksty, special issue on Magdalena Abakanowicz, vol.60, nos.3-4, 2006.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, exhibition catalogue, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencia 2008.

Lucy Askew and Rachel Taylor
November 2008

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'Embryology', Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1978-80 | Tate

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is a collection of objects of varying sizes, made of various rough-hewn fabrics and stuffed. When installed, the boulder-like forms are accumulated into large group environments that the viewer can walk into and around. The objects inhabit an ambiguous, disturbing place between bodies, organic matter and rock.

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The Neo Naturists : studio voltaire (08 July – 28 August 2016)

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The Neo Naturists : studio voltaire (08 July – 28 August 2016)

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Studio Voltaire presents a retrospective of the 1980’s performance group the Neo Naturists. This will be the first historical survey of the Neo Naturists work in a public institution.

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Studio Voltaire presents a retrospective of the 1980's performance group the Neo Naturists. This will be the first historical survey of the Neo Naturists work in a public institution.

The Neo Naturists are an important live art collective initiated in 1981 by Jennifer Binnie, Christine Binnie and Wilma Johnson. The group emerged as a part of London's subculture that arose from the squatting community in the aftermath of Punk and the emergence of the New Romantic club scene and the advent of Thatcherism. During this time a creative energy developed in the UK that sat outside established institutional practices of the time, creating its own network of activities, events, economies and personalities.

The Neo Naturists were a part of a cultural network of collaborators and peers that included figures such as BodyMap (Stevie Stewart & David Holah), Leigh Bowery, James Birch, Jill Bruce, Michael Clark, David Dawson, Peter Doig, Boy George, Maia Norman, John Maybury, Sophie Muller, Simon Foxton, Bruce Lacey, Andrew Logan, Grayson Perry, Genesis P.Orridge, Psychic TV, Derek Jarman, Princess Julia, Marilyn, Philip Sallon, Test Department, Jill Westwood, Dencil Williams and Cerith Wyn Evans.

The group established quite organically, whilst Christine Binnie and Wilma Johnson had been experimenting at St Martin's College with body painting as a way to expand past the canvas, Jennifer Binnie and Grayson Perry had also been using body paint as a way of exploring body image and identity at Portsmouth Polytechnic. United by a belief in the radical and subversive potential of bodypainting, the Neo Naturists took these private experiments to clubs and parties, which quickly developed into more formalized parts of the groups artistic practice.

Wearing little more than body paint, the group achieved a unique artistic voice, which contrasted with the highly polished aesthetic of 1980s London. In a cultural landscape that was decidedly slick, urban and modern, the Neo Naturists' work celebrated a particular kind of anarchic innocence, making frequent references to the English pastoral and homely pursuits such as camping, girl-guiding and harvest festivals.

In the Neo Naturists' performances, the body was both spectacle and metaphor for the social body. Presenting the nude, painted body with an almost Edenic lack of embarrassment, their performances were "bodypositive" and celebratory, in stark contrast to the increasingly commodified, 'sexually packaged' body widely promoted in the 1980s.

This retrospective includes archival materials from The British Film Insitute, The Michael Clark Company and the Neo Naturist Archive; alongside original works by Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie, Grayson Perry, John Maybury and Wilma Johnson. The exhibition offers an opportunity to experience a significant selection of the Neo Naturists' extraordinary practice first hand. The Neo Naturists have been neglected within contemporary discourse, yet the relevance and potential of their work and methods remains as sharply radical and transformative today as it was more than three decades ago.

This exhibition is supported by Thomas Dane, The Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council Grants for the Arts. A Night with the Neo Naturists is supported by Yana and Stephen Peel.

Download the free Neo Naturists publication including a commissioned text by Louisa Buck or collect your free copy at the gallery. Designed by An Endless Supply.

The Neo Naturists, Installation View, Studio Voltaire, 2016. Credit: Andy Keate.
Sellotape dresses with Marilyn, Crowndale Road, 1984
Flashing in the British Museum, Christine Binnie body painted and photographed by Wilma Johnson, British Museum London, 03 March 1982
Neo Naturist Cheer Leaders with Leigh Bowery and Michael Clark, Royal Opera House, London, 09 Feb 1986
Christine Binnie painted and photographed by Wilma Johnson, Central St Martins, London, 1980
Swimming and Walking Experiment Centre Point Fountains, Tottenham Court Rd London, August 1984
All images courtesy of the Neo Naturist Archive.

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Studio Voltaire presents a retrospective of the 1980's performance group the Neo Naturists. This will be the first historical survey of the Neo Naturists work in a public institution. The Neo Naturists are an important live art collective initiated in 1981 by Jennifer Binnie, Christine Binnie and Wilma Johnson.

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Upcoming exhibition at the Tate, 12th September 2017 - 8th February 2018. Whiteread's work addresses the absence of the human body in domestic environments.
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/rachel-whiteread

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'Human Scale' exhibition presents nine of the major contemporary sculptures obtained by the National Art Gallery over the past 15 years, such as Ron Mueck’s giant 'Head of a Baby'. All of the sculptures portray the human body using a figurative approach, but in a contemporary manner, using materials and scale in unexpected ways. Other works by artists include Evan Penny, Ugo Rondinone, Karin Sander and the late Louise Bourgeois.

https://www.gallery.ca/en/see/exhibitions/past/details/human-scale-10692

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Performing For The Camera : Tate Modern 

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Performing For The Camera : Tate Modern 

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Serious performance art, portraiture, or simply posing for a photograph… what does it mean to perform for the camera? - Helpful in looking at documenting performances :)

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Performing for the Camera - Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate

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Tate Modern exhibition Performing for the Camera examines the variety of ways in which the photographic image has both documented and developed our understanding of performance since the invention of photography as a medium in the nineteenth century.

