Events

view times

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an exhibition Cornelia H. Butler is curating for 2005, will be the first comprehensive museum survey of international feminist art. Diverse, radical, and fractured, the feminist art movement is historically confined to a single decade, the 1970s, an era during which the majority of American feminist activism occurred. However, feminist activity in art spans three generations, beginning with women artists engaged in an individual studio practice who had neither the language of feminism nor the privilege of collectivity. This discussion will focus on the parameters of such an exhibition in terms of chronology, international scope, and social context. Finally, in terms of methodology, does the research for such a project begin with the “canon,” such as it is, of so-called feminist artists or does the subject require a new, more inclusive route of inquiry and research in short a rethinking of the structure of an historical, canonical exhibition?

Butler is Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where she has organized numerous exhibitions, including Flight Patterns (2000/01), Afterimage: Drawing Through Process (1999), and The Power of Suggestion: Narrative and Notation in Contemporary Art (1996). From 1992 to 1995 she was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, State University of New York. Previously she worked at Artists Space and the Des Moines Art Center. She received an MA in Art History from the University of California,  Berkeley.