This article is part of our latest dedicated museum section, which focuses on new artists, new audiences and new ways of thinking about exhibitions.
TARRYTOWN, NY – Judy Chicago is still amused — and not a little outraged — as she recalls how male critics first reacted to her work and that of other pioneering female artists.
The men had a special disdain for ‘The Dinner Party’, Mrs. Chicago’s 1979 sculptural installation, whose place settings, inspired by illustrious women, contained porcelain paintings and embroidery.
“The female art?” she said in mock indignation during a recent video call. She added: “You shouldn’t think about them† They are not art, are they? They are craft†
But Mrs. Chicago, still an iconoclast with a silver head and dyed purple curls, has lived to get the last word. Her work has become a foundational piece of feminist art and now the prototypes for two of her records are about to become respected guests at another party. There they will interact with a round 1893 Shaker tapestry by Elvira Curtis Hulett, while an unnamed aluminum head that Louise Bourgeois covered in tapestries in 2002 will keep company with a silk brocade pincushion that Dolley Madison, a former first lady, made. of fabric scraps.
Such chronologically strange couples are at the heart of ‘Women’s Work’, an exhibition that will underline how the creations of contemporary women artists draw on the household objects of past centuries, almost all of them also made by women. From May 27 to September 26 at the Lyndhurst Mansion, a museum of Gothic Revival homes in Tarrytown, NY, “Women’s Work” will display more than 125 works of art—almost all of them American—not only in the estate’s exhibition gallery, but also from its period Rooms.
In those lavish spaces, which recently served as the interior for the hit HBO series “The Gilded Age,” the pieces will be “in conversation,” said Howard Zar, the museum’s executive director. One can only imagine what a 1990 hand-painted porcelain soup tureen by Cindy Sherman, depicting a self-portrait of the artist as Madame de Pompadour, might say to Sèvres’ delicate, hand-painted cups and saucers from the early 19th century. century. it on the dining table of the mansion.
Mr. Zar said in an interview that he got the idea for “Women’s Work” after Helen Molesworth was fired from her position as chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2018 because of what the museum described as “creative differences”. (Some in the art world claimed she was fired for her staunch support of female and minority artists.) He was further inspired by “Womanhouse,” a 1972 installation of works by feminist artists in a Victorian mansion in Hollywood, hosted by Mrs. Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, whose work has also been featured in the Lyndhurst show.
The new exhibit is “a discussion of what these women were doing, what was revolutionary about it, what was beautiful about it,” said Mr. zar. But it’s designed not only to highlight how contemporary women artists have reclaimed and reinterpreted traditional techniques, but also to show that those early crafts are more than just, well, women’s work. Often art in their own right, they provided a precious avenue for self-expression and an independent income.
When women “didn’t have families to care for them, they had to find a way to survive,” said Nancy Carlisle, the senior curator of collections at Historic New England, a Massachusetts heritage organization that features colonial-era artifacts. era. Ms. Carlisle hosted “Women’s Work” with Becky Hart, an independent contemporary art curator who recently retired from the Denver Art Museum.
Their selections help save figures such as Idelle Weber, one of the early pop artists, from obscurity, as well as historical women such as Elizabeth Adams (1825-98), whose copy of the self-portrait of the French court painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun will be hung in the photo gallery of Lyndhurst Mansion. Adams “had the advantage of being well-off and not married, so she could have the determination to learn to paint,” said Ms. Carlisle.
But some women on the show remain anonymous, such as the creator of an early 20th-century black rag doll, with cap and apron, believed to have been created by her African-American nanny for a white child. It will occupy one of the museum’s bedrooms with ‘Brenda’, Faith Ringgold’s 1976 soft sculpture of an elegantly dressed black woman.
‘This was a black woman introducing herself,’ Mr Zar said at the museum, referring to the ancient doll, ‘and she was probably a servant at the time, with no agency. And I wanted to put him next to this Faith Ringgold doll, because this is about a black women’s claims agency.”
That museum bedroom will also feature fairy-tale-inspired cloth dolls by Kiki Smith that combine 19th-century folk art forms with her own painting. “I have a great appreciation for the creativity of the past,” said Ms. Smith, but “to make it live,” she added, “you have to redecorate it or breathe new life into it, or breathe life into a shape.”
Many of the show’s works do this in intriguing ways. Sabrina Gschwandtner’s “Quilts in Women’s Lives V” (2014) consists of 16 millimeter strips of films of women sewing and crafting – documentaries that the Fashion Institute of Technology had removed from its collection. And Paula Hayes has reinvented the 19th century terrarium, giving her designs a womb-like shape and a side opening. “It doesn’t seem like a radical difference, but it is,” Ms Hayes said.
Other pieces subtly or shamelessly undermine their historical antecedents. In the mansion’s library, the cut-paper silhouettes in Kara Walker’s 1997 book “Freedom: A Fable” may look like the work of genteel Victorian ladies, but they contain tales of racial oppression. Ms. Ringgold delivers a similar surprise in ‘Feminist Series: Of My Two Handicaps #10’, part of her decades-long series of Tibetan-style thangkas (scroll paintings). However, the stitched vertical letters are not Tibetan script.
“On these painted landscapes I have printed statements of black women in gold paint, dating from slavery to the present day,” Ms Ringgold wrote in an email. This one includes words from Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American congresswoman: “Of my two disabilities, being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.”
Even some of the tiniest objects in “Women’s Work” make outsized comments. A jewelry box will hold 19th-century cameos, with their ethereal portraits of femininity, alongside a raw, realistic version of Catherine Opie. Her 2019 gem-lined cameo for the LizWorks jewelry line shows herself, tattooed and bare-chested, feeding her son. The case also includes “Pocahontas Jewelry Set” (2014), a ring, pendant, and earrings by Native American artists Keri Ataumbi and Jamie Okuma, who were inspired by colonial paintings of the woman who called Mrs. Ataumbi “the iconic indigenous female.”
“Great dialogue there,” she said of the group screening of the case.
But perhaps the sharpest criticism will come from the video of the 1966 exhibition of Yoko Ono’s performance ‘Cut Piece’, which invited spectators to come on stage one by one and cut off a piece of her clothing while she remained silent. sit. Ms. Hart sees this work as capturing “a history of violence against women’s bodies” that will find particular resonance in a heavily decorated Victorian setting.
“I think this piece by Yoko Ono cuts through all that in a way that nothing else in the show does,” she said.
However, ‘Women’s Work’ will also consistently demonstrate how much female artists have achieved. The assemblages represent their progress in erasing the distinction between art and craft, by claiming that each medium was dignified and that the intimate, the personal, and the domestic were legitimate creative subjects.
“It’s something to celebrate that artists can now be themselves in their work,” said Ms. Chicago. But, she added, “this battle is far from over.”