uptown and out @uptownandout - Tumblr Blog

It’s an ungainly word for English speakers, which is maybe why we do not hear it often: Gleichschaltung. Yet the concept remains central for a clear view of what happened to Germany in the 1930s.

#jugend #art nouveau

standingatthefence

MISCEGENATED FAMILY ALBUM

photo-installation 1980/94, Lorraine O’Grady , Cibachrome prints

“Attention to framing, both literal and metaphorical, is key to understanding Conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady’s 1980/1994 photographic installation Miscegenated Family Album. On first glance, the work’s pairing of family photos with ancient statues of Nefertiti seems an elaborate and fantastic way to establish royal lineage, but this family album has little to do with genealogy. Instead it is a subtle recounting of O'Grady’s strained relationship with her older sister, Devonia, a rift that was not resolved before Devonia’s untimely death at 37. O'Grady finds a striking parallel between her sister and Nefertiti, who disappeared in her late thirties, leaving behind six children and her younger sister Mutnedjmet. All the images in the album are scaled identically, eliminating hierarchy and reinforcing a poetic link between the two families.”

-Alexander Gray Associates (New York) 2008

post-impressionisms

“The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.” – Georgia O'Keeffe

Yoko Ono

Cindy Sherman

Amrita Sher-Gil

Berthe Morisot

Faith Ringgold

Frida Kahlo

Georgia O'Keeffe

carangi

Jenny Holzer for Helmut Lang

#jenny holzer

thefoxhuntingman

from Vincent van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo (30 October 1877)

(translated by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger)

#vincent van gogh

entheognosis

I’m a witch woman; high on tobacco and holy water. I’m a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A profession of sorts. I have the magic of words.

Sandra Cisneros (via entheognosis)

antigonick

A book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (via antigonick)

sweetsummerchildofmine

“It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters.”

-Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination, chapter 2, the Infection of the Sentence (via sweetsummerchildofmine)

theliteraryjournals

She began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked. She had resolved never to take another step backward.

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (via wordsnquotes)

days-of-reading

In rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and other women. It is the tone of a woman determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of woman, but she is acutely conscious–as she always was–over being overheard by men: by Morgan and Lytton and Maynard Keynes and for that matter by her father, Leslie Stephen. She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread in her determination to have her own sensibility yet protect it from those masculine presences.

Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (via days-of-reading)

critical-objects-deactivated202

If Manet or Degas depicted contemporary subjects in baroque outfits, it might look something like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings. The exquisite painterliness of her portraits is virtually unmatched; the images fully reveal the process of their making and yet somehow transcend it. In fact, Yiadom-Boakye’s works are not portraits, but rather depictions of composite figures born completely from her own imagination. Her version of painting revels in its complete subjectivity, something she equates loosely with jazz. “The fantasies, nonsenses and random associations in my head meld with the life I live and the things that happen around me,” she has said. “It is necessarily flawed, histrionic, emotional, intuitive, illogical, personal, and largely lost when translated into words.” This helps understand her poetic titles, too, which suggest narrative threads not immediately connected to the paintings but no doubt enhance our pleasure in consuming them. This embrace of irresolution and emotion is precisely what makes her figures so compelling, so alive—perhaps suggesting she has accessed some truth unavailable to those who pursue “realistic” transcription. Like several of the artists I’ve written about so far, Yiadom-Boakye is subjected to a constant barrage of racializing interpretations, which cast her works as radically political for the simple fact of setting their black subjects in a more classical idiom. Take one step back and you realize the absurdity of such a proposition, its unchecked assumption of a white gaze, and how far the canon has yet to come.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Passion Like No Other, 2012

#lynette yiadom-boakye

thereturnofwomen

20 Pioneering Female Artists You Should Know

Hannah Höch, Leonora Carrington (pictured above), Tina Modetti, Frida Kahlo, Agnes Martin, Elizabeth Catlett, Barbara Hepworth, Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, Adrian Piper, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Sonia Delaunay, Carmen Herrera, Miriam Schapiro, Gunta Stölzl, Florine Stettheimer, Joan Jonas, Romaine Brooks, Alma Woodsey Thomas, Evelyne Axell, Madame Yevonde, Bernice Bing

Individual pages linked so you can read more and watch videos/interviews on each artist.

“Women have been cast in the role of mothers and homemakers, and we are real good at it. Black women have been cast in the role of carrying on the survival of black people through their position as mothers and wives, protection and educating and stimulating children and black men. We can learn from black women. They have had to struggle for centuries. I feel that we have so much more to express and that we should demand to be heard and demand to be seen because we know and feel and can express so much, contribute so much aesthetically.” —Elizabeth Catlett

Of Barbara Hepworth, photo below, from The Daily Mail: Her abstract sculptures exude a feeling of feminine calm and resilience, while her strong features, seen in photographs, often wear the same beatific, but determined half-smile. It’s the expression of a woman who fought her way through the hostility of the all-male art world to become the greatest woman artist this country has ever produced, only to suffer an extraordinary and shocking demise.