Look at #MeToo

Maybe my antennae is super sharpened right now, but an off shoot of the attention that women in general are getting right now seems to manifest itself in a series of exhibitions of women in America.  

Here is San Diego there are three shows featuring women of color.   Alanna Airitam has made a series of works called the Golden Age which places black portraits in historical context. The result is a lush, proud and generous view of a people who were made to feel less than for far too long. The Artist Odyssey commissioned David and Barbarella Fokos to create From Haarlem to Harlem: short film about the Golden Age which is well worth the 20 minutes. Her work will be featured in About Face from April 21 until June at the San Diego Art Institute. You need to see these works in person as they seem to straddle a line between photo and painting even through they are printed images. 

Alanna Airitram, works on loan to the exhibition by Larry and Debra Poteet

Alanna Airitram

Basically working with the same issues, “It is hard for me to recall seeing a Black person represented in a museum or contemporary space as a young person,” reflects artist Erica Deeman, showing her photo series Silhouettes and Brown at the Museum of Photographic Arts as part of its “Artist Speaks” which started at the end of April. “I reflect back upon this and wonder upon the impact for me personally. I think one of the reasons I make the work I do is to address this absence.” This show is on until September. 

The color of the background matches the color of the skin in this Brown series

Notice the reflection of the artist in the eye of the sitter

Silhouettes are very large images and are not just the outlines but subtle highlights revealing contours. 

The artist herself speaks directly to you about both series on display. I loved this very large video which made me feel she was in the room with me. She was raised in England but noticed the strong difference in how people of color are treated in the US when she moved here. 

Another women of color speaking out is Sadie Barnette: DEAR 1968,… In Dear 1968,… artist Sadie Barnette has taken  the file that the FBI amassed after her father joined the Black Panther Party in 1968. She was born in 1984, thus the title refers to a large drawing in graphite, “Dear 1968,” “Love, 1984” Barnette got  her father’s 500-page FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act which she has decorated in various glittery vinyl and rhinestone stickers.

What appears black printing in this photo is dark graphite pencil hand drawn.

On another wall, she has transformed the file’s official stamps into a domestic-style wallpaper. On top of the wallpaper, a pair of photographs show her father in his Army uniform after being drafted to fight in Vietnam in 1966, and just two years later in his Black Panther uniform, fighting against racism on his own soil.

I have recently written Picked RAW Peeled blogs about the following exhibitions:

SD Art Prize 2017 at the Athenaeum and 2018 announcement Picked RAW Peeled by Patricia Frischer

Artist Eleanor Greer selected as 2018 Business of Art Scholar Picked RAW Peeled by Patricia Frischer
Gabrielle Bakker at Lux Institute Picked RAW Peeled by Patricia Frischer 

Seventeen on Being 17 at the Cannon Art Gallery Picked RAW Peeled by Patricia Frischer

I would be remiss not to mention the women of the 2017 and 2018 SD Art Prize at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla.  Rizzhel Mae Javier and Victoria Victoria Fu with Mathew Rich are showing May and June 2018 and Anne Mudge with emerging artist Erin Dace Behling will be showing in 2019 along with and established artist Robert Matheny with emerging artist Max Robert Daily 

Rizzhel  Mae Javier and Fu/rich in the background. at the Athenaeum. Please Note{ Rizzhel Mae Javiar is also artist in residence at the New Children's Museum currently. 

Ann Mudge

Erin Dace Behling

Artist Eleanor Greer selected as 2018 Business of Art Scholar  and was featured at Mission Federal ArtWAK as part of her scholarship sponsored by SDVAN. She was also part of the SDSU student award exhibition that is on at the same time as the SD Art Prize at the Athenaeum. 

Gabrielle Bakker is artist in residence at Lux Institute and the work will be on view during Lux at Night on May 19th, 2018 

Prom Dresses: Seventeen on Being 17. Seventeen female artists evoke and interpret being 17 years old through the great American Prom. In their work, the artists explore this girlhood rite of passage and all its uncertainty, excitement, doubt and hype. Why does Prom still carry such meaning for many, even years later? Featuring the work of Maite Benito Agahnia, Manuelita Brown, Diana Carey, Bronle Crosby, Susan Darnall, Ellen Dieter, Kaori Fukuyama, Julia C R Gray, Diane Hall, Kathleen Kane-Murrell, Kathy McChesney, Lori Mitchell, Gillian Moss, Alison Haley Paul, Julia San Roman, Christine Schwimmer, Gail Titus, Theresa Vandenberg Donche, Brenda York. Cannon Art Gallery, Carlsbad End June 17 and showing Tuesday - Saturday 11 am - 5 pm Sunday 1 - 5 pm

Christine Schwimmer

In just reading 2-3 editions of the New Yorker Magazine in the last month, I have noticed the following exhibitions.

Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was the inspiration for my own set of banners painted as the backdrop for the Passport to Brazil event produced by the Encinitas Friends of the Art.

Tarsila

Encinitas Friends of the Arts Presents Passport to Brazil Picked RAW Peeled by Patricia Frischer. Four banners by Patricia Frischer

Shelia Hicks from Nebraska at age 83 is and has a show at the Pompidou honoring seven decades of work in Paris.

Francesca DiMattio has a solo show at Salon 94 Bowery in New York of her amazing ceramic works described as “a rollicking revenge fantasy for every women artist who has ever been dismissed as de trop.”

Radical Women; Latin American Art 1960-1985 is showing at the Brooklyn Museum with a theme of resisting oppression. We loved the photograph by Liliana Porter called Untitled (hands and triangle) from 1973.