While you’re on your winter break (if you’re a current student), you might have some free time to travel or just to visit a museum in town. I started making a list of some interesting things to see in the New York area over the break, but I soon wanted to expand it to include other interesting places! I found quite a few art exhibitions … Continue reading Planning Any Winter Break Travel?
“The whole world, as we experience it visually comes to us through the mystic realm of color.” – Hans Hofmann {Liz Atzberger is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates installation art from all mediums, but most famously with plasticings, magnets, and other unconventional sources.} {Liz Atzberger’s installation “Rods and Cones” is part of HYPERCOLOR, an exhibit at Small Black Door in Ridgewood, Queens.} {You can find more of … Continue reading HYPERCOLOR
By Simi Johnston Simi Johnston is a student at Sarah Lawrence College who works in mixed media arts and studies gender theory. She grew up in Vermont and recently went on birth control. Fuck Pretty Fuck Pretty is an all female photography exhibit based in Los Angeles and curated by Angela Featherstone. Though the show recently ended its term in the Robert Berman gallery, its … Continue reading WOMEN X ART X SIMI JOHNSTON
By Simi Johnston Simi Johnston is a student at Sarah Lawrence College who works in mixed media arts and studies gender theory. She grew up in vermont and recently went on birth-control. A week after my 20th birthday, I had my first naked photo taken of me. At the time, I was in Alaska with my family. With thousands of miles separated us from society, … Continue reading A Naked First
Adding insult to injury, I got this news about the censorship of a David Wojnarowicz piece at the National Portrait Museum on World AIDS Day. David Wojnarowicz was an artist who passed away in 1992 due to AIDS-related illness; he used a variety of media, like collage, text, and video, to share his experiences as a working-class prostitute and young, gay man with a world that was largely not ready to hear these stories. He inspired me as a high school student while I attempted to use the art media around me to construct narratives that I didn’t find in the mainstream.
My fellow queer/feminist art enthusiast and librarian pro, Kate Angell, sent me this article by Blake Gopnik at the Washington Post. Gopnik makes great arguments against censorship in art and highlights a different interpretation of Wojnarowicz’s video piece in question, “A Fire in My Belly.” The piece is a 30-minute meditation on Peter Hujar, an artist, colleague, and former lover of Wojnarowicz’s, who also passed away due to AIDS complications. Continue reading “David Wojnarowicz Censored on World AIDS Day”
Many of us RE/VISIONIST staffers are excited to announce our involvement in the 5th Annual BIG SHE-BANG. Editor Rosamund Hunter and myself (Web Editor) are both active members of For the Birds, the organizing collective that presents the Big She-Bang. Public Relations Manager Nydia Swaby will be speaking on a panel about Youth & Media, regarding her experience teaching young girls African-American history at Girls for Gender Equity. Even contributors Lauren Denitzio and Stephanie Land are part of it! Click through for a press release with all the information on the event. Continue reading “For the Birds Collective Presents: The 5th Annual BIG SHE-BANG”
by Lauren Denitzio
As a radical and as a feminist, it is tempting to assume that those around me are all “on the same page” or equally aware of the certain privileges we each possess or the conditioning and historical disadvantages we have experienced. As an artist and illustrator it is tempting for me to assume that my audience is comfortable with anti-homophobic, anti-sexist, and sex positive themes. Despite sporting the “radical” or “left-wing” label, these groups – whose members I consider friends and colleagues – are not exempt from the necessity of challenging our views on gender, patriarchy, and other feminist issues. I have started to examine the ways in which visual resistance is used by feminist voices within these groups and how prevalent, or not, certain issues have become in radical circles.
Sandra Campbell, in her essay Creating Redemptive Imagery, makes valuable observations concerning the role of the individual in shaping what is acceptable representations of power structures and violence against women in visual culture. She calls on individuals to make it their responsibility to discuss how the representation of these establishments in the media can affect change. She then states that “by doing this we will lead the way to the establishment of structures and supports for artists and others in our cultural industries to develop, to market, and to disseminate a wide range of alternatives.” It is the range of alternatives, the expression of another world where patriarchal power structures do not exist, that needs to be creatively represented if the popular mindset is going to shift to its favor. Continue reading “The Necessity of Feminist Voices in Radical Visual Culture”
by Jessie Nash
When British visual artist Victoria Gugenheim told me she was performing as a female drag queen in a show called “Kinky Salon” at the London venue, The Resistance Gallery, my first image was that of a drag king. It took me a few seconds to extract the real meaning from the term ‘female drag queen’ and ask “Wait, what?”
“Female drag queens” are sometimes described by the LGBT community – according to the LGBT Info Wiki – as “Faux Queens.” I was embarrassed to admit this concept was unfamiliar to me. I’ve known about drag kings and queens since my teen experiences with the LGBT scene. I learned quickly not make assumptions about the sexuality or identity of those performing. Yet I could not recall ever seeing a female drag queen show. In simple terms, a female drag queen is a biological female performing in the traditional drag queen style usually employed by men. For Victoria there is also an element of her sexuality and gender identity involved. She describes herself as: “A riot grrrl who’s a gay man, who’s a drag queen, trapped in a woman’s body.” Of course it made perfect sense after that, and I wondered how the whole thing had passed me by. Continue reading “Interview with Victoria Gugenheim”
by Stephanie Land
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
– Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
I sketched this quote in pencil on my bedroom wall when I was 16; it was tucked away by my desk, around a field of flowers I had painted. It may have been the beginning of my feminist experience, without even knowing it. Maya Angelou’s writings got me through and out of my very young and traumatic abusive situation with a high school boy. While studying photography at Columbia College Chicago, I officially found a haven in my discovery of feminism. I found adopting a feminist ideology gave me the opportunity and sense of security I needed in order to express my anger, shave my head and let my hair grow in other places that weren’t considered feminine. I didn’t want to be called pretty, and I fought any kind of denigrating remarks made about women, whether on the street or in the workplace. I used the medium of photography to discover new insights. Continue reading “Feminism & Creativity”
by Jen Westmoreland Bouchard
Born in El Khnansa, Morocco in 1974, Latifa Echakhch has lived most of her life in France and now resides and works in both Paris and Martigny, Switzerland. Echakhch’s work focuses primarily on themes of cultural identity, agency, globalization, and immigration. Her 2006 work, Hospitality, explores the bureaucratic obstacles faced by immigrants to France and the ways in which these “outsiders” are perceived by their Western counterparts. In the fall of 2008, I had the opportunity to view Echakhch’s installation, Speaker’s Corner, on display in London’s Tate Modern. The installation is made up of two parts residing in separate rooms. Though physically separate, they relate to one another thematically on many levels. For Each Stencil Revolution 2007 is a room of dark blue carbon paper layered over the entirety of each of the four walls. The title of this section harkens back to international human rights and war protests of the 1960s, during which carbon paper was used to create multiple copies of flyers, statements, and images. Continue reading “Making her Voice Heard at Speaker’s Corner: The Work of Latifa Echakhch at the Tate Modern”
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