In Memoriam: Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon 1935-2009

With a heavy heart, Women & Their Work would like to mark the passing of Jeanne-Claude. Part of one of contemporary art’s most fantastic partnerships, she and her husband Christo produced some of the best known and marvelous monuments in modern memory. Their work has been praised and admired worldwide both by the public and critics.

Revolutionizing the creation of monumental-scale art, Jeanne-Claude and Christo made works of joy and wonderment, always with the avowal that their work was without any statement other than the celebration of landscape. With a number of works across the world over the course of 50 years, some of their best known installations include Wrapped Reichstag (1995), Running Fence (1976), and The Gates (2005). Although the couple worked together exclusively, there was always an independent spirit in each, as is attested by the documentary collection 5 Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude. She was Christo’s partner and his muse. She was ours as well. We will miss her.

New York Times Obituary writer William Grimes has written a beautiful chronicle of Jeanne-Claude’s life. You can find it here.

Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon
June 13, 1935 – November 18, 2009

Tax Free Day in our GiftShop this Thursday

Tax Free Day in our GiftShop is this Thursday.


Shop tax free all day long 10am – 8pm Nov. 19th. The GiftShop doubles in size for the Holidays holding twice the gifts for your shopping pleasure. Women and Their Work members will receive an additional 10% discount. Come visit the GiftShop, and you’ll get to see our new exhibit “My Wicked Twisted Sense of Love”. Women & Their Work

Art with Heart Benefit Party

Come to Empower Art’s first annual Art with Heart Benefit Party.

Proceeds will help Empower Art provide counseling and art workshops to adolescent survivors of family and sexual abuse.

Where: US Art Authority
2908 Fruth Street (next to Spider House)
Austin, TX 78751
When: Tuesday, November 10
7:00PM to 9:30PM

Music by CIPHER , The Patches,
 & DJ Miguel Angel
Eat, Drink, &  Dance !
Orginal Artwork  & Silent Auction
Tickets $15 in advance & for students.
$20 at the door.

For more information:
www.empowerart.org
or Laramie Gorbett 323 219 -5689

Architecture & Desire panel Nov. 5th, 7pm

panel talk held at Women and Their Work

UT Resident, Video & Performance Artist, Joan Jonas Public Lecture

UT Resident Artist Joan Jonas to Present Public Lecture in the Department of Art and Art History on Oct. 22

Event: The University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History presents a lecture by internationally recognized performance and video artist Joan Jonas. The lecture is part of the fall 2009 artist residency taking place in the Department of Art and Art History. This public lecture is free and open to the public.

When: Thursday, Oct. 22, 4-6 p.m.

Where: The University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History, ART 1.102.

Background: Jonas is internationally known for her performances and video art, mixing objects and mediated images together in natural and industrial environments. Using video as a mirroring device, Jonas herself appears as a performer in her work, often performing densely collaged narrative texts. Her awards include recognition from the American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art.

If you miss it, you may want to know that Joan’s teaching an undergraduate class here at UT that is going to be part of Fusebox in the spring, with a new performance piece. She’s also a part of this lecture in SA: http://landheritageinstitute.org/2009ARTSCI/Agenda.html

So long, Nancy!

Nancy Spero, Artist of Feminism, Is Dead at 83

New York Times
repost
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 19, 2009

Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist whose tough, exquisite figurative art addressed the realities of political violence, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 83 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was infection leading to respiratory problems that in turn caused heart failure, said her son Philip.

Born in Cleveland in 1926, Ms. Spero studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and there met her husband, the painter Leon Golub, to whom she was married for 53 years until his death, in 2004.

The couple moved to Paris in 1959, where Ms. Spero steeped herself in European existentialism and produced a series of oil paintings she had begun in Chicago on the themes of night, motherhood and eroticism. When they settled in New York City, which became their permanent home, in 1964, the Vietnam War and the social changes it was creating in the United States affected Ms. Spero profoundly.

To come to grips with these realities, Ms. Spero, who always viewed art as inseparable from life, developed a distinctive kind of political work. Polemical but symbolic, it combined drawing and painting as well as craft-based techniques like collage and printmaking seldom associated with traditional Western notions of high art and mastery.

