ArtVerve - on contemporary female art | Issue 4 | Sep 2015 by ArtVerve Magazine

ArtVerve on contemporary female art

Horizontal by Judith Bernstein, photo: Bevan Davies 1973

TEA Sketchbook Circle in conversation with Marina Cantacuzino founder of The Forgiveness Project review of The Invention of Privacy an insight into the

Womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Art Library

at the MusĂŠe Marmottan Monet Paris the life and work of photographer

Dorothy Bohm the New York interviews with Judith Bernstein & Margaret Roleke reviews on Sonia Delaunay Agnes Martin Barbara Hepworth & the Liberties exhibition at Collyer Bristow A SLWA Publication | Issue 4 | Sep 2015

White Girls 2015 painted plastic dolls and toys © Margaret Roleke

The New York Interviews

Margaret Roleke Paris 1953 © Dorothy Bohm

Women’s Art Library Liberties

The life and work of

Barbara Hepworth

Innate Dignity

Costumes for Curators #3 Althea Greenan (2013) Amelia BeavisHarrison photo: Julian Hughes

The Restless Image 1975 - 2000 by Rose Finn- Kelcey © The Estate of the Artist; Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

Collyer Bristow Gallery

Eugène Lomont Jeune femme à sa toilette 1898 Huile sur toile 54 x 65 cm Beauvais, Musée départemental de l’Oise © RMN Grand Palais / Thierry Ollivier

or manipulative mistress of self-promotion?

Sonia Delaunay High priestess of colour

Discs in Echelon, version 2, Plaster, 1935–6 © Barbara Hepworth Estate, on loan to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

Sonia Delaunay Yellow Nude 1908 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes © Pracusa 2014083

Althea Greenan

4 Musée Marmottan Paris

The Invention of Privacy

Dorothy Bohm

The Forgiveness Project Marina Cantacuzino

Agnes Martin

Work by Elinor Brass and Karen Wicks in their shared sketchbook

ArtVerve Editorial Team Melissa Budasz is an artist, curator and director of SLWA. She studied painting at Camberwell and Norwich Schools of Art, graduating in 1997 and has a studio at The Biscuit Factory, London. She blogs regularly and writes articles on her practice, collaborations, exhibitions and research projects and publications. A multi-media painter, her work connects to symbolic and discursive systems such as myth, philosophy and psychoanalysis referencing nature, the female body and literature.

Elinor Brass

Crying Cuntface 2014 © Judith Bernstein

TEA Sketchbook Circle

The New York Interviews

Judith Bernstein

What’s on What’s On

on contemporary female art

Pia Goddard is a fine art photographer, poet and short story writer. After completing a degree in sculpture at Chelsea and an MA in Fine Art, Architecture & Critical Theory from KIAD in 1994, she worked for many years as a photojournalist and art educator. Her current practice is mainly image and text based, encompassing traditional crafting techniques. Her focuses are the tyranny of objects and the landscapes of transition: physical, emotional and imagined. Moira Jarvis worked for many years in art education and completed an MA in Fine Art painting at Wimbledon College of Art (UAL) and now works in one of the Cannizaro Park studios in Wimbledon. A curator and researcher for SLWA, Moira’s work explores personal and collective histories and our place in the natural world. Current concerns are carbon bombs and how we can re-connect with nature for our psychological and physiological wellbeing. Laura Moreton-Griffiths is an artist and curator and studied at St Martin’s School of Art in the late 80s and Camberwell College of Arts, graduating in 2008 with a degree in painting. Her diverse practice explores the extended field of painting and sociopolitical narrative. Interested in overlooked histories, the underbelly of Englishness and contemporary anxiety, her paintings, drawings and sculptural objects are developed from collages of cultural and art-historical references.

Editor Melissa Budasz

Althea Greenan

Women’s Art Library

Costumes for Curators #3 Althea Greenan (2013) Amelia Beavis-Harrison photo: Julian Hughes

Women’s Art Library

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Althea Greenan curates the Women’s Art Library (WAL) at Goldsmiths, University of London and oversees events relating to the collection, as well as studying for her PhD that she hopes to complete this year. WAL began as an artists’ initiative in 1976 which developed into an arts organization publishing catalogues and books. A membership newsletter started in the early 1980s became the Women’s Art Magazine and finally MAKE until 2002. The main purpose of the WAL was to provide a place for women artists to deposit unique documentation of their work. WAL collected personal files that functioned together as an alternative public space to view and experience women’s art. Thousands of artists from around the world are represented in some form in this collection. As part of Goldsmiths Library Special Collections, the WAL continues to collect slides, artist statements, exhibition ephemera, catalogues, and press material in addition to audio and videotapes, photographs and digital formats. It welcomes donations from women artists to help develop the collection which is located within the Library’s Special Collections and Archives space on the ground floor. The Special Collections Reading Room is equipped with audiovisual equipment as well as an integrated projection facility for group use, and a slide table. Independent researchers, students and staff are very welcome to consult the collection. Althea, what is a typical week for you in the library? I work in two libraries at the same time, because the Women’s Art Library is really a sub-collection in the Library at Goldsmiths. My office is busy with all sorts of activities such as scanning, copyright management, book ordering, academic liaising, but we are all engaged with looking after the Special Collections Reading Room which itself is a space that hosts meetings, quiet study and the mostly not-so-quiet study of special collections, which includes everything in the Women’s Art Library. A typical week will include managing every way in which a researcher, artist, student, academic might make use of the art documentation in the WAL. With every request I feel I am working with a different collection. For example, two women working as a collective called The Temporary Separatists, wished to look through anything I could locate on 1980s women artists collectives.

Women’s Art Library

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... a fine art student starting to think about her dissertation ... the topic she wanted to explore through women’s art is working with blood ... Boxes, theses, paper files, slide files, including notes, letters, announcements and photographs were all retrieved for these researchers to browse. Since the WAL collection used to be out on open shelves before it was gifted to Goldsmiths, I do my best to recreate that moment of serendipity and bring out the unexpected! Another request the same week came from a fine art student starting to think about her dissertation, and the topic she wanted to explore through women’s art is working with blood. Starting with the stack of books I have on Ana Mendieta she is also getting an introduction to the early photographic series of Alexis Hunter, but this is, of course, just a start. A typical week for me in the Library will always feature many ‘starts’: a project, a series of visits, an exchange of expertise, a new artwork, a new file, a new woman artist to get to know. Finishing something usually signals the imminent start of something else.

careful. It combined the usual frenzy of arts organizations with a feminist mission that had to negotiate funders, the art world, and the heightened expectations that came with its success. You increasingly work and collaborate with women artists, can you tell us how this evolves? My work with artists has developed on two fronts since the WAL collection reopened in Goldsmiths in 2003. Firstly my commissioned writing moved from art journalism to art writing, thanks to my work with artists who curate - for instance Nicky Hodge who commissioned the text Come Closer (2007) - and artists preparing for shows, such as Samantha Donnelly with whom I wrote Rubberneck (2014) and Liliane Lijn with whom I reworked the interview format for Adrift in the depth of our mind’s eye (2012). This is my work as a writer. As the curator of the WAL my work with artists is more about facilitating their interaction with the WAL collection. Starting with a lot of talking, exchange and anecdotes that can become material for the artwork itself, like Holly Pester’s artists book Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip (Bookworks 2015). The Living with Make: Art in the Archive Bursary supported Holly’s time in the WAL. It is a biannual award offered in partnership with the academic journal Feminist Review: £1000 for a 3-month residency in the WAL collection and a venue for launching the project that results. In 2009 Oriana Fox produced a day of feminist performances at Tate Modern titled Once More with Feeling and in 2011 Clare Gasson’s The River was performed and recorded at the South London Gallery. There is a new call for submissions being prepared as I write so check the WAL web site http:www//goldsmiths.ac.uk/make for details.

How and when did you get involved with WAL? I joined a women artists group called Artemisia and on a weekend retreat to Wales (this was the 1980s!) the Women Artists Slide Library in London was mentioned over and over again. It published a newsletter that was always looking for reviews of women artists’ shows - they were rarely published anywhere else - and so I was determined to write up my Artemisia sister artists’ group show and the article was accepted! When I moved to London I became a volunteer, was given slides to organize and label, loved the work and soon became an employee. The WASL as it was known then (in 1989) was based in the Bishop’s library in Fulham Palace where the local council housed other charities. There’s a lot of talking, exchange and It was an energetic, seductive, demanding anecdotes that can become material for place to work and all-consuming if you weren’t

the artwork itself ...

Women’s Art Library

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The bursary is not the only way to work with the WAL collection as I have been privileged to support proposals from artists who secure their own funding - mostly from the Arts Council of England - and produce wonderful projects. Anne Krinsky’s From Absorb to Zoom: Actions in the Women’s Art Library is an excellent example. As a printmaker moving into digital printing, she not only drew on the collection for inspiration but as an artist interested in documentation expanded the analogue material in the WAL. She contacted 17 artists whose work she discovered and particularly enjoyed, and asked for digital updates for the project’s blog [1]

Anne Krinsky: From Absorb to Zoom / An Alphabet of Actions in the Women’s Art Library was exhibited in two buildings at Goldsmiths University of London in March 2015. Krinsky’s site-specific digital print installation with content derived from the archive was funded by Arts Council England. Each scroll 300 x 112 cm

I am currently working with three residencies at different stages of realisation with artists at different stages of their careers. Faye Green is a choreographer/performer/writer awarded the Emerging Artist Award in 2013 [2] who secured ACE funding to travel from Newcastle and take up a funded WAL residency to research for a piece that will be performed in Sheffield. Bella Milroy won this year’s Birth Rites Collection Prize [3] which offered a residency at the WAL which Bella will take up once she finishes her undergraduate degree in Nottingham. Women’s Art Library

SALT Magazine, Women Under the Influence & X Marks the Spot created a collective discussion about engaging with the notion of archives and identities. The third residency I will mention is the longest running and features the collective X Marks the Spot whose approach to artists’ archives reactivates the politics of their practice. Their starting point with Jo Spence’s archive was as if she had joined the collective to take up the issues Jo had raised about women and health to contribute to the publication Not Our Class produced by Studio Voltaire. When I introduced XMTS to the Women of Colour Index collection in the WAL, they put in a proposal which we jointly developed into the Gillian Elinor Project, supported by a wonderful donation of £5000 from the estate of Gillian Elinor, an activist feminist art historian associated with the WAL during its founding years. XMTS are looking at the Women of Colour Index, not only as a historical record, but as a means of understanding the landscape for black artists today. XMTS are reworking the notion of archiving for a future to build up a research/ outreach project that engages and records black women artists, historians, teachers and archivists in a way that enriches the legacy of the WOCI. The WAL began its programme of artists residencies with the Bursary which was sustained by royalties earned from the electronic academic publishers of the Women’s Art Magazine and MAKE (EBSCO). However in recent years, the earnings have increased probably reflecting a surge of academic interest in feminist art practices. Earnings are ringfenced for WAL projects and in 2014, WAL was able to allocate £200 to three collectives to develop a presentation at the Centre for Feminist Research in Goldsmiths. Along with XMTS two other feminist collaborative projects SALT Magazine and Women Under the Influence, ArtVerve |7

There is one project that literally took me out of my comfort zone; I could barely get it over my shoulders!

refers to the pinking of ageing slides, my rise from the patriarchal canon as a custodian of the slide collection... and in this context the incarnation of a living archive! Although I’m wary of such a title, I loved the costume. These are a sampling of ways artists working with the WAL collection demonstrate its relevance in ways that academic research cannot. The WAL is currently well-placed to support artists’ research into the legacy of women artists and this activity is vital to the collection. WAL was after all started by artists and should remain connected to contemporary practice.

