#halfthepicturebkm

[brooklynmuseum]

Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” tells the story of a woman’s life—her exploration of self and her relationships with others—through scenes staged in her own kitchen. In the background of this scene hangs an image of Malcolm X, who on this day in 1965 was assassinated. By folding a revolutionary icon of the 1960s into this work, produced in the 1990s, Weems evokes Malcolm X’s legacy, in art and life, that is still prevalent today.

Posted by Rachel Lewis Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953). Untitled (Man Smoking/Malcolm X), from the Kitchen Table series, 1990. Gelatin silver photograph, sheet. Brooklyn Museum, Caroline A.L. Pratt Fund, 1991.168. © artist or artist's estate 

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show will be on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Judith Scott began making art at age 46, producing an extraordinary body of idiosyncratic sculptural assemblages in a career spanning just seventeen years. From 1989 until her death in 2005, Scott worked assiduously at Creative Growth, a studio-based program in Oakland, California, founded to support artists with developmental disabilities. Fastidiously weaving, bundling, and wrapping fiber, found objects, and other unconventional materials, she often worked for weeks or months on a single piece. Scott’s life experience as an artist with Down syndrome who was also deaf and did not speak highlights the limitations of the conventional art-historical canon. Moving beyond the term “outsider artist,” critics and curators have recently contextualized her objects within mainstream modern and contemporary art history, telling a richer, more complex story about how artistic gifts can be nurtured and compelling works of art can be made.

Judith Scott (American, 1943-2005). Untitled, 1994. Fiber and found objects. Brooklyn Museum, Florence B. and Carl L. Selden Fund, 2015.30. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, Benjamin Blackwell)

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show will be on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

In a series of self-portraits taken at various New York City locations, Nona Faustine confronts the viewer, taking possession of sites where enslaved African Americans lived, or where they were sold or buried, such as at the Lefferts House homestead in Brooklyn. Located a short distance south of the Brooklyn Museum in present-day Prospect Park, the Lefferts House and surrounding property were owned by a wealthy Dutch family whose fortune was sustained by slave labor. By positioning her partially naked body at these locations—which too easily appear benign today—Faustine demands recognition of the history of slavery in the United States, and our ongoing reckoning with its legacies.

Nona Faustine (née Simmons) (American, born 1977). Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn, 2016. Chromogenic photograph, sheet. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2017.41b. © artist or artist’s estate

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show will be on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

The feminist Guerrilla Girls collective has long been at the front lines of conversations about oppression and exclusion, fearlessly and hilariously tackling sexism and racism in the arts since their founding in 1985. Twelve of their iconic posters—originally designed to be wheat-pasted in highly visible areas of New York frequented by the art world—are currently on view in Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection.

Posted by Allie Rickard Guerrilla Girls (established United States, 1985). Guerrilla Girls' Pop Quiz, 1990. Offset lithograph. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Gift of Guerrilla Girls BroadBand, Inc., 2017.26.28.

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Stacy Lynn Waddell’s practice is characterized by her use of fire, gilding, and alchemical processes, and explores issues of personal experience and American culture and history. In recent years, her work’s physical and material transformations are utilized in works that honor under-recognized African American figures, primarily in portraiture. This particular portrait is of Maren Hassinger, an artist featured in the acclaimed EASCFA exhibition, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, creating an intergenerational connection between female artists of color and honoring the legacy of Hassinger and her peers. Hassinger is wearing a “WWAR” t-shirt, the title of which glows like a protest slogan from the complex, gold-leaf background. The work also engages in contemporary discussions of memorialization, monuments, and the Black Lives Matter movement, as Hassinger stands above the empty plinth that carried Confederate General Beauregard and that was dismantled during Waddell’s New Orleans residency that produced this work.

Posted by Chiara Mannarino Stacy Lynn Waddell (American, born 1966). We Radical Women Wanted a Black Revolution (for M.H.), 2017. Composition gold and aluminum leaf with gouache, watercolor, acrylic, and Sumi ink on paper, 100 1/2 × 52 in. (255.3 × 132.1 cm). Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Gift of the Contemporary Art Committee and purchased with funds given by Deborah Rechler, TL2018.26.

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Adejoke Tugbiyele constructed her monumental gay pride flag from six gele, Nigerian women’s headscarves customarily worn at formal occasions as symbols of femininity, elegance, and prestige. Tugbiyele produced the banner shortly after the Nigerian government enacted legislation criminalizing same-sex relationships, resulting in widespread persecution of LGBTQ communities across the nation.

The flag resists strict notions of gender and sexuality imposed by the state, instead affirming the coexistence of Nigerian heritage and queer identity. Redoubling the flag’s power as an object of defiance and dignity, Tugbiyele has since carried it in protests and gay pride parades in both Nigeria and the United States.

Posted by Allie Rickard Adejoke Tugbiyele (American, born 1977). Gele Pride Flag, 2014. Fabric, metallic thread, brass. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 2016.24. © artist or artist's estate

[brooklynmuseum]

SILENCE=DEATH was a project started in 1986 by six New Yorkers, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás, as a support system during the height of the AIDS crisis. Interested in spreading awareness, and inspired by art world activists, they created this poignant poster centered on a simple but loaded, reclaimed symbol. Historically, an upside down pink triangle badge was employed in Nazi concentrations camps to identify homosexual prisoners. The right side up pink triangle quickly became an icon of AIDS activism and was adopted by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which is still active today.

Posted by Elizabeth Treptow SILENCE = DEATH Project (Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Li. SILENCE=DEATH, 1987. Offset lithograph, sheet: 33 9/16 × 21 15/16 in. (85.2 × 55.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Robert Thill in honor of Robin Renée Thill Beck, 1998.109. © artist or artist's estate #halfthepicturebkm

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Ellen Lesperance uses painting and knitting to create complex works that are largely inspired by women weavers of the Bauhaus, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, and body-based feminist artists of the 1970s and 1980s. Lesperance first creates gouache paintings on paper, which serve as patterns to recreate historic knit garments, which she locates within archival images and video documentation of women involved in Direct Action feminist protest. The physical labor she expends to create her knitted pieces intrinsically makes a statement about the demands of women’s labor.

Posted by Chiara Mannarino Ellen Lesperance (American, born 1971). Cardigan Worn by One Woman of the Boeing Five, Tried for Entering the Boeing Nuclear Missile Plant on September 27th, 1983, Sentenced to Fifteen Days in the King County Jail for Defending Life on Earth, 2011. Wool sweater hand knit by the artist, and gouache and graphite on tea stained paper. Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Purchase gift of Jill and Jay Bernstein, 2012.18a-c.