nothin It Takes A City: Art Gallery Exhibit Explores… | New Haven Independent

It Takes A City: Art Gallery Exhibit Explores 150 Years Of Women At Yale”

Wangechi Mutu

Sentinel I.

Wangechi Mutu’s Sentinel I stands guard over its space in the Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibit On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale,” on view now through Jan. 9. But it’s not a passive sculpture; in a way that no photograph can do justice to it, the piece appears to shift its shape as you get closer or farther away, and as you walk around the piece. The human figure morphs into something more like an animal, or maybe a plant, or maybe something more elemental, like fire or smoke. In a hall full of powerful pieces, it seems to protect and at the same time draw strength from the art around it.

That is one of the prevailing themes of the gallery’s sprawling exhibition of the works of dozens of women artists — that there are threads running through the works that bind them together. Sometimes those threads are thematic and aesthetic. Other times they’re quite direct, as one generation of artists mentors and teaches the generation coming up below them. The overall effect is to make an undeniable claim for the women in the exhibits as great artists, regardless of gender. But the political question then, is hot on its heels: why isn’t this great art, all part of the gallery’s collection, on view all the time?

The exhibition itself helps inform those who might want to answer that question. It really is an It takes a city’-type project,” said Lisa Hodermarsky, of the voluminous research, done by numerous staff and students, to put the exhibition together. The genesis of the show lay with the observance a few years ago that the academic year 2019 – 20 was going to see the coinciding of two important anniversaries; it was going to mark 150 years since the first women students arrived at the Yale School of Art, and 50 years since the entire university became coeducational. For Hodermarsky and others at the gallery, it was a chance to dive into the museum’s vast collection to put together the story of the development of art and women’s rights, at Yale and much more broadly, to shed light on what has changes in the past 15 decades, what has stayed the same, and perhaps what more can be done.

The exhibition has a serious audio component to it, of recordings of interviews with the artists themselves interspersed with readings of letters, manuscripts, and accompanying text by Yale School of Drama students. We really wanted to give voice to these women,” Hodermarsky said. But from those voices, a larger narrative emerges.

The admission of women into the School of Art was a progressive move in 1869. For the earliest students — the exhibit highlights Josephine Miles Lewis, who was, in 1891, the first student at Yale (female or male) to be awarded a bachelor of fine arts degree — art was a means toward autonomy. As students, they would win prizes to study in France, mentored by practicing artists there. As graduates, the ability to paint fine portraits was a way to earn income.

Audrey Flack

Lady Madonna.

But as the decades progressed, Hodermarsky explained, the School of Art’s curriculum remained more or less unchanged, which meant that it didn’t keep up with developments in the broader art world. Impressionism (think Monet), expressionism (think Edvard Munch’s The Scream), cubism (think Picasso), and the general movement in art to embrace abstraction in all its degrees and forms in the first half of the 20th century made hardly a dent in the way the School of Art’s faculty taught its students. The emphasis remained on portraiture using classic painting techniques, working from plaster casts and live models.

That changed when abstract artist Josef Albers became chair of Yale’s department of design in 1950. Over the objections of some faculty (who resigned), Albers brought Yale’s school of art into the 20th century. The effect on its students was evident. The celebrated artist Audrey Flack — among the first cohort to graduate under Albers’s new curriculum, in 1952 — has had a career spanning painting and sculpture in a multitude of styles, from abstract expressionism to photorealism to post-pop baroque.”

The exhibit is most interested in showing art created by women after 1950, when, in a few different ways, their artistic visions are set free. It’s divided into six thematic areas: representation, nature, legend and ritual, space, and place, and memory and history. The themes work in that they invite the viewer to worry less about the chronology of the pieces, and instead look for connections among them. The overarching themes that emerge are of women connecting with one another and with the broader world of art and art history around them.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

The Rest of Her Remains.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s The Rest of Her Remains is a case in point. Crosby’s sheer technical ability as an artist is on full display. At first glance it looks like someone perhaps taking a nap in their bedroom. Hodermarsky pointed out, however, that the figure’s pose is nearly identical to that of the man in Edouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador. And upon closer inspection, the shapes swirling around the figure are scenes in and of themselves; images, Hodermarsky suggested, of the artist’s own Nigerian childhood.