Introducing the WAL in Costumes for Curators artwork by Amelia Beavis-Harrison Photo: Julian Hughes

created a collective discussion about engaging with the notion of archives and identities: Over/under/mis-identification in the Women’s Art Library. The evening included singing and letter readings that explored themes such as friendship in the archive, with SALT producing a flyer relating to their interest in manifestos and subversive feelings. [4] In 2013, I worked with Amelia BeavisHarrison, responding to her call for curators who might like to participate in her Costumes for Curators project. She not only conducted a detailed interview to understand what ideas and aspirations underpinned my curatorial work, she also asked me to take over 40 measurements of my body! I agreed to ‘perform’ the costume at a special occasion where I was also performing my role as the curator of the WAL. This was the conference ‘Past is Prologue: Creating Art from a Living Archive’ the proceedings were podcast. [5] I wore the costume for a photoshoot and during tours of the WAL which were given during the conference breaks. The costume

Women’s Art Library

The aim of MAKE magazine, in a similar way to ArtVerve, was to enhance public knowledge of the practice, impact and achievement of women in visual culture. Why did it cease in 2002? The answer to that is very simple. The funding for both the magazine production costs - coming from the Arts Council of England - and the core funding for Make, the organisation for women in the arts - as the Women’s Art Library was then called - from London Arts Board were both cut. Arts magazines all found it very difficult to cover costs of publication, and advertising was incredibly difficult to sell. The organization could not pay a great deal for writers, and academics usually waived payment, but nonetheless carrying on with a print publication and producing it to a good enough standard to adequately represent artwork was untenable without extra funding. MAKE did create a magazine web site, but this came too late to become an extension of the publication and it ceased after nearly 20 years and 92 issues. However, it continues its mission to “enhance public knowledge of the practice, impact and achievement of women in visual culture” by generating an income that is supporting new work by women artists engaging with women’s art documentation.

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I would be delighted to host any initiative proposing to work on the records of women artists or any aspect of women’s contribution to the visual arts and put the WAL collection at their disposal. Are there plans for further Wikipedia art editing events at Goldsmiths, can you tell us more about this? I would love to do another session with the Wikimedia UK who are an educational charity keen to increase the quality and range of information in Wikipedia and are especially keen to increase the input of women contributors. I would be delighted to host any initiative proposing to work on the records of women artists or any aspect of women’s contribution to the visual arts and put the WAL collection at their disposal. We would even provide lunch!

Slidewalk 11 May 2013 13:59 (detail), Althea Greenan

Thirty/forty years later, as feminism focuses minds as urgently as ever, there is a different, I think intensified relationship to images that technology drives. We are all responding to this and just as there were women artists who stepped away from representing the body, I see and feel myself at times joining others stepping away from images into art writing. I’m sure I don’t need to reiterate Your PhD is about understanding the Women’s how problematic the image can be for Art Library slide collection as a site of evolving women and how important it is to respond. feminist discourse and innovative digital development - can you expand on this and say So there is this wonderful collection of how this has evolved since WAL’s conception? slides of women’s work which technology is I devised this research project about the WAL disenfranchising. The slides are not under slide collection because to my mind it is a threat, and are considered a valuable archive luxurious, troubling, enlightening, excessive, for now, but these are unstable photographic unique creation by British women artists. It is objects, slowly but surely colour-shifting and not the only slide collection of women’s art in becoming less a true record, if such a thing the world as many slide registries were set up exists. as showcases for artists in the same way web sites are today. But the women who became Despite my love of the slide, I don’t want to “the slide collective” in the late 1970s were make it the focus of the study. It is not the fact consciously responding to the socio-political that they are slides that makes this research and cultural lack of visibility for women’s art necessary, but that they were collected for a practices and the dire fact that next to no feminist project. Artists carefully packed them visual information about historical women’s up and sent them in for many reasons, but work existed. In very practical terms, there was they were all aware that this was a collection an urgent need for a resource of images from of women artists only. All this makes these women artists, for women artists and the fields slides represent far more than the individual of publishing and education, and an expanding artworks that you can still see and appreciate artworld that feminism was helping to change. from looking at the transparency.

Women’s Art Library

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Copyright protection makes it difficult to introduce new women’s artwork to the narratives we write about women’s art practices, often because the artist herself cannot be traced for permission.

often because the artist herself cannot be traced for permission. The work of the lesser known artist is by no means irrelevant, out of date, amateur, or embarrassing but offers a vital and rich conversation that many artists, if they could, would be eager to engage with. So when I use the term ‘innovative digital development’, I’m looking at the slide not as a charming relic from an analogue past (although they are very seductive), but as an information communication technology that a group of women artists strategically used to raise the visibility of their practices. In fact, I see the WAL slide collection as having something to teach digitization practices.

I think digitization will need to be used to preserve and ensure continued access to the WAL slide collection, but it also needs to capture the uniqueness of this feminist project which represents thousands of art practices. This is difficult. It does not help that when a slide is digitized its transparency is scanned but the slide mount that is inscribed by the artist, is virtually discarded. Routine digitization of slide collections (many of which have gone to If you would like further informaton on the landfill) diminishes the presence of the makers Women’s Art Library, please visit : of the slides and in the case of the WAL, this flies in the face of the whole meaning of the http:www//goldsmiths.ac.uk/make slide collection. Ironically the booming world of images across all our devices and daily communications is not necessarily increasing our access to images of women’s art. Copyright protection makes it difficult to introduce new women’s artwork to the narratives we write about women’s art practices,

References 1 annekrinskyfromabsorbtozoom.blogspot.co.uk 2 http://www.dazeddigital.com/tag/faye-green 3 http://birthritescollection.org.uk/home/4541196091 4 http://saltmagazine.tumblr.com/ post/104318829033/hannahregel-salt-made-asubversive-feelings 5 http://www.gold.ac.uk/podcasts/app/front/ podcastsBySeries/27 Rebecca Snow working on the documentation of Women’s Work of Brixton Art Gallery at the WAL Women’s Art Library

ArtVerve |10 ON CONTEMPORARY FEMALE ART

Liberties

Like Mother Like Daughter III 2000 The Restless Image - a discrepancy between the felt position and the by Frances Kearney seen position 1975 - 2000 by Rose Finn-Kelcey © The Estate of the Artist; Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

Contact Sheet 1 (detail) 2009 by EJ Major

Nina (Absent Friends) 2014 by Eleanor Moreton

Curated by Day+Gluckman An exhibition of contemporary art reflecting on 40 years since the Sex Discrimination Act

Collyer Bristow Gallery

4 Bedford Row London WC1R 4TF to 21 October 2015 Artists

Guler Ates - Helen Barff - Sutapa Biswas - Sonia Boyce - Jemima Burrill - Helen Chadwick - Sarah Duffy - Rose English - Rose Finn-Kelcey - Alison Gill - Helena Goldwater - Joy Gregory - Margaret Harrison - Alexis Hunter - Frances Kearney EJ Major - Eleanor Moreton - Hayley Newman - Freddie Robins - Monica Ross Jo Spence - Jessica Voorsanger - Alice May Williams - Carey Young

Liberties at Collyer Bristow

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Feminist artists make visual the tension that is hard to verbalize, to get women’s voices heard and create a place in a discriminatory world.

further afield at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Personally I rely on textbooks, the internet and social media, rarely seeing the work in real-life or in a gallery setting. Only recently has art made by women been given more 1975 was an important year for women in the prominence by our major art institutions. UK. The UN declared the first International Women’s Year, the Times reported that more This year, the Tate alone is staging shows that than 1,500 Women’s Liberation Movement give formal recognition to Sonia Delaunay, groups were meeting regularly around the Agnes Martin, Barbara Hepworth and Georgia country and The Sex Discrimination Act was O’Keefe next year, and influential less wellintroduced. The act was brought in to protect known artists like Marisol Escobar in the individuals from discrimination on the forthcoming World goes Pop. To get the work grounds of sex; Part 1 specifically addresses of women artists shown in such blockbuster ‘Direct and indirect discrimination against exhibitions is an extraordinary achievement women’. Created to deal with employment in museum programming. and education inequality, the radical new legislation gave women the right to equal pay The shows are important markers in the and status in the workplace, more essentially, continuum that go some way to addressing the however, it intended to give women equal imbalance of women’s underrepresentation standing in society with emphasis on the in the art world and societal status generally way society uses language and constructs but are not, however, feminist exhibitions. prevailing stereotypes like ‘A Woman’s Place...’ Thames & Husdon has just published Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, in which The act went a long way, but not far enough reference is made back to Nochlin’s seminal into the hearts and minds of every institution, 1971 essay ‘Why are there no great women home and individual of the land. Feminism artists?’ A provocative statement for many has had to do that, to address what a system reasons not to go into here. Simplistically her set up to advantage a white male elite can’t argument condenses down to the need for and won’t - the palpable discrepancy in the institutional and cultural change rather than everyday life of women in a society that the achievement of a given individual. continues not to give truly equal status or consider an alternative. Feminist artists, This is particularly poignant as when we look their artistic practice intrinsically bound back at art history for examples of significant to identity and opposed to gender bias, art made by women and find that if, in the make visual this tension that is hard to face of huge adversity women managed to verbalize, to get women’s voices heard and work as artists, many have been written over create a place in a discriminatory world. or wilfully written out of the narrative, which reflects a telling absence back at us that From the direct action and political art of the evidences the obvious problem that people protest movement, to contemporary female do not want to talk about. practice that is more individualistic and idiosyncratic to see feminist art often requires In this context Liberties is a breath of fresh air, a special trip to feminist art collections, giving space in plain sight to a feminist show like those held at New Hall, Cambridge or with an upfront feminist agenda. Liberties at Collyer Bristow

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Day+Gluckman identifying themselves as feminist curators have brought together works by more than twenty women artists exploring the body, power politics and identity, that is entirely accessible and entertaining, framed by changes in attitude provoked by the Sex Discrimination Act, developments in feminist art theory and its influence on female art practice.

The title cleverly alludes to the struggle with liberty, both civil and that of the individual and comically infers that frankly society is taking liberties, a hint at the multiplicity of meaning and humour contained within the show. The curation perfectly adds to the discourse, presenting film, sculpture, photography, performance and painting and gives a clear understanding of feminist art history in the UK since 1975. From early works by the feminist old guard that make reference to the 19th century women’s suffrage movement and the first wave of feminism that confronted the art historical canon and raw, angry work that unpicked, co-opted or reclaimed everyday social interactions; to second wave feminist art that more explicitly links with gender inequality and the demand for equal representation within art institutions, much of it performative and undocumented; and video art, that thankfully continues to broadcast to new audiences; through 1980s post-modern, analytical, media literate art that used the language of advertising and guerrilla sloganeering; to women who refuse to identify as woman artists or feminists or own that they make work from woman’s perspective, even though the work may knowingly make reference to feminist themes and would not be possible without the previous waves. Some artists of course, have practices that span the decades and the different Liberties at Collyer Bristow

waves and have developed their practice and opinions along the way. That is why Liberties is a thoughtfully conceived exhibition; it draws all the history together without being caught up in in-fighting and cliché́. My personal favourites are Sonia Boyce’s Devotional Wallpaper a pattern repeat naming 20 black women from the music industry, the names collected from the general public, a wealth of influential women given critical weight; Francis Kearney’s Like Mother Like Daughter III, a C Type photograph staged from the child’s perspective, a woman occupied in a singular pursuit to the latent neglect of her children has multiple readings and hints at mental health issues and the intense desire to create; Jessica Voorsanger’s frank and funny self-portraits of the artist as ‘Claude Monet’ and others from her Bald Series 2013, were made at a time when she was exposed and raw and having to re-evaluate her identity after losing her hair whilst undergoing cancer treatment. Hayley Newman’s embroidered and comically anthropomorphized dishcloths Domestique 2010-14 are laugh-out-loud wonky subversions of everyday domesticity; Helen Chadwick’s Wreath to Pleasure No 8 & 12, photographs of sculptural body forms composed of flowers and fur, intimate, sensual and menacing; Jemima Burrills’ film The New Model, a bedraggled woman emerges from a carwash, industrially clean and pristine; Margaret Harrison’s Getting Very Close to Understanding my Masculinity 2013 gender bending watercolour and collage of Marvel style superheroes, that conflate Wonder Woman and Mother Teresa through the eyes of the beholder; Eleanor Moreton’s Nina (Absent Friends) unassuming paintings in oil of women storytellers; and Rose English’s Baroque Harriet 2 & 3 1973, collage and photography, poetic duvet days. ArtVerve |13

The show is hung in the offices of law firm, artists, including works by Anne Redpath, Judy Collyer Bristow in Bedford Row, Holborn. Chicago, Mary Kelly and Christine Borland.

