Feb 16, 2013

 

PROGRAM OF EVENTS:

10:00-10:15
Welcome and Introductory Remarks
Organizer: Catherine Morris, Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. 

10:15-11:45
Queering the Museum
Chair: Tirza True Latimer, California College of the ArtsPanelists: Kim Anno, California College of the Arts; Apsara diQuinzio, University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archives; Thomas Lax, Studio Museum, Harlem; Jeannine Tang, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

What are the norms that shape museum collections and exhibitions today? Representing a range of queer perspectives and professional practices-scholarly, artistic, and curatorial-we reconsider canon construction, ideologies of display, institutional activism, and what “normal” looks like in an era marked by the prevalence of the prefix “post” (post-feminist, post-colonial, post-modern, post-racial, post-subjectivity, etc.). By “queer” we mean to indicate a set of strategies arising out of our commitments to disenfranchised sexual communities, yes, but also to social justice more broadly.

11:45-12:30
Mining the Archives for a Feminist Pre-History
Andrea Geyer, artist and Sabine Breitwieser, Appointed Director, The Museum de Modern Salzburg.
Sabine Breitwieser will discuss with Andrea Geyer about the artist’s research into three women who laid the foundation of the Museum of Modern Art: Lilly Bliss, Mary Sullivan and Abby Rockefeller.

12:30-1:15
Lunch Break

1:15-2:45
The Artist as Archivist
Chair: Aruna D’Souza, Independent ScholarPanelists: Harmony Hammond, artist, writer, and independent curator; Catherine Lord, Professor of Studio Art, University of California, Irvine; Ulrike Müller, artist; and Martha Wilson, artist and Founding Director, Franklin Furnace.
This panel will address the question of artist’s archives — archives of artistic work, archives created by artists of work that otherwise would be lost to time, archives as art. While the archive has long had an important place in feminist art practice,  representing a crucial artistic strategy to deal with the exclusion of women artists from the museum since the early 1970s by creating and occupying alternative spaces, and while they have been often the richest site of feminist work within such institutions, we will pose the question of how these archives operate – both as a literal space and as a conceptual resistance – in relation to the museum, to artistic practice, and to personal narrative.

2:45-4:00
Working With and Through Collections: Curators in Conversation
Chair: Saisha Grayson, Assistant Curator, The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum
Panelists: Cathleen Chaffee, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Galleries; Norman Kleeblatt, Curator of Fine Arts at the Jewish Museum and Jenelle Porter, Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.

This discussion will seek to address how institutions choose to or resist integrating feminism into their collection strategies, both overtly, through mission statements and collection plans, and less overtly through daily management, presentation and interpretation. Further, speakers will offer comparative perspectives on what it means to apply feminist and queer methodologies within different collections. Does this entail bringing political concerns to bear on acquisition choices, or does this center on installation and interpretation?

In particular, this panel will focus on what it means to build a feminist or queer approach to collections not built with these concerns in mind (that is, 99.99% of them).  How can lessons learned from the growth of feminist art history and queer theory be applied to contemporary, historical, cross-cultural, or other identity-based collections? What opportunities and pressures does the stewardship of a permanent collection place on institutional curators with such ideological investments?

4:00-5:30
Sex in the Museums
Chair: Anne Swartz, Professor of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design
Panelists: Elissa Auther, Associate Professor University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Co-Director, Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics at the MCA Denver; Claudia Hart, Associate Professor, Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Jeffreen Hayes, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at Birmingham Museum of Art; Jennifer Tyburczy, Fulbright- García Robles Fellow, El Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios de la Mujer, El Colegio de México, Mexico City, and Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, Rice University.

In any museum, rarely is sexually-oriented work shown for sex’s sake or alone.  Typically, there is an overlap with politics; when it is silenced or removed sex is often used as a cover to prohibit other sorts of political voices, such as those who speak out about racial injustice.  What qualities and what politics are at work in these decisions?  What makes an artist’s work sufficiently interesting to overcome curatorial reluctance to show sexually oriented material?  How is a critical race perspective incorporated into exhibitions of this work?  How does queerness exist at museums?  How are sex-the embodied, ephemeral activity-and sexuality-sexual orientation, sexual desire, love, intimacy, and a relationship to certain objects in space and time, such as those in museum exhibitions-distinct from one another?  This panel of artists, curators, and scholars will address questions surrounding what it means to create and display work considered transgressive.

PRESS RELEASE

Parking and Directions to Brooklyn Museum of Art
Museum: (718) 638-5000
The Brooklyn Museum is committed to making its facilities and programs accessible to all visitors.
For information on accessibility for adult audiences, click or contact access@brooklynmuseum.org or call (718) 501-6229.

For more information contact:
Connie Tell
The Feminist Art Project, Manager
191 College Ave., 2nd floor,
Institute for Women & Art @Rutgers
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone: 848-932-3726 x 16
tfap@rci.rutgers.edu

Documentation for this event is held at the Feminist Art Projects Archives located at Rutgers University.