One result was a group of pictures in gouache, ink and collage on paper titled “The War Series” (1966-70). With its depictions of fighter planes and helicopters as giant, phallic insects, the series linked military power and sexual predatoriness, but also included women among the attackers. Ms. Spero later described the work as “a personal attempt at exorcism”; it remains one of the great, sustained protest art statements of its era, all the more forceful for its unmonumental scale. Exhibited in 2003 at the LeLong Gallery in Manhattan, its pertinence to contemporary politics was unmistakable.

In 1971, Ms. Spero also returned to the interests of her Paris years in the introspective and tormented “Codex Artaud,” a series that interspersed images of broken bodies and hieroglyphic monsters with the transcribed writings of Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the mentally ill French poet who viewed himself as an outcast from society and who spoke of human folly with a mocking rage. To some degree, the work reflected Ms. Spero’s own sense of exclusion from an art world that had the character of a men’s club.

By the time of the “Codex Artaud” her long involvement with the women’s movement had begun. Ms. Spero was active in the Art Workers Coalition, and in 1969 she joined the splinter group Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which organized protests against sexist and racist policies in New York City museums. In 1972, she was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery, the all-women cooperative, originally in SoHo, now in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. And in the mid-1970s she resolved to focus her art exclusively on images of women, as participants in history and as symbols in art, literature and myth.

On horizontal scrolls made from glued sheets of paper, she assembled a multicultural lexicon of figures from ancient Egypt, Greece and India to pre-Christian Ireland to the contemporary world and set them out in non-linear narratives. Her 14-panel, 133-foot-long “Torture of Women” (1974-1976) joins figures from ancient art and words from Amnesty International reports on torture to illustrate institutional violence against women as a universal condition.

Ms. Spero considered this her first explicitly feminist work. Many others followed, though over time she came to depict women less as victims and more often as heroic free agents dancing sensuously.

Although Ms. Spero received relatively little art world attention during the early part of her career, she gained visibility in the 1980s and ’90s as socially concerned art came into favor. By this time her work had gained in formal complexity and variety, with its weavings of image and text, its time-consuming techniques of painting, cutting and stamping, and its adaptation of aspects of Pop, Minimalism and Color Field painting, styles she had previously distanced herself from.

Beginning in the late 1980s, she transformed the scroll format into site-specific wall murals. In 2001, she completed a mosaic installation for the 66th Street subway station at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. In 2006, despite painful degenerative arthritis that had crippled her for years, she executed wall paintings for “Persistent Vestiges: Drawing From the American-Vietnam War,” an exhibition at the Drawing Center in SoHo. For a concurrent solo show at the LeLong Gallery, she made a single printed-paper frieze that wrapped around the base of the gallery’s walls.

Titled “Cri du Coeur,” (2005) and adapted from an Egyptian tomb painting, the mural depicted a procession of mourning women. Some viewers saw in it a reference to the war in Iraq or to Hurricane Katrina; others understood it as Ms. Spero’s response to the death of her husband the previous year. Like her, he had created an art that insisted on balancing ethics with aesthetics.

Ms. Spero had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1992 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1988. A traveling career retrospective was organized by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse in 1987. In 1997, she was included in Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. She often exhibited in two-person shows with Mr. Golub. A Spero retrospective is planned for the Pompidou Center in Paris next year.

In addition to her son Philip, who lives in Paris, her survivors include her sons Paul, also of Paris, and Stephen, of Swarthmore, Pa.; six grandchildren; and a sister, Carol Neuman, of Portland, Ore.

Kiki Smith, one of the many younger artists influenced by Ms. Spero, once said in an interview: “When I first saw Nancy Spero’s work, I thought, ‘You are going to get killed making things like that; it’s too vulnerable. You’ll just be dismissed immediately.’ ”

Ms. Spero herself, who experienced both being dismissed and celebrated, said simply of her work, “I am speaking of equality, and about a certain kind of power of movement in the world, and yet I am not offering any systematic solutions.”