Hung in a corporate setting, corporate feminism it is not; Liberties is a commercial exhibition with many of the highly desirable works affordably within reach.

* Sue Crockford’s film A Woman’s Place documents The 1971 National Women’s Liberation Movement march. The battle continues.

The private view was a who’s who of by Laura Moreton-Griffiths contemporary woman artists: some of the exhibiting artists, feminists, educationalists, men and women. I found it amusing that men in suits frequently obscured my view of the works. I have visited a couple of times since. Liberties is Day+Gluckman’s last exhibition for Collyer Bristow Gallery. Trained as artists, the curators Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman have worked together since 2006 for a variety of well-established galleries and arts organisations. They continue their feminist curating with a long term project A Woman’s Place*, named after Ruth Adam’s book charting the role of women in society from 1910-1975 and ending with the Sex Discrimination Act, published by Persephone Books. Supported by Art Council England, the National Trust and the University of Sussex, the project, currently in its research phase asks what is the current position of women, and is working towards a series if site-specific commissions exploring how a woman’s interaction with space and art practice is influenced by our creative, historical and cultural landscapes that are in constant flux. Also if you are looking to see the work of contemporary women artists practicing today, Gluckman is developing the profile, programme and acquisitions of the New Hall Art Collection, a permanent display at Murray Edwards College Cambridge, that houses close to 400 contemporary works by women

Liberties at Collyer Bristow

The exhibition continues until the 21 October 2015 (open office hours) Email to make an appointment gallery@collyerbristow.com dayandgluckman.co.uk/liberties

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La Toilette Naissance de L’intime Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Eugène Lomont Jeune femme à sa toilette 1898 Huile sur toile 54 x 65 cm Beauvais, Musée départemental de l’Oise © RMN Grand Palais / Thierry Ollivier

The Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris The invention of privacy

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The Musée Marmottan Monet sits on a quiet, leafy corner of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine in the sixteenth arrondissement. Boasting a large collection of works by Claude Monet and other French Impressionists, it is their recent exhibition La toilette naissance d’intime (the invention of privacy) that highlights art historically and culturally the evolution of corporeal rituals where largely women are observed and represented. These selected works depict sexuality and beauty, erotica and fetishism. The exhibition brings together works by major artists of the 16th century to the present day, about the rites of cleanliness, their spaces and their gestures. This is the first time that everyday practices have been given such exposure. Some of the works have never been shown since their creation as the museum has brought many international collections together. Works on display range from Durer, Boucher, Manet, Degas, Lautrec, Picasso to Bettina Rheims and Gloria Friedmann. The exhibition is hung chronologically and by nature with elevated scenes of servants begins with an early 16th century tapestry playing musical instruments, perfumes, depicting a woman bathing surrounded adornment and food with vibrant colours suggesting sensory alertness. A lithe, slender, young body is celebrated as an ideal, giving visual form to beauty. The frame is the site of meaning, where vital distinctions between inside and outside, between proper and improper concerns are made. These threads connect the works throughout this tightly hung and intimately spaced show, as well as documenting the socio-political environment of the time.

Pays-Bas du Sud Le Bain, tenture de la vie seigneuri- ale Vers 1500 Laine et soie 285 x 285 cm Paris, musée de Cluny - Musée national du Moyen Age© RMN Grand Palais (musée de Cluny - musée national du Moyen-Âge) / Franck Raux The Invention of privacy

The nude took on a new realism in the 17th century as maids were often the models, seen isolated from the rest of the world. Observed in their toilette, often with no water to clean themselves (due largely to the lack of clean water). Washing is often limited to few body parts - feet, hands and hair and some were still clothed or partially dressed as they are seen adorning themselves in front of a mirror, the sensual context often highlighted by an image of a lover in a frame, or a statue of lovers embracing. ArtVerve |16

Through the act of painting, a woman can become culture - she is framed and is the image and the wanton matter of the female body and female sexuality is regulated and contained.

secretive ritual about skill and accessories and here it is given approval and celebrated we are invited to watch the private pampering of a woman as an erotic spectacle. There are two divided moments - social bathing in groups and the private ritual of intimate Etchings, paintings and tapestries are all grooming where we the audience, become displayed depicting the toilette. From the the voyeur. Renaissance to the 18th century we glimpse at the public toilet and then move on to a Francois Boucher will often have a before and new kind of privacy - one woman making after painting of a woman in her parlour fully herself up in mirror. This has been a social clothed going about her daily routines, and rite in the past and now made more intimate then in another she is depicted in the same in Francois Boucher’s 1738 La mouche une setting and clothes, but this time in a state dame à sa toilette below, an oval canvas that of undress adjusting a stocking or going to acts as a keyhole into a private world. Here a the toilet with her animals present who bear woman applies a beauty spot which highlights witness to her private grooming, as in this c. her pale complexion. She is lost in her own 1742 painting The Raised Skirt. thoughts and absorbed by her reflection as she makes herself up for the man she holds in Boucher’s paintings bring gender identities to the pocket medallion. the fore and the inherent differences between the sexes and the role of women beneath the Bathing has been replaced by an intimate and gaze of men.

François Boucher Une dame à sa toilette Huile sur toile 1738 86,3 x 76,2 cm Collection particulière © Courtesy of P & D Colnaghi & Co, Ltd, London The Invention of privacy

François Boucher, La Jupe relevée 1742 ? Ou début des années 1760 ? Huile sur toil 52,5 x 42 cm Collection particulière © Christian Baraja

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In works from the late 19th century we see more nude women at their mirrors, the bodies sometimes heavy, less elegant and in less traditionally elegant poses, adopting a more natural and animalistic quality as painted by Manet and Lautrec. In Degas 1883 Femme dans son bain s’épongeant la jambe the representation of the toilette is of gestures washing the body and hygiene is brought into painting. We are a voyeur into a private world whilst a woman bathes in her bedroom. Soft pastels evoke the sensations of loving flesh and soft hair; the face is averted as the limb she is washing captures our attention, there is no romantic idealisation, this is a modern feature and highly sensual - a wet sponge on skin, the viewer often can’t see the breasts or full body, they are obscured but still erotic.

In the 20th century, we come to the war years which saw a shift from soft forms and luxurious time spent in the tub to sharper angles and colours, with form presiding over content and we enter a place where maybe we should not be, like in Kupka’s The Lipstick and Leger’s Women at their dressing table. Cubist ideas that emphasize the fragmentation of planes moves away from imitation and only allude to the figurative, Picasso’s 1906 Femme se coiffant, Josef Capek’s 1920 Toilette, Wilfredo Lam’s 1942 Femme à sa coiffure all highlight geometrical forms in either primary colours or grey tones and black and white with uncertain depths: there is no sentimentality seen in the ancient study of the nude as in previous times, these works are painted in the tragic context of war where care for the self has become tense; the movements are sharp and joyless.

A new relationship emerged of someone forgetting and finding herself. The bathroom became a refuge from the world, a moment where time no longer existed.

Edgar Degas Femme dans son bain s’épongeant la jambe Vers 1883 Pastel sur monotype 19,7 x 41 cm Paris, musée d’Orsay, legs du comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911 © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

The Invention of privacy

Fernand Léger Les femmes à la toilette 1920 Huile

sur toile 92,3 x 73,3 cm Suisse, Collection Nahmad © Suisse, Collection Nahmad / Raphaël BARITHELADAGP

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We then reach the 21st century, and see a displacement of the gaze. For centuries women at their toilette were watched without their knowing it. In Bettina Rheims’ work, the boundaries of how sexual identities are depicted are pushed. Both celebrities and unknowns have posed for her in various staging of glamour and fame, of fashion, beauty, sex and seduction. Her subject is the visualization of female eroticism in its sensual, emotional and disquieting varieties. She has a sensitive and delicate, yet provocative approach to the subject.

The intellectual woman knows she is offering herself, she knows she is a consciousness, a subject; one cannot wilfully kill one’s gaze and change one’s eyes into empty pools. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

naked with her back to the camera in front of a washbasin. Not circulated till years after her death in 2008, de Beauvoir knowingly allows a photo to be taken of her nudity, whilst an intellectual and feminist, she is also a young, amorous and free body, ‘a body that reaches out to the world cannot be thwarted and In her Karen Mulder portant Un tres petit metamorphosed into a statue animated by soutien-gorge Chanel Janvier 1996, the hidden vibrations’. Extract The Second Sex subject is wearing a face mask and her beauty routine is revealed as she knowingly The lesson of the bathroom has become the stares at the camera. It is an ironic game lesson that women now wish to dictate: they of a woman being photographed by a will no longer allow the male gaze to govern woman, her nipples covered (only just), their image, but play on their revealed she could even be post-surgery. Rheims or marked nudity, and on the arousal or interrogates sexuality from the view-point of frustration of desire. Women artists are gender, emphasizing both the way women using images of the female body in order to perceive their own body, and male fantasies make visible a range of feminist identities. about what goes on in the bathroom. It is a fight for visibility on one’s own terms. For feminists to reclaim the female body, Interestingly, a portrait that is not in the this means to challenge the authority of exhibition but displayed in the back of the boundaries - of gender and identity, between publication is of Simone de Beauvoir, standing art and obscenity, the permissible and forbidden. by Melissa Budasz

References Extracts from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, publication by Vintage 2015 Le Deuxième sexe by Simone de Beauvoir © Éditions Gallimard, Paris 1949

Très petit soutien-gorge Chanel, janvier 1996, Paris 1996 C-print 120 x 120 cm Signé au dos sur le cartel Paris, collection de l’artiste © Bettina Rheims copyright Studio Bettina Rheims (libre de droit) The Invention of privacy

La Toilette Naissance de l’intime, Musée Marmottan Monet, publication by Hazan, Paris 2015 The Female Nude Art, Obscenity and Sexuality Lynda Nead, publication by Routledge, Oxon 1992

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TEA Sketchbook Circle

Work by Elinor Brass and Karen Wicks in their shared sketchbook

Elinor Brass is an artist, Head of Art at at Eltham College, Director of the Gerald Moore Gallery and is currently studying for a doctorate at the Institute of Education. Working with photography, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture and installation, her work plays with the juxtaposition of objects and textures to create painterly responses to environments. The absence of people as well as the contrived and found positioning of objects in her images emphasize implied activities and narratives. She often works in collaboration with Emily Orley. In their work together, they begin their projects with the idea that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;places remember eventsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (words that James Joyce scribbled in the margin of his notes for Ulysses) to investigate and document the history of sites in and around London. By thoroughly researching the buildings that they decide to use and their surrounding areas, and then working with carefully composed installations and photography, they bring these places to life by tapping into the memory contained within the very fabric of the building. Elinor has established a national sketchbook circle, where artists are working using a book to collaborate with other practitioners exchanging ideas monthly. The circle has been set up in association with the NSEAD and Campaign for Drawing to support art teachers in continuing their own artistic practice. TEA Sketchbook Circle

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chooses a book (that will fit through a letterbox) and they make work either in the book or document it in the book. Then they post it to the person next to them in the circle. Everyone posts in the same direction around the circle so everyone receives a book and everyone sends one. The idea is that by the end of the month you need to make work in response to the work that you have received and then send it back to where it came from.

Elinor Brass, founder of Tea Sketchbook Circle

The idea is that you are pushed as an artist ... it means you commit time to art. Elinor, can you explain how the idea developed for the Sketchbook Circle? After my first year of teaching I enrolled on a Masters course in Painting at Wimbledon School of Art, which was set up especially for art teachers. It taught me a discipline to my making that I hadn’t previously possessed. I discovered that I could start to schedule in my making time, rather than only making work when I felt I had done all my schoolwork and dealt with other commitments. The more I made, the more I made and I found I thought about my artwork and ideas more so it didn’t feel like a struggle to switch on. A few years later I established the first circle of artist educators, working with a friend and educator Tanya Paget. We were both committed to our making, but liked the idea of collaborating more. We both brought to the circle a handful of friends who were keen to be involved and it developed from there. We had around 20 artists each year and a really interesting mix of disciplines with writers, graphic designers and painters.