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This exhibition is interesting as they provide information which evidently proves that the art world mirrors society; there is still unequal representation of artists, therefore there is unequal opportunity. They also include the galleries who didn't reply to their questionnaire.

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Is it even worse in Europe?

The Guerrilla Girls pictured outside the Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: David Parry/PA Wire

Archive
Guerrilla Girls: Is it even worse in Europe?

1 October 2016 - 5 March 2017

The Guerrilla Girls ' new commission for the Whitechapel Gallery revisits their 1986 poster stating "It's Even Worse in Europe".

Characteristically deploying their strategic combination of humour, information, bold graphics and a subversive use of public space, their latest campaign includes a banner installed on the front of the Gallery and a display of posters and new research.

Guerrilla Girls: Is it even worse in Europe? explores diversity in European art organisations. It presents responses to questionnaires sent to 383 directors about their exhibitions programme and collections. The questions were formulated to critically look at the narratives that are produced by cultural institutions.

The Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous, feminist activists was founded in 1985. Each member takes the name of a woman artist from the past as a pseudonym and in public their identities are hidden under gorilla masks. Using facts, humour and fake fur, they produce posters, banners, stickers, billboards, projections and other public projects that expose sexism, racism and corruption in art, film, politics and culture at large.

Coinciding with this new commission and exhibition, the Guerrilla Girls will also lead a week-long major public project at Tate Modern (4 - 9 October 2016), as part of Tate Exchange.

Thu 2 Mar 2017, 7pm | £9.50/£7.50 concs

In celebration of International Women's Day join a screening of filmmaker Amy Harrison's documentary Guerrillas In Our Midst (1992)alongside acclaimed documentarist Kim Longinotto's Eat the Kimono.

Sat 4 Mar 2017, 11.30am-6pm | £15/12.50 concs

This day-long event offers a platform to consider the position of women in the art world and address questions of inclusion and diversity, especially in relation to museum collections.

The Whitechapel Gallery Archive Displays are generously supported by:
Catherine and Franck Petitgas

Guerrilla Girls at the Whitechapel Gallery is supported by:
Valeria Napoleone XX
Omni Colour
New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

With additional support from:
Etxepare Basque Institute

Find out more

See the press release

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The Guerrilla Girls pictured outside the Whitechapel Gallery. Photo: David Parry/PA Wire 1 October 2016 - 5 March 2017 The Guerrilla Girls ' new commission for the Whitechapel Gallery revisits their 1986 poster stating "It's Even Worse in Europe".

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re.act.feminism - a growing archive and exhibition project on feminism and performance art travelling through Europe from 2011 to 2013. With Archive, Exhibitions, Workshops, Performances, Talks, Research

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NORMAL LOVE Precarious Sex. Precarious Work

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NORMAL LOVE Precarious Sex. Precarious Work

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The exhibition »normal love. precarious sex. precarious work«, curated by Renate Lorenz (assisted by Pauline Boudry and Wibke Straube«, focuses on differently sexualised and ethnicised gender and work relations.

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Die Ausstellung „normal love / precarious sex. precarious work" geht von den Fotografien und Texten der ‚maid of all work' Hannah Cullwick aus, die in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts in London entstanden. Ausgehend von ihren historischen Selbstinszenierungen klassen- und geschlechtdurchquerender Sexualität sind die beteiligten KünstlerInnen eingeladen, sich mit dem Zusammenhang von Sexualität und Arbeit zu beschäftigen.

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This exhibition has been made possible thanks to generous support from The Friends of York Art Gallery; The Henry Moore Foundation; Thomas Dane gallery, London and The University of York, and additional Art Fund support for the events programme.

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Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968

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Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968

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The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum is New York City's second largest in physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 1.5 million works.

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Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art

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Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art

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The first exhibition solely devoted to exploring the representation of the veil, its politics and poetics, in contemporary art.

Twenty artists and film-makers address the question of the veil in all its complexities and ambiguities, challenging any single or fixed cultural interpretation. Veil 's core is made up of a wide cross-section of international contemporary artists including: Faisal Abdu'Allah, Kourush Adim, AES art group, Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer, Farah Bajull, Samta Benyahia, Shadafarin Ghadirian, Ghazel, Emily Jacir, Ramesh Kalkur, Majida Khattari, Shirin Neshat, Harold Offeh, Zineb Sedira, Elin Strand and Mitra Tabrizian.

In collaboration with the New Art Gallery, Walsall, the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool and Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.

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Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art at Modern Art Oxford

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The first exhibition solely devoted to exploring the representation of the veil, its politics and poetics, in contemporary art. Twenty artists and film-makers address the question of the veil in all its complexities and ambiguities, challenging any single or fixed cultural interpretation.

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Solo exhibition by Bharti Kher who explores human relationships and women's role in society through a variety of mediums, most noticeably with her body plaster casts.
https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/the_exhibitions/exhibit_kher.html

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Solo exhibition by Flora Maclean who celebrates the grassroots of women's football by  providing a unique insight into the sport through her photography.

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Art and the Feminist Revolution. An exhibition held at the The Museum of Contemporary Art

Los Angeles in 2007

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The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

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WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution is the first institutional exhibition to examine comprehensively the international foundations and legacy of art made under the influence of feminism. This groundbreaking and long-awaited historical survey focuses on the crucial period of 1965 to 1980, when the...

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Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe

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Tate's recently launched (Dec 2016) research project into the history of performance at Tate. Many of the exhibitions are relevant to the Bodies of Difference module. A great resource for the history of exhibitions that deal with the body.