Sylvia Mangold

Opposite Corners.

What does it mean to evoke Manet’s work? Is she dreaming the past? Or is she dead, and what remains are her memories?” The ambiguity buzzes in the air and feels subversive, a little dangerous.

The same is true throughout the exhibit. Sylvia Mangold’s Opposite Corners is a rigorous technical study of perspective and of texture, especially in her treatment of the wood floor. But there’s something eerie at work, also: in all her attention to detail, and the way that she cleverly finds ways to open up space in the canvas, the one element that’s missing is herself. What does it mean that the artist has made herself invisible?

Maya Lin

Silver Housatonic.

Similarly, in the section of the show devoted to nature, several of the works are landscapes that draw attention to the fact that the image on display is itself artifice, a shadow of the subject itself. Others focus, arrestingly, on environmental degradation. Stark images of burned out forests are so attuned to the phantasmagorical shapes of the blasted trees that it’s nearly impossible not to linger on them as the photographer did.

Perhaps the two strands of thinking regarding making art about the natural world intertwine most tightly in Maya Lin’s Silver Housatonic. The jagged line of gleaming metal is, first, an accurate depiction of the way the Housatonic River appears on the map as it flows from Massachusetts down to the Long Island Sound. Aesthetically, it’s a pleasing object. But filling the river with metal takes on additional resonance when you know the actual Housatonic River is heavily contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) originating at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, Mass., the long-lasting effects of which has caused friction between GE and the state government regarding who’s responsible for cleanup as PCBs slowly pile up behind the dam at Lake Zoar. Lin’s piece is beautiful and pointed.

An-My Le

Explosion.

The section of the exhibit on memory and history contains three photographs from An-My Le that provoke a similarly fraught line of questioning. Le, a photographer born in Saigon in 1960, fled Vietnam with her family in 1975 and settled in the United States. The photographs in the show are images from a group of Vietnam War reenactors in the Southeastern U.S. doing what they do. How many of the reenactors are veterans themselves? How many are looking to get a taste? And what does it mean for Le to be there? Is she the enemy they’re fighting? Or is the enemy elsewhere? Or is there an enemy at all?

Putting together the exhibition, Hodermarsky said, showed both how rich the collection already was in representing women artists, but also the lacunae” — the artists’ work that should be here and isn’t.” She hopes that the exhibition will spur further acquisitions of artwork by women, and more generally, that this doesn’t mark an endpoint in time, but a forward look at what we want the future to look like.”

Looking forward is important because, In the works on display, what comes through loud and clear are the ways in which women artists have still been pushed to the margins in the art world, even when the training they received was up to the minute in taking account of where art was and where it was going at the time. There is the keen sense that women artists used that marginalization to subvert the movements they were taking part in, to call attention to their weaknesses. When minimalism was all the rage, for example, the women artists in the exhibit created works that satisfied the requirements of the genre — using simple, repetitive elements to build a whole — but then gave those elements a textured, handmade quality often missing from men’s work. Women artists were also more likely to employ aspects of traditional crafts like textiles to add depth to their work. The results are often more vivid pieces, sharper humor, deeper emotion.

As Hodermarsky said, viewers can’t see a show like this and simply push it aside as a show of work by women — it’s just great work.” There’s power in stepping aside to let the work speak for itself.” At the same time, it’s fair to ask why many of these pieces in Yale’s collection aren’t on more permanent display for the public to see, and what role a certain kind of structural sexism might be playing in that. American society’s current confrontation with the racism built into its structure was long overdue. We haven’t really even begun to have the same conversation about sexism. On the Basis of Art” is one of a million good places to start.

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