The circle connects the group but the work doesn’t go all the way around, you are instead having two in-depth visual conversations with the two people either side of you. It is up to that artist how much they make and often it depends on how much time there is that month. The idea is that you are pushed as an artist because you don’t know the direction the work will go in once you have passed it on. It means that you commit time to art or else you let someone else down! More importantly you are committing time to keep your practice going. We have a very active and supportive Facebook group that means you get to see the exchanges in other sections of the circle and it has become a very dynamic community of artists. You won’t always like the work that you receive! But personally I find it exciting to find a way through that. How does it relate to the project TEA (Thinking, Expression, Action)? I have become more involved with the NSEAD over the years and I took part in the TEA project where I wrote a couple of case studies about drawing in the gallery. I think the most meaningful outcome of the TEA project was the use of social media for art teachers to connect. There were lots of fantastic projects that emerged the summer TEA was established with artist teachers making work, posting it to other teachers and using Facebook extensively.

How does the project work? The way the circle works is that everyone TEA Sketchbook Circle

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their own artistic practice. They help us to promote it and are incredible advocates generally. We have also had lots of support from the Campaign for Drawing, which has been invaluable. Susan Coles has been part of the circle for the last 3 years and regularly gives talks about it. We are lucky enough to have an exhibition at the Baltic in October with a day of workshops. The NSEAD have been very involved in this event and again we have got some Arts Council funding. Tea Sketchbook Circle exhibition Gerald Moore Gallery, February 2015

I mentioned the Sketchbook Circle to Susan Coles (who was then the President of the NSEAD and instrumental in the use of social media to connect artist teachers) and she suggested we set it up for the TEA teachers. In the first year we had 29 teachers involved, then in the second year just over 100 and this year we have grown to having 175 artist teachers involved. I have been working with Georgia Naish to develop the project this year and we have started to involve other artist teachers through curating interesting mail-outs with quirky materials and ideas and putting on more events where people can get together to meet and learn new skills. In fact for the last two years we have put on an exhibition of the Sketchbook Circle work in Gerald Moore Gallery and had a day of workshops in the gallery as a way of celebrating the circle. We had 80 teachers from across the country attend this year and we are really pleased that we have got Arts Council funding for next yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s show. What is the role of the NSEAD who established the idea? The circle now has the backing of the NSEAD and the Campaign for Drawing supporting artists and artist teachers to continue

TEA Sketchbook Circle

Is the aim of this research programme to empower art teachers to nurture their own practice and thereby enrich their own classroom teaching? Actually not everyone in the group is a teacher. The circle has a good number of participants who want to get back into making and it supports them to do that really effectively. The circle has different roles. It has created a strong community of practitioners. It is nurturing and encouraging artist teachers nationally (and internationally actually!) It is building confidence. It is helping to share ideas, techniques and materials. It is helping people to rediscover the artist in them! It is encouraging experimentation and playfulness.

In the first year we had 29 teachers, in the second just over 100 and this year we have grown to 175 artist teachers involved. What sort of feedback have you had? We recently sought feedback from the circle participants to see what impact the circle project was having on them and also to keep improving the quality of the project. Many of those who replied commented on the impact it was having on their classroom practice, which is great.

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It is clear that people are uplifted by the project at a time when art subjects are being marginalised in schools. There are many teachers who are the only art teacher in their schools, this helps them feel connected. What is the impact of this research globally? At the moment we have a few artists who are working in Europe, but we are establishing a way that we could grow this international interest. This will be something new for Sketchbook Circle 2016, which we will launch in October. I have recently had something published in the International Journal of Art and Design Education about the success of the circle and part of my doctoral research is exploring this community of practice. And locally? I hope that we continue to grow the circle next year and we will endeavour to keep improving it.

We have had some wonderful feedback from the participants about how it has built their confidence and impacted positively on their lives.

Tea Sketchbook Circle exhibition Gerald Moore Gallery, February 2015

how much of an impact this group could have, but it has started to put some meaningful pressure on government. What I have noticed is how it has brought together different sectors of education together, which rarely happens but also some key players in the creative industries. The NSEAD has done some excellent research to feedback to meetings and this has been used to highlight the impact of the curriculum changes and the ways that the creative subjects are being marginalised.

We are developing a new website and are planning to have more shared resources as well as more events and workshops. It has clearly made a big difference to a lot of people and we have had some wonderful feedback from the participants about how it has built their confidence Your doctorate examines your work as artist, and impacted positively on their lives. researcher, teacher whilst running a gallery. Can you talk about the tensions that those What work does the All Party Parliamentary different roles create? Group for Art and Design Education do to This year I have been writing a reflective develop provision of creative subjects in blog of my day-to-day as a way of starting to think more deeply about my different schools? Susan Coles was instrumental in getting the ‘selves’ and how they collide and also APPG up and running. Initially I wasn’t sure how they compliment each other.

TEA Sketchbook Circle

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Tea Sketchbook Circle exhibition Gerald Moore Gallery, February 2015

I am now starting to code my writing to understand the patterns that are emerging so that I can start to build theory. The blogging has been a really positive experience as it has encouraged me to make time to be reflective, in a similar way that the Sketchbook Circle keeps me making work. From what I can see so far, many of the tensions are to do with time. Needing to create more time for making, finding ways to prioritise, looking for ways to keep well. It is a pretty challenging time for those of us working in the secondary school art room and I can see what is emerging from my research is an interest in finding ways of keeping nourished and keeping energised. If you would like further information on TEA Sketchbook Circle please visit: www.sketchbookcircle.com sketchbookcircle15.tumblr.com @elinorbrass @sketchbkcircle ďżźďżź

TEA Sketchbook Circle

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Sonia Delaunay High priestess of colour or manipulative mistress of self-promotion?

Sonia Delaunay Yellow Nude 1908 MusĂŠe des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes ÂŠ Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay

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In one of last year’s Reith lectures, In an act of blatant self-interest, she Grayson Perry said he felt that the married Wilhelm Uhde, a gay art general public were angered by art and dealer and close associate of Picasso feared being duped. For these people, going into a gallery was a bit like going to a concert and just hearing noise. I think for those attending the Sonia Delaunay exhibition held recently at Tate Modern, the sounds were melodic, gently jazzy and in tune with the relieved ticket-holders. At last, an exhibition full of comprehensible, unchallenging decorative pieces with the added bonus of the window-shopping experience of textiles that could be retailed today in any high-end designer shop and clothes to covet. For me, the juxtaposition of smoky greens and rusty-pinks, the burnt oranges bumping the thundery blues, all delighted my artistic taste-buds and my consumer’s palette. In the 1960s, I recall Delaunay’s imagery everywhere - from Habitat to art school paintings, her concentric circles and prismatic colour resonating with the times. Perhaps her very familiarity and general accessibility confused the issue for me as I wandered round. The more I looked and read, and later, researched, the more I questioned her trail-blazer status. Even though I had originally railed at The Sunday Times critic, Waldemar Januszczak’s review questioning her artistic development and her right to be hung in such a prestigious venue, I found myself questioning what she was. Was she a feminist? Polyglot and polymath, brilliant and original, or derivative and calculating?

Born into a humble family in the Ukraine in 1885, Sonia began life as Sarah Stern. Family circumstances led her to live with a wealthy uncle and his family in St Petersburg, and this was when she underwent her first move up the social ladder, changing her name to Sonia Terk. She was propelled into a life of privilege and culture. Introduced to art galleries and museums, Sonia became enthralled with the arts and was sent to the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe. At 20 she moved to Paris, and paintings from this time exhibit the strong influences of Matisse, Gauguin and the German Expressionists and resemble uninspiring copies. But, it can be argued that few young artists produce original, nonderivative pieces in their formative years. Januszczak wrote he was impressed with the speed she absorbed the art around her, but I would suggest that this level of plagiarism is endemic in people who are hungry for recognition and fame. In Kenya, many local artists I have worked with frequently borrowed European art history books and produced competent versions of paintings by Cezanne, Matisse and even Renaissance masters. Their paintings impressed art consumers, as did Sonia’s in Paris.

Her next move was to connect her further with the Parisian artistic cognoscenti. In an act of blatant self-interest, she married Wilhelm Uhde, a gay art dealer and close associate of Picasso and other major players on the Was Sonia Delaunay the high priestess of art stage of the time. This ensured her stay colour, sonorous composer of hue and in Paris and placed her firmly in the creative geometry and a visual poet, or a manipulative zeitgeist. mistress of self-aggrandisement and promotion? Importantly, do these questions matter when we view any artist’s work? Sonia Delaunay

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She swiftly moved on to marry Robert Delaunay, and the trademark abstract style that would shout their name began. A brand was born ... and the intriguing question remains … did Robert initiate the concept of one colour & shape affecting another, the term ‘simultanism’, did Sonia create her own versions of this, or was Sonia the principle protagonist? My research shows very similar and striking images produced by both around the same dates. In most publications, Robert gets the credit, but this is hardly a surprise. Sonia held on to the ‘corporate’ concentric circles, discs of contrasting colour and the ‘sophisticated doodle’ imagery throughout her life, and after Robert’s diversification into other genres, persuaded him back to this approach 20 years after the first works appeared. I think this approach to picture making, after the colour theory and analysis

Sonia Delaunay, Electric Prisms 1914 Centre Pompidou Collection, Mnam / Cci, Paris © Pracusa 2013057

Sonia Delaunay

are understood and applied, is relatively easy? The formula was a good one, much borrowed over the years, and perhaps a difficult one to develop and/or abandon. Sonia quickly took diversionary creative tactics. Possibly propelled by greater praise for Orphism (as Apollinaire dubbed their work) being heaped on her husband, she took the pattern making, the colour juxtapositions and bold shapes into the arena of textiles, fashion and beautiful ‘designer living for the home’. How stunningly her shapes and doodles and colour blocks adapt to textiles. This was the part of the exhibition that many of us loved. We are hugely familiar with the genre, the design style, and the Liberty-esque and Conran-like textiles that evolved from this period. The Bauhaus was flourishing. Were her designs so different from those of other contemporary designers? Was she, yet again, conveniently well placed to pursue her latest project?

Robert Delaunay, Le Premier Disque 1913-14 Private Collection

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I was intrigued by one scribbly rose textile sketch dating from 1928 to 1930 that bore more than a close resemblance to one I recognised of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Further research showed that Mackintosh’s design dated from 1915 to 1923. Perhaps this was a coincidence … does copyright exist on chevrons, zigzags, abstract flowers? Or perhaps Sonia was being as sharply shrewd as before and adapting the ideas of others to her own? Again, if the result is successful, is it important when we enjoy an artwork? There were other exhibits in the show I found myself critical of. One was the mural design for the international exhibition at the Palais de L’Air in Paris, which I found reminiscent of an art A level student’s book cover design. It was detailed, technical and resonated with the aeronautic theme, but lacked any sense of colour or sophistication. But perhaps this approach to graphic imagery

started at this time and offered a formulaic response to student designers subsequently. I found myself bored by the later artworks in the final galleries. For me, it was a case of familiar themes being re-worked with no evolved surprizes, and I felt deeply disappointed that on her final return to oilon-canvas, Sonia had reverted to the safety of the syncopated rhythm, the clichéd shapes and familiar palette. The resulting images seem to be cruder than their predecessors. Is this a result of over-exposure and over-use? One critic wrote that Robert Delaunay was the first painter to play the colour spectrum as if it were a musical scale. I agree that the early images, from both artists, touched the sublime, but feel her late attempts were discordant. Not deliberately so, but perhaps a consequence of fearing to leave the safety of the genre for which she was famous. Apollinaire quoted ‘An Orphic painter’s

Sonia Delaunay, Design 253 (detail), 1928-30, in Color Moves: The Art and Fashion of Sonia Delaunay 2011, at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Textile design: Chrysanthemums 1915-1923 © The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow 2015

Sonia Delaunay

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works should convey an untroubled aesthetic Cover photo with reference to Tate Modern pleasure, but at the same time a meaningful exhibition: The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay, 15 structure and sublime significance’. April - 9 August 2015. I would question how often this can be achieved, and, if achieved, how can the oeuvre continue to develop, improve or evolve? For me many questions remain. Does an artist have more or less integrity if they stick to the same essential imagery throughout their life’s work? I would suggest that experimentation beyond a basic concept is essential for creativity. Was Sonia’s ambition evidence of a feminist philosophy? I think not. She was hugely successful, partly through her social connections, but I could find no evidence of commitment to sororal issues.

Sonia was quite ruthless in her selfpromotion, so I would hesitate to hold her up as a beacon to feminism. Whatever her critics write, say, or believe, she was the first woman to have a solo show in her lifetime at the Louvre, and she was awarded the title of officer of the French Legion D’Honneur. Her show at Tate Modern is significant in public perception. She used her intelligence to meet and influence people and work on projects most contemporary women artists can only aspire to. If looking at a large body of work in a prestigious international gallery leaves me feeling as if I have eaten luxury chocolates that end up tasting the same, then I have to question the experience. I did not set out to be negative in my critique of Sonia’s work, much of which I enjoy. We are rarely asked if we personally like Titian, Picasso or Hirst, or if this matters. She was enormously successful and recognised. Why do I feel less impressed by this than I should? by Pat Keay Sonia Delaunay

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Dorothy Bohm A glimpse into her photography and life

Paris 1953 ÂŠ Dorothy Bohm

I have spent my lifetime taking photographs. The photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing. It makes transience less painful and retains some of the special magic, which I have looked for and found. I have tried to create order out of chaos, to find stability in flux and beauty in the most unlikely places Dorothy Bohm Dorothy Bohm

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In March 2013, during the weekend of International Women’s Day, South London Women Artists staged a collaborative interpretation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party to honour 1038 women of importance. 38 artists took part in this 3 day installation at 47/49 Tanner Street, SE1 and each artist chose a woman who had played a significant role in their own life and work. Edori Fertig chose the photographer Dorothy Bohm. Bohm’s displaced childhood as a Jewish refugee from Lithuania before World War II made her deeply aware of the vulnerability of human existence and empowered her with the gift of being able to capture the fleeting moment with poetic urgency. Dorothy Bohm has had a long and illustrious career dating from the 1940s to the present day. Born in 1924 and now over 90 years old she is a practicing artist in the process of reappraising her life and work, both of which have been shaped by happiness, tragedy, war, a long and loving marriage and her life in England. ‘It has been extraordinary,’ she says. ‘by some happening I became a photographer’. Her photography spans over 70 years - she came to England as a 14 year old school girl to escape the Nazis just before the outbreak of the Second World War. She studied photography at Manchester College of Technology and founded Studio Alexander in Manchester, before moving to Hampstead, London in 1956. She is considered one of the great humanist photographers of her time.

Edori Fertig next to her dinner invitee: Dorothy Bohm. Photo: David Randall-Goddard

For years Bohm concentrated on black and white portraiture but when she ventured into colour in the 1980s there was a dramatic shift in her work.

Egypt 1986 © Dorothy Bohm Dorothy Bohm

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Female mannequins, adverts and posters that often represent women in ambiguous and constrained ways appear regularly in Bohm’s work from the 1980s onwards. Torn posters that detail fragments and layering of urban life and vandalism are re-visited frequently, revealing an interest in disorientation and displacement. Colour photographs with images of real women merging with representations of women in the form of mannequins and posters form a large body of her work.

London 1988 © Dorothy Bohm

I find that colour requires a different sensitivity. Reality and unreality mix more harmoniously. I can give vent more readily to my fantasies: it allows more scope for the dream! My eye is alert to bursts of colour where unexpected things emerge. The emotional appeal of colour to me is very strong; it does not say the same thing as black and white. On being a woman, Bohm says ‘the first thing I want to say, and this is very important, is that not at any time in my life have I ever felt I have been disadvantaged being a woman. I mean this as a woman and as a photographer. I am proud to say that I initially supported my husband when we were first married whilst he studied; and then much later as I was photographing women in Africa and Israel, my female subjects had a way of opening up to me that they wouldn’t have necessarily done if I was a man’. She adds however, that as a teenager learning her craft, her teachers were men. Bohm cites both her father and husband as strong advocates of her work. They both encouraged her to use a camera – her father gave her a Leica camera from around his neck as he put her on the train for England saying ‘it might come in useful to you one day’. Bohm had no idea that it would. Sadly she had to sell it in order to survive. Bohm wasn’t to be reunited with her father until 20 years after the war, traumatised by his experiences in a Russian labour camp; he was unable to discuss fully what had happened.

Bohm cites both her father and husband as strong advocates of her work. There were however three women who did have a strong influence on Bohm’s development as a photographer: London 1997 © Dorothy Bohm

Dorothy Bohm

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Self-portrait 1942 © Dorothy Bohm

Erica 1946, a portrait from Studio Alexander © Dorothy Bohm

Eva Silberman, a Bauhaus- influenced photographer, Germain Kanova, a wellestablished London based photographer and Marie Riefstahl-Nordlinger who introduced Bohm to post-war Europe and especially Paris which had a strong impact on her work over the years. Bohm continued to photograph women focussing on their ‘interior life’ whilst her photographs of men showed them as social animals, often in groups. Her photos of children are particular favourites as she feels the natural and vital spirit of children gives her joy.

In 1971 Bohm was involved in the founding of the Photographers’ Gallery in London. As Associate Director she met and became friends with world famous photographers such as Ansel Adams, Bill Brandt, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Andre Kertesz, Josef Koudelka whilst also nurturing younger, talented photographers.

Bohm’s strongest and most captivating photographs are those of women. She has declared many times that it has been a distinct advantage being a women photographing women as this allows an intimacy and immediacy often denied to male photographers. Her work reflects her personality in that the rational and intuitive are in perfect balance. She recounts many key influences and friendships throughout her life, examples are with the artist, historian and poet Roland Penrose and the photographer Lee Miller. Dorothy Bohm

Whether it is a still-life, landscape or human study, everything is a unique situation and in state of transience. Bohm manages to capture a particular moment in time that couldn’t be captured again. by Melissa Budasz & Moira Jarvis Dorothy Bohm has a new book coming out later this year, entitled About Women: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm published by Dewi Lewis. With thanks to Dorothy Bohm Monica Bohm-Duchen Edori Fertig Merita Zhubi References A World Observed 1940-2010 www.dorothybohm.com

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in conversation with

Marina Cantacuzino

the most dangerous thing in life is to let people become convinced that truth has just one face Khaled al-Berry

The Forgiveness Project

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Marina Cantacuzino is a former freelance journalist who wrote stories between 1990-2004 about ordinary people’s struggles and triumphs: the challenges they faced with their relationships, their health, and their work. As a result she became acutely aware that far more effective than reporting on the views of experts and analysts, was being able to share the authentic voices of people who had lived through difficult experiences. She has set out to tell the real stories of people whose response to being harmed was not a call for revenge but rather a quest for restoration and healing. The impetus behind The Forgiveness Project charity was an exhibition she created with photographer, Brian Moody, called The F Word. In the course of collecting these stories of reconciliation and forgiveness, she noticed that forgiveness cut public opinion down the middle like a guillotine. There are those who see forgiveness as an immensely noble and humbling response to atrocity; and then there are those who simply laugh it out of court. The F Word tells the stories of people whose lives have been shattered by violence, tragedy and injustice and who are learning to forgive, reconcile and move on. Since its launch in 2004, the exhibition has been seen in more than 550 venues, across 14 countries, to an audience of over 70,000 people. Marina, The Forgiveness Project book was published this Spring 2015 and has been hugely successful, can you tell us what sort of impact this has had on your life? I’m a writer at heart and so founding, and then leading, The Forgiveness Project, has meant that my time and energy have for the past 11 years largely been focused on the operational and strategic concerns required when you’re running a charity. The fact that I was asked to write a book has brought me back to my first love – writing and telling stories! The stories you have collated are often from ordinary people who have experienced extreme situations and circumstances has your journalistic work always been influenced by this? When I was a journalist editors would often ask me to write first-person stories, in other words interview someone, then edit and

The Forgiveness Project

Marina Cantacuzino. Photo: Kata Karolyi

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write up the story in their own words. I acquired a bit of a reputation for being good at this which I didn’t fully appreciate because I thought anyone could do it really. It didn’t feel like ‘proper’ journalism because it didn’t require a great deal of research or invite opinion. However, over time, I realized that I only received letters from readers in response to these kind of stories because they seemed to reach directly through to people who were experiencing similar life events. The stories were told in people’s authentic voices, revealing their vulnerability and their strength, often after having worked their way through very challenging circumstances. Therefore when it came to collecting stories about forgiveness I knew this was the right format. My focus this time was on restorative narratives, real lived experiences that demonstrated how the healing process is to move from the narration of an offence as hurt feelings to the narration of an offence as an experience of significance. Did you envisage that these stories would form the basis of The Forgiveness Project, a charity which uses storytelling to explore peaceful solutions to hurt and violence? I never planned to start a charity. In 1999 I had created, with the photographer Brian Moody, an exhibition called One In Four about mental health. It was part of the government’s Mind Out for Mental Health campaign and the exhibition was a similar format to The F Word, consisting of strong portraits alongside first-person testimonies. The One In Four exhibition was extremely successful and travelled the country but still my life remained firmly rooted in journalism. So I expected The F Word to follow the same path. But this was totally different, because I think the subject spoke to people about how to address the pain and suffering in their own lives. Also the exhibition didn’t preach or tell people what to do. It simply presented a space of inquiry through presenting the The Forgiveness Project

limits and possibilities of forgiveness in the aftermath of harm and trauma. Also when The F Word was launched in 2004 it was not that long after the invasion of Iraq and the world felt in a mess. These were stories of hope at a very bleak time, and they seemed to resonate with people, tapping into an urgent public need for alternative and peaceful responses to violence. From that moment on, the subject of forgiveness, with all its nuanced, layered, complex, simple and lucent interpretations, would not leave me alone.

Forgiveness complex.

nuanced,

layered,

How do you go about collecting and developing restorative narratives? Initially one story would lead to another as people wanted to become part of the exhibition or form part of our website storybank. For instance, I was in South Africa interviewing Desmond Tutu who said, ‘have you visited the Parents Circle in Israel/ Palestine, and if you haven’t you must’. So I went to Jerusalem and collected some stories from this amazing group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families supporting reconciliation and peace. Also, once the exhibition was launched, we received a lot of press and after that people started writing in with their own stories. It’s rare that someone can write their story in a way that enables us immediately to publish it on-line because there is a process I prefer to use to get the best result. It’s a collaborative process, a conversation. I do the interview, then I write up and edit the piece, before checking it back with the storyteller. If we leave people to write their own stories often it will end up too long, too complicated, too detailed, or not detailed enough, and therefore, to put it bluntly, I know it’s unlikely to have the impact which the story requires. ArtVerve |36

Every story I tell teaches me something new about forgiveness or compassion or empathy, because no two stories, no two perspetives, are the same. I read this quote once which I think really sums it up - ‘A biographical story is like a diamond. It must be dug out, mined out, and then the light is only refracted when it is cut, worked on, polished’. What has The Forgiveness Project taught you? Every story I tell teaches me something new about forgiveness or compassion or empathy, because no two stories, no two perspectives, are the same. That’s why I love this complex, slippery, highly contested subject. So, to take just one example - Khaled al-Berry articulated for me the reason why I am so reluctant to nail things down and fix them. As a former member of the radical Islamist Egyptian group al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, Khaled eventually moved away from the movement, coming to an important realization that ‘the most dangerous thing in life is to let people become convinced that truth has just one face.’ It made me realise that if forgiveness was a colour it would be grey, the colour of compromise and conciliation, and because it sits between the two extremes of black and white. Can you tell us about the schools projects you have been involved with? From sharing stories on-line and hiring out The F Word exhibition to churches, conferences, schools, community groups etc., teachers have consistently contacted us asking for more resources. They want to drill down deeper into the subject and so we are now creating a Learning Resource. Because I strongly believe that forgiveness is an unchartered journey of the heart that looks and feels different for everyone, this won’t be about setting out a step-by-step process to follow. The Forgiveness Project

However, the stories on our website do demonstrate that there are some key attributes to being a forgiving person and some key components required if you are to line yourself up for forgiveness. So we are going to further explore that. We will make it clear that forgiveness is a choice, it’s not necessarily for everyone, nor is it always applicable, for instance in the midst of violent conflict when people are hell-bent on survival it may be incendiary to talk about forgiveness. Also triggers throughout life might throw you off course again because Forgiveness is an intention, a direction, not a destination. The Forgiveness Project’s essential methodology uses story-telling to explore how forgiveness and related concepts - reconciliation, letting go/moving on, conflict resolution - can and does transform people’s lives. This resource will be available for teachers and other learners to use as they wish and choose in the coming months/year.

If forgiveness was a colour it would be grey, the colour of compromise and reconciliation, and because it sits between the two extremes of black and white. What is The Forgiveness Toolbox? I helped to create The Forgiveness Toolbox www.theforgivenesstoolbox.com with Dr Masi Noor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Liverpool’s John Moore University. Some years ago Masi discovered The Forgiveness Project because of his interest in the subject of group forgiveness and victimology. He asked me if he could analyze some of the politically motivated stories and work out, from a psychological perspective, what was going on, how come some people were able to resolve inner/outer conflict by not allowing the pain of the past dictate the path of the future. ArtVerve |37

Restorative narratives, from victim/ and perpetrators of crime and violence, survivors and perpetrators of crime remain at the heart of everything we do. and violence, remain at the heart of You have been running a prison programme everything we do. Masi’s reasoning came from his belief that forgiveness often remains a vague concept and psychology is well-positioned in disentangling the myths around powerful concepts such as forgiveness, and breaking them down into practical and tangible skills that are accessible to people. The seven skills based on these actual real-life stories do not form an exhaustive or prescriptive list but are: 1. understanding (the skill of making sense of your suffering – researching & learning phase) 2. resisting conformity (the skill of finding your own path) 3. courage and curiosity (the skill of looking beyond yourself) 4. building bridges born out of suffering (the skill of relating to another’s pain) 5. accepting personal and collective responsibility (the skill of locating the “I” and the “us” in suffering) 6. recovering from resentment (the skill of letting go of anger and bitterness) 7. empathy (the skill of putting oneself into someone else’s shoes) Can you tell us more about The F Word Exhibition? Where is it touring currently? The original exhibition has been displayed to an audience of over 60,000 across 13 countries, in more than 500 venues, including schools, prisons, corporate institutions, shopping centres and hospitals. Early this year, The F Word was on display in Brussels, as part of an EU programme exploring memory and healing. Feedback shows that the vast majority of visitors comment on the impact the stories have had on shifting the way they think about personal and social relationships. Restorative narratives, from victim/survivors The Forgiveness Project

in England and Wales called RESTORE, what is the aim of this programme? RESTORE is an intensive, group-based offender intervention which we have run in prison and probation settings since 2007. It is centred on the stories of victims and perpetrators of crime. Its overall aim is to contribute to the rehabilitation process for offenders, by preparing and supporting them emotionally to effect change in their lives. Using the personal testimonies of both victims of crime and ex-offenders (who facilitate the programme side-by-side) it enables offenders to address their inner motivations, develop empathy and formulate fresh perspectives. Participants learn to create a new narrative from a basis of hope, responsibility and a sense of agency; essential elements that lead to a reduction in offending. Finally, what are your plans for the future of the project? My hope is that The Forgiveness Project grows in a local way, perhaps with chapters developing in different communities and countries. In England we deliver the RESTORE programme, we hire out The F Word, collect stories for the website, and hold lectures, seminars, workshops and Forgiveness Conversations. In America, currently we just have someone coordinating The F Word but we’d love to do more there. My hope is that some elements of our work could get replicated and that partners pick and choose what they do from a menu, and we then provide support to ensure quality control and the integrity of the work. The F Word exhibition tour dates: St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol: 12-20 Sep 2015 Sandhurst Baptist Church, Berks: 22 Sep- 3 Oct 2015 For further information and updates please visit: theforgivenessproject.com

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Judith Bernstein Voyeurs at Mary Boone Gallery, New York photo: John Reynolds

New York interviews Judith Bernstein Margaret Roleke

Black Girls 2015, wall relief with toys & singing/ light up dolls ÂŠ Margaret Roleke The New York interviews

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and activist organisations including Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition, and Fight Censorship.

Judith Bernstein When something is funny, you laugh ... it’s almost like an ejaculation, so you get a release by laughing at it, by laughing with the viewer when you see it; but it is dead serious. Day 1 in New York and I have a meeting with Judith Bernstein at her studio in Chinatown. Taking the subway in New York is easy so I arrive only slightly confused in the everexpanding frenzy that is Chinatown. I climb five flights of stairs in the dark, which is a perfect preparation for what is to come. There is more energy and excitement in Bernstein’s studio than on the streets of Chinatown. Hard to imagine I know, but her success is palpable. In the Whitney Museum of American Art, Judith Bernstein’s work is called Vietnam Garden. It is from a series of anti-war drawings that attack the macho militarism of US foreign policy. During that time she was an art student at Yale University and it was then that she adopted the image of the phallus as a central motif based in part on graffiti found in the men’s toilets on campus. Attracted by the content, tags and bold defiance of graffiti she transformed penises into guns, superheroes, giant screws and flagpoles. Provocative and outrageously witty she describes her use of humour to address political issues by saying ‘when something is funny, you laugh ... it’s almost like an ejaculation, so you get a release by laughing at it, by laughing with the viewer when you see it; but it is dead serious’. Bernstein was an early member of many art Judith Bernstein

Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum, New York, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Bernstein was a founding member of A.I.R. (Artist in Residence) Gallery (the first gallery devoted to showing female artists) where she had her first solo exhibition in 1973. Following that show at A.I.R. Gallery, Bernstein was asked to take part in Focus: Women’s Work - American Art 1974. But it was here that her large charcoal drawing of a penis (extremely large, actually, at 9’x12-1/2’ and extremely well drawn) entitled Horizontal was pulled out because it was thought to be “lacking in redeeming social value”. Although artists like Robert Mapplethorpe had dealt with censorship, it was a more difficult position for a woman to navigate. The publicity surrounding Bernstein’s work killed her career to the point that she was unable to get a full time university job. Also people didn’t think her work was feminist. They thought that in order for a work to be

The Voyeurs © Judith Bernstein

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feminist it had to be self-referential. She was cut out of the female canon. Bernstein kept on working. Her next solo show was nearly 40 years later. In 2004 the dealer Mitchel Algus put Bernstein in a group show and four years later gave her a solo exhibition. In 2008 Paul McCarthy saw her work and some months later his daughter offered her a show at Box LA and things started to happen. Amongst many of the significant shows this year is an On-Site Installation at Art Basel, The Box LA showed her work at Frieze New York, she has a show at Mary Boone Gallery on Fifth Avenue, in Paris, in Zurich.... And very appropriately last year she had a stunning exhibition at Studio Voltaire London, called Judith Bernstein: Rising. Bernstein says that the renewed interest in her work has been due to recognition of how revolutionary her early work was by younger critics and artists. She says that they are also responding to her current work because the issues around feminism and war are still unresolved - her work is hands-on and raw. Bernstein’s first solo museum exhibition took place at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York in a show called Judith Bernstein: Hard October 2012 – January 2013. In fact it was a retrospective showing key works and

included Horizontal 1973. In this symbol of sexual and political domination, Bernstein used thick fast strokes to evoke a comic book suggestion of a screw in motion. It has stood the test of time. There was also a re-creation of the 1986 mural called Signature, a performative piece, which she says is about ego, male posturing but also about her own ego. Selected pieces were Jack-off Policy 1967, Union Jack-off Flag 1967 and Fun-Gun 1967 which are said to form the most powerful anti-war works of that period by women. There was also Birth of the Universe 4, Space, Time and Infinity 2012. Six new large oil paintings from this Birth of the Universe series and recent drawings were being shown at Mary Boone Gallery on Fifth Avenue. The show is called Judith Bernstein: Voyeur. Bernstein says that female genitalia is often romanticised but she wants to use the vagina as a metaphor for the black hole, the universe as a metaphor for the ever changing relationship between men and women. Birth as the Big Bang. In these paintings she is also dealing with a psychological narrative and has gone back to her own nuclear family where the mother feels ‘You owe me. I gave you birth you owe me’.

Judith Bernstein in her studio and with Moira Jarvis Judith Bernstein

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Crying Cuntface 2014, oil on canvas 86 x 86 inches ÂŠ Judith Bernstein

For me these paintings speak of gravitational pulls that make up not only our personal experience of our own lives but also our experience of the universe. The explosive energy of the work is accentuated by the use of alternate ultraviolet and white spotlights highlighting the florescent paint and allowing the oil paint to give depth and punch to the layers of our unfathomable universe. Perhaps the voyeur is the comical male genitalia staring into the black hole contemplating birth and existence? Ideas are immense and they match the humour which is immense. The artist and her work are joyous and optimistic. A fabulous introduction to New York. by Moira Jarvis

References Into the Abyss: Judith Bernsteinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dissection of Desire, Thomas Micchelli 2015 Judith Bernstein, An Art Star, New York, Julie L. Belcove 2015 Judith Bernstein: Hard, Brooklyn Rail, Ann McCoy, 2013 Judith Bernstein: Hard, curated by Margot Norton, published by New Museum 235 Bowery New York

Judith Bernstein

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Margaret Roleke

Her work highlights the stereotypical differences between toys meant for girls, and those meant for boys. Dolls and war toys.

I am also interested in Ellen’s work as an artist. She has a studio behind the main gallery which has been turned into a gallery space. Ellen describes herself as an interdisciplinary abstract painter. She uses synesthesia, digital It’s World Toy War media and interactive performance as tools Bushwick Open Studios for developing a corresponding language Day 2 in New York and I have a meeting with between colour and sound. When I study the Margaret Roleke in Bushwick. Bushwick is to work entitled Molecules of Music Data 2014. Brookyn what Hackney Wick is to Hackney. I hear sounds, watery and lyrical. Skyrocketing rents have driven artists farther east from Brooklyn to Bushwick. Vogue has But I have actually come to see Margaret recently deemed it one of the top coolest Roleke who was in fact one of the first artists neighbourhoods in the world. But all is quiet to show with Odetta, teamed with the artist at midday on Saturday. I check out Roberta’s Charlotte Schulz in a show called Gobsmacked. for lunch and discover the early crowd Brooklyn based, Roleke also has a ‘making having brunch. But by the time the meeting studio’ in the woods in Connecticut, an hour is over Bushwick is buzzing and Bushwick north of New York. Open Studios are in full swing. It is the one weekend of the summer season you need to The impact of the show World Toy War is be physically present in Bushwick or so the immediate. Roleke says she is dealing with ‘consumption, consumerism and excess’. Her publicity tells us. I believe it. work highlights the stereotypical differences Margaret Roleke is showing her work in the between toys meant for girls, and those Fucigna/Roleke Space. This is her showroom/ meant for boys. Dolls and war toys. ‘Toys studio space which she shares with the are a vehicle for Roleke’s larger ideas which artist Joseph Fucigna. Roleke exhibits her explore the tendency of our current culture work at Odetta Gallery which is next door. to use social media and propaganda to This gallery, voted one of the best top ten prescribe narrow, contrived definitions to us galleries in Bushwick, is owned by the artist as individuals and as a nation’. Ellen Hackl Fagan and opened just a year ago. Fully committed to the local art community in this gritty industrial landscape, Fagan is also a member of AWAD, the Association of Women Art Dealers which is based in London but has now expanded internationally. I say that South London Women Artists would love to work with her. She seems keen and we plan to follow this up when I get back to London. Margaret Roleke

Her work cleverly opens up this argument. We are trained up by the toys we play with as children, so that as adults we are easily seduced to consume, without considering the impact of this ‘consumption, consumerism and excess’ on the planet. And we are often seduced by the superficial glitzy packaging of consumer goods. Not even the contents. ArtVerve |43

Interestingly Roleke uses this same process to draw us into her work. Her work initially reminds me of colourfield painters, perhaps Helen Frankenthaler, but there are twists. The formal elements of colour, tone, texture etc invite us to interact with the work but then our expectations are challenged. Small scale plastic gendered toys and the packaging for these toys have become the paint that builds up the overall image. Roleke says that she graduated from Long Island University and started as a painter and left as an installation artist. This process is evident in her work. She likes to create a beautiful object but on examination references our current state of world disorder. Eva Hesse has been an influence particularly in the way she has used diverse materials. Roleke says that Bruce Nauman’s work ‘gave me permission to create work that was uncomfortable’. Fucigna/Roleke Space © all artwork Margaret Roleke

The three large sculptural wall pieces that I see are composed of Barbie dolls with with missing limbs, toy guns, soldiers and other war toys. One piece is black, one brown, one white. Roleke says that the issues women face are universal, irrespective of colour. But these pieces also reference conflict, exploitation and the missing Nigerian girls. I am reminded of the world politics outlined in the book I am reading about global warming by Naomi Klein called: This Changes Everything. by Moira Jarvis

White Girls 2015 painted plastic dolls and toys

Margaret Roleke

References culturecatch.com/art/margaret-roleke momaps1.org/studio-visit/artist/margaret-roleke realartways.org/event/margaretroleke/2015-03-28/

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Barbara Hepworth Innate Dignity

Barbara Hepworth, Discs in Echelon, version 2, Plaster, 1935â&#x20AC;&#x201C;6 ÂŠ Barbara Hepworth Estate, on loan to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts University of East Anglia, Norwich

Barbara Hepworth

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The recent interest in Barbara Hepworth has re-injected her into our collective consciousness. Penelope Curtis, Director of the Tate Britain who has co-curated Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World had been trying to exhibit a large group of Hepworth’s at the Tate for several years but until recently there was little interest in Hepworth. She was in danger of fading from the cultural map but now there is an appetite for her work and a desire to acknowledge her contribution to 20th century art.

Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos 1946 part painted wood and strings object: 430 x 460 x 385 mm, 15.2 kg Presented by the artist 1964 © Bowness, Hepworth Estate

Barbara Hepworth

Hepworth has found a new audience in a younger generation interested in how she used photography to project images of her work and herself into a global context. Inga Fraser, assistant curator for Sculpture for a Modern World puts this into a historical format: ‘Anticipating today’s 360 degree photography and slick installation shots provides us with our first-and sometimes only encounter with a particular piece by an artist. In the early 20th century works by Barbara Hepworth and her international contemporaries became known to many primarily as reproductions in avant-garde magazines and specialist books or, as the amount of coverage given over to the arts in the mainstream media increased, in newspapers, cinema news reels and television documentaries.’ [1] Much editorial has been given to the generally perceived view that Hepworth had limited success but she was one of the leading sculptors of the 20th century. Before the Second World War she was part of an international avant-garde and in the 1950s and 1960s she exhibited widely around the world, winning many international awards and commissions. However, despite being a pivotal member of English Modernism cofounding the Unit One movement, during her lifetime she tended to be written out of this group by frequent critiques of the movement by Alan Bowness, Bryan Robertson and Edward Mullins. Her influence upon younger artists who emerged in the 1950s including Reg Butler, Lyn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull has rarely been acknowledged. Whilst Pelagos, Single Form, her largest and most significant commission which stands in the United Nations Plaza in New York or the familiar Winged Figure on the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street is instantly recognisable as Hepworth’s, we may struggle to attribute other works to her. ArtVerve |46

This may be due in part to her differing styles. Her work went through distinct stages, mostly affected by, if not informed by, significant life changing circumstances which were to impact on her ability to work freely and consistently. Although Hepworth’s purist modernist forms may now be synonymous with a period in history, before Gilbert and George presented themselves as living sculptures and Tracy Emin exhibited her unmade bed, her philosophy is timeless as it evolves from an innate understanding of the human spirit and its interaction with its environment, be this physically or politically. This understanding came from within; it was not a perceived understanding. ‘I rarely draw what I see; I draw what I feel in my body’. [2] In the 1961 film by John Read, commissioned by the BBC, Hepworth can be seen walking along the beach collecting pebbles. She talks of the human act of carrying a stone; it connects us with the past and holds knowledge of our survival, peace and security.

were unhelpful. [4] Yet these comparisons pervade and may go some way to explain Hepworth’s lack of favour in the years following her death. Herbert Read contrasted Hepworth’s desire for ‘loveliness’ and a ‘sense of mystery’ revealed in her reaction to materials, to Moore’s striving for ‘power’ and ‘vitality’. [5] In Women Artists and Modernism, Katy Deepwell has contrasted Read’s view with J.P Hodin’s (who contributed to many of Hepworth’s catalogues) emphasis upon the artist’s necessary relationship to European intellectual thought and philosophy. Hodkin read Hepworth as coolly idealist in contrast to Moore’s romantic depth of feeling. Deepwell goes on to argue that Hodin’s reading of Hepworth opens up ways of re-emphasizing her ideas as emerging from an embodied experience (mind in body) in terms of physical sensations through abstraction as parallels for human and political relationships. [6] Hepworth herself was required to spend much of her time explaining the position of abstraction and constructivism, discussing terms, writing statements and promoting abstraction in publications.

This innate sense was often presented in a stereotypical view of her as eternally feminine seeking beauty in nature particularly when she was critiqued alongside Henry Moore, but this was to undervalue her contribution to modernist discourse. Hepworth and Henry Moore’s careers worked in tandem, starting with studying at Leeds College of Art. The perception that she walked in his footsteps, perpetuated by Hugh Gordon Porteus [3] and Herbert Read hung over Hepworth like a black cloud. At a recent Q and A session at the Tate Britain, Penelope Curtis refused to be drawn on the subject saying that comparisons between Moore and Hepworth Barbara Hepworth

Conoid, Sphere and Hollow III Marble 1937 Government Art Collection of United Kingdom © The Hepworth Photograph Collection

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Abstraction was new and required explanation, especially as many of the forms in her own work gave no perceived starting point. She found it much easier to explain her position through her writings than in person, shying away from private views and the press. Her writings offer an invaluable and powerful insight into her view of her position in the world and the creative arena:

Hepworth’s labours that are held within each form. Sensing all the hours of carving, rasping and sanding, the qualities of hand on material, the effort, the knowledge gained of each material until the work takes on its own life and purpose it is possible to see how Hepworth saw herself as the object. ‘From the sculptors point of view one can either be the spectator of the object or the object itself. For a few years I became the object. I was the figure in the landscape and every sculpture contained to a greater or lesser degree the ever-changing forms and contours embodying my own response to a given position in the landscape.’ [8]

When we say that a great sculpture has vision, power, vitality, scale, poise form or beauty, we are not speaking of physical attributes. Vitality is not a physical organic attribute of sculpture - it is a spiritual inner life. Power is not man power or physical capacity: That she saw herself as the object is suggestive it is an inner force and energy. [7] of the assimilable femininity of the time, The current exhibition at the Tate Britain attempts to demonstrate key moments that reflect the internationalism of her career. Walking around Sculpture for a Modern World, a lot can be understood by its chronology.

that viewed women as complementary to the male dominated critical ethos to which Hepworth herself was to refer. However, her use of ‘complimentary’ and the rejecting of feminist critique was a desire not to be seen as part of a female art group, but as equal to her male counterparts. In the introduction in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition In Body and Soul an anthology of Women’s art in the 20th and 21st century, currently showing at Sala Kubo-Kutxa Aerota, San Sebastian, Xavier Iturbe writes;

It starts with her early work and that of her contemporaries who saw carving as a way to express the accumulative idea and sensation, rejecting modelling for its concerns with a visual attitude. It leads us through a creation of a new mythology concerned with shape, light, texture, colour and weight, to the Fortunately there is no longer any Pavilion which places her works in a direct argument about whether art produced conversation with the architectural space. Printed material on the walls reinforces Hepworth’s international status and her influential design of Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. Each room is a testament to the artist’s skill, the sculptures stand firm with their concrete presence and objecthood. Many are confined under Perspex due to nervous insurance companies, but it is still possible to sense Barbara Hepworth

by women is inferior, a view that was held until a century ago. Before that, it’s very existence was directly denied. Today, we know that it is a problem relating to being recognised and being visible. The doubt may lie in the depth of this problem which, even in developed societies which we could regard as advanced like ours, it still runs quite deep. [9] ArtVerve |48

In the 60s Hepworth entered a new extremely productive period. Nearly as many sculptures were produced during 1965 to 1975 as were produced from 1925 to 1965. These works are the subject of an exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield, A Greater Freedom. In this period Hepworth no longer sees herself as the object, the works have taken on a monumental scale and they now possess a mysterious life of their own. Hepworth now has the solitude to work more readily afforded to male artists; she has time. Her reputation has given her sufficient commissions to buy space, materials and assistants.

particularly ideas for figures in space. Whilst showing at the British Pavilion for the 1950s Biennale, she wrote

Every day I sat for a time in the Piazza San Marco and the most significant observation I made for my own work was that as soon as people or groups of people entered the Piazza they responded to the proportions of the architectural space. They walked differently, discovering their innate dignity. They grouped themselves in unconscious recognition of their importance in relation to each other as human beings. It is this acknowledgement of ‘innate dignity’ in Hepworth that should continue to be revisited. by Jackie Brown

‘I find it easier now I am free to make forms and move them around. I don’t feel so personally involved - I’m not exactly the sculpture in the landscape anymore. I think of the works as objects which rise out of the land or the sea, mysteriously. You can’t make a sculpture without it being a thing, a creature, a figure, a fetish ... it’s something you experience through your senses, but it’s also a life giving, purposeful force.’ [10] In this period Hepworth has the opportunity to fully realise her dreams of the 1930s to make large works in the landscape. She can return to explore earlier ideas, Barbara Hepworth

References 1. Inga Fraser-Tate etc. Issue 34 Summer 2015. pg 70 2. Barabara Hepworth - John Read. Television documentary 1961. 3. Hugh Gordon Porteus-‘Take away from Barbara Hepworth all that she owes Moore and nothing would remain but a solitary clutch of Brancusi eggs and a few Arp scraps.’- Henry Moore-Sculpting the 21st century. pg 267 4. Penelope Curtis-Q &A session, Tate Britain, 23/06/2015 5. Who’s afraid of Henry Moore-David Cohen-Henry Moore, Sculpting the 20th century 6. Katy Deepwell-Hepworth and her critics- Women Artists and Modernism 1998. 7. Barbara Hepworth-Sculpture-Circle, International survey of constructive art. 1937 8. Barbara Hepworth- Carvings and Drawings. 1952 9. Xavier Iturbe-In Body and Soul catalogue 2015 10. Barbara Hepworth in conversation with Edwin Mullins from Barbara Hepworth- Carvings and Drawings

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Agnes Martin Agnes Martin

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In the room the women come and go, talking of, in this case, Agnes Martin. Packaged in conversations, all artists survive both in their work, and in the dialogue that comes after them - myriad sound waves spreading out in circles from the source. Martin did not necessarily want that expanding discussion, disengaging herself from it at every turn, but there it is, so we must turn to look at the picture, stop our ears, use our eyes and see what it is that makes this work sublime. Alhough she hated any kind of critical, textual commentary of her work, once refusing a show because the deal included a catalogue, her self-imposed solitude was full of her own words, deliberately complex conversations in her notebooks and lectures. These tangential, Woolf-esque streams of consciousness, walls of words, were peppered with quotes from other writers, Plath amongst them. She was confusing, deliberately creating a smokescreen to disappear behind.

On the other side of the screen Agnes was walking her way towards silence, relentlessly, trying to create the perfect place in which she hoped to pin down the experience of inspiration.

support her choice of a life of solitude. Another conversation revolves around her lifetime battle with schizophrenia, her fights with voices, catatonic episodes and depression, but these things seem to barely make it to the canvas, unless you consider the repetition in the work to be a coping mechanism. If you think of it as repetition at all. Though almost all the canvases are a square of equal size, that repetition is another smokescreen. But are these multiplying conversations in danger of drowning out the work? Is it worth remarking on this constant format, which has written itself out of the equation through its resistance to change? More importantly the content alters imperceptibly yet definitely, from painting to painting. These changes, both minute and monumental, hold, like much in her work, two opposites at bay, and are evidence of the stages of Agnesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journey along the path to the edge of the void.

The poem, A Man in a Landscape, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, defines the edges of that path. On one side is the eternal, indelible presence of ourselves in our work, and on the other its absence, with all the terror and potential that holds. There might be nothing Some of the conversations around Agnes there. are loud and we lend our ears eagerly when we first meet her in the canvas, looking for On one side, I dare not turn my eyes from him, some way to access her work. Agnes was a I dare not relinquish that threated pinpoint of recovering daughter, a survivor of a tough being lest it should vanish... mother who handed her, in equal measure, much pain but also the tools to deal with it And on the other, Ah, how slow to go, who self-reliance, survival skills and determination. with each step drags after him this vast Her constant companion on her journey mantle of landscape, this once-velvet now to solitude, where her voice would be free threadbare and trailing to waste! from external editing, was a lifetime interest in Eastern philosophy, which she used both The absence, if anything, is terrifying but we to temper her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s harsh lessons and all want to know what it holds.

Agnes Martin

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A photographer who refines and refines the image, moving towards that point where the picture is perfect, reshoots the same construct in different light, with a different filter, a different lens, closing in on the point. The minimising strategy works ever harder to say more with less, tuning out the packaging and turning down the volume of the conversation, filling the picture with emptiness and its opposite - potential, or inspiration. What is left lies somewhere in the afterburn of the image, which like a photographic negative, is printed a little differently each time.

Her connection with the artworld through fellow artists, galleries, lovers, was loud too, and on the cusp of success she took the decision to edit out those insistent voices, refused to join the dialogue, and disappeared from the picture into the desert. She all but gave up painting for seven years, writing and studying instead, and earning herself the title of ‘mystic of the desert.’

In the middle of the grids the sounds are very quiet indeed, but they are still there. Like piles of virgin notebooks, music paper, graph paper, the space invites words, notes, Agnes reduced and reduced, not in a equations. The air is almost alive with the mechanical way, but through a process sound of scratching pens ready to fill spaces. of reflection, intuition and spiritual consideration. Though her reputation as She wanted us to arrive at the picture, a Minimalist is there in the history, she innocent, like children, and experience considered that these elements of her inspiration in its raw form. But that is reductive process made her an abstract not possible, not remotely so, unless expressionist.

all the noise has stopped.

Her path towards the empty picture was full of tiny human touches, adjustments, wobbles, irregularities, all evidence of struggles with the terrifying prospect of the void in which there is no voice, but hopefully, some joyous resonating response - perfection, joy, inspiration.

Children we are not, and so many words have already filled our heads. Though Agnes turned much of the volume down, silenced most of it in her search for the joy of formless response, we still need reassurance that, like the entity qwfwq, in Calvino’s Cosmicomics, if we shout into the void, our first creative act, Her continuous reduction takes us to a we will hear something returned. Only then can we experience our own intake of breath place just before words, where there as we feel the joy of unadulterated inspiration is still some tiny human hook into the formed in ourselves.

experience, an indelible, quiet whisper. But you won’t hear it if you listen too But even Agnes could not remove herself completely. Though she struggled to smooth hard.

the line, rub out the errors, there is still the tiniest kink of the line, imperceptible but fundamental to the experience of joy, necessary to stop the headlong rush into a wordless landscape.

We are a long way through her life before we come to the works which through their paring down and paring down and thin washes of colour provide us with the space to find our place. Many of her early works, joyous assemblages and collages, she Her human tracery allows us entry to an destroyed, perhaps for being too full of voices. image, fends off the scary possibility that this Agnes Martin

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picture might show us endless nothing. No answer. Those little wobbles are evidence of a humanity through which we understand the nature of our first unedited experiences, those most intimate early memories which come uninformed. Finally, in front of one of the pale candy floss squares the voices have been tuned right out, and there it is, an empty space which is full. This is the moment then, looking into the void when nothing happens at all, and then everything happens at once. Something speaks back, without words, and the colour becomes the most intense experience of all. You feel saturated in it, experience it at a cellular level, feel yourself as part of something immense, un-nameable. Minimising and maximising stand next to each other, separated only by focus. She has found the way to reveal - if you can let go too. Then intensity arrives unbidden, and there in the picture is the thing she is trying not to say but to show. Those canvasses are full of emptiness reflecting potential. And there she is, gone, and there you are. The journey to silence is the only way to hear your own voice. by Pia Goddard

Agnes Martin (1912-2004) Untitled #5 1998 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, DĂźsseldorf ÂŠ 2015 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Agnes Martin

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Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s On

on contemporary female art next 6 months London Exhibitions Celina Teague: I Think Therefore I # Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery 533 Old York Road SW18 to 5 September 2015 Vivian Maier: Photography Beetles & Huxley, 3-5 Swallow Street W1 to 5 September 2015 Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire ICA, The Mall SW1 to 6 September 2015 Isa Genzken: Basic Research Paintings ICA, The Mall SW1 to 6 September 2015 Eileen Hogan: Edges And Enclosures Browse & Darby, 19 Cork Street W1 9 September - 2 October 2015 Vanessa Garwood: Is it True? It Is Not True Rook & Raven, Rathbone Place W1 10 September - 10 October 2015 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens W2 to 13 September 2015 Jumana Manna Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road E3 18 September - 13 December 2015

Sara Naim: Heartstrings Hayward Gallery, Southbank SE1 to 27 September 2015 Emily Jacir Whitechapel Gallery 80-82 Whitechapel High Street E1 30 September - 13 December 2015 Kara Walker Go To Hell Or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road N1 1 October to 7 November 2015 Ever Old Newness/Ever New Oldness: Hannah Lees The Sunday Painter, London SE15 to 2 October 2015 Rose Blake: Now I Am An Artist Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery Charlotte Street W1 7 - 31 October 2015 Rebecca Ward Ronchini Gallery Dering Street W1 9 October - 5 November 2015 Agnes Martin Tate Modern, Southbank SE1 to 11 October 2015

Cornelia Parker Shirley Baker: Women, Children & Loitering Alan Cristea Gallery, Cork Street W1 Men ,The Photographers Gallery, London W1 12 October - 7 November 2015 Until 20 September 2015 The Fallen Woman The Foundling Museum, LondonWC1 25 September 2015 - 3 January 2016 Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on

Tiger, Mog and Pink Rabbit: A Judith Kerr Retrospective - The Jewish Museum 129 Albert Street, Camden, NW1 to 14 October 2015 ArtVerve |54

What’s On

on contemporary female art next 6 months Lee Miller: A Woman’s War Imperial War Museum Lambeth Road SE1 15 October 2015 - 24 April 2016 Alice Anderson Memory Movement Memory Objects The Wellcome Collection 183-193 Euston Road NW1 to 18 October 2015 Christina Mackie Tate Britain Commission 2015 Tate Britain, Millbank SE1 to 18 October 2015 Points of Contact: Adeline De Monseignats and Marie Klars The Cob Gallery, Camden NW1 8 - 31 October 2015 Barbara Hepworth Sculpture for a modern world Tate Britain, Millbank SE1 to 25 October 2015 Soldiers and Suffragettes: The Photography of Christina Broom Museum of London Docklands E14 to 1 November 2015 Anj Smith: Phosphor on the Palms Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row London W1 to 21 November 2015 Rose English: A Premonition of the Act Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Road, NW3 11 December 2015 - 21 February 2016 Cornelia Parker: One More Time St Pancras International’s Barlow Shed roof Euston Road N1 to 31 December 2015 What’s on

Outside London Exhibitions Laura de Santillana & Alessandro Diaz de Santillana Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield to 6 September 2015 Evelyn De Morgan: Artist of Peace Blackwell House of Arts and Crafts Bowness-on-Windsmere, Cumbria to 13 September 2015 Public Faces: Private Lives - Vivien Leigh Treasurers House, York 19 September - 20 December 2015 Rachel Howard: At Sea Jerwood Gallery Hastings to 4 October 2015 Fragile? National Museum Cardiff, Wales to 4 October 2015 Fiona Banner: Scroll Down & Keep Scrolling The Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 10 October 2015 - 17 January 2016 Magali Reus: Particle of Inch The Hepworth, Wakefield, West Yorkshire to 11 October 2015 Phyllida Barlow: Set The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh to 18 October 2015 Vivienne Westwood: Cuts From The Past Danson House , Danson Park, Kent to 31 October 2015

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What’s On

on contemporary female art next 6 months Laura Ford Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham to 1 November 2015 Jenny Holzer: Softer Targets Hauser & Wirth, Somerset to 1 November 2015 Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1865-1885 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 7 November 2015 - 26 June 2016 Elizabeth Frink: The Presence of Sculpture Nottingham Lakeside Arts University Park, Nottingham 25 November - 28 February 2016 International Exhibitions Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY to 7 September 2015 Vera Röhm: Raum und Rhythmus Museum der Wahrnehmung MUWA Graz Graz / Austria to 11 September 2015

Lara Favaretto: Good Luck MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo Rome, Italy to 20 Sepember 2015 Andrea Zittel: The Flat Field Works Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium to 27 September 2015 Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back Museo Picasso, Málaga, Spain to 27 September 2015 Lynn Chadwick Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany to 18 October 2015 Rachel Khedoori Hauser & Wirth New York, 69th Street to 24 October 2015 Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life New York Botanical Gardens, New York to 1 November 2015

Obedience: An installation in 15 rooms by Saskia Boddeke & Peter Greenaway Jüdisches Museum Berlin to 13 September 2015 Organic Matters: Women to Watch 2015 The National Museum of Women in the Arts Washington, D.C. to 13 September 2015

What’s on

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Usage All images other than graphic files used in the design of the magazine are copyright of the original artist(s). If you wish to use the images, please contact the artist first. If the images are being posted for a blog, art site or likewise, please make sure to fully credit the artist(s) and/or provide a link so that viewers will be able to see more of the artists work. Any photos of shows and/or events are copyright of the photographer. If you wish to use any images of this nature, please contact the photographer. If you wish to use any writings in this magazine; interviews, articles, critiques and any other information please contact the Editor. Copyright and Courtesy All images used in this magazine are copy written to the original creator/owner. This includes any images of artwork and prints, photographs of any events and any written works featured. If any writing is being used in portion or in full with permission, please give credit to the source and link back to ArtVerve magazine. Any writing that has been used without permission is copyright infringement. All artworks referenced in this magazine have been listed with copyright, where applicable. Where copyright has not been listed, the artist name is listed and/or a 70 year rule has been applied and the image has become part of the public domain.

About

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ArtVerve • celebrates, recognizes and documents contemporary women artists, current exhibitions and projects with critical theory • is a forum of ideas and views on contemporary female art • is not driven by ideological principles; for dialogues to become available we are trying to keep it as open as possible • the contributors are not all professional art critics or writers, but practitioners whose contributions are just as valid as they reflect on their contemporaries and their interest in the history and future of female art • is a magazine written by artists for artists with intelligence, passion and a point of view. This magazine is produced out of a need to communicate the talent and relevance of female art historically and in contemporary practice.

No part of this electronic magazine may be reproduced without the written consent of ArtVerve. Requests for permission should be directed to the editor. If you would like to be one of our contributors for the next edition of ArtVerve, March 2016, please make contact with the editor-artverve@slwa.co.uk If you would like to subscribe to ArtVerve please mail subscribe-artverve@slwa.co.uk and type SUBSCRIBE in the subject line.

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Contributors Elinor Brass Jackie Brown Melissa Budasz Marina Cantacuzino Pia Goddard Althea Greenan Moira Jarvis Pat Keay Laura Moreton-Griffiths With special thanks Judith Bernstein Dorothy Bohm Margaret Roleke Designed by Melissa Budasz This is an online magazine. Printed copies of this magazine are available for ÂŁ5.00 per copy please contact the editor-artverve@slwa.co.uk for further information.

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ArtVerve

on contemporary female art

Edition 5 due out 1 Mar 2016

A SLWA Publication| Issue 4 | Sep 2015

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