In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls feminist collective displayed bright, brash posters in New York City public buses as part of its campaign to shake up the art world and the centuries-old practice of drastically sidelining female works and perspectives.
The posters presented the classic reclining nude figure from the 1814 painting “La Grande Odalisque,” by one of Western art’s good old boys, French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. But in the irreverent Guerrilla Girls’ style, the face of the harem girl was obscured by the group’s signature gorilla mask. The posters also pointedly asked: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?”
In a very graphic way, the poster made the case that major art museums are disproportionately filled with images and ideas, particularly about women, that are created by men and controlled by the so-called “male gaze.”
More than 30 years later, the poster is one of a number of Guerrilla Girls works that greet visitors to a major new exhibition of 21st-century feminist art at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Its inclusion is among the ways that the exhibit, “New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century,” tries to reverse the historical focus of museums celebrating male genius.
Occupying nearly half of the 25,000-square feet of gallery space in UC Berkeley’s downtown art museum, “New Time” showcases more than 140 works by more than 75 feminist artists and collectives, one of the most extensive to date of feminist art practices. Here the “female gaze” controls how the paintings, sculptures, videos and mixed-media works consider art, society, current events and history from the perspective of women.
The exhibit is offered at a time when the de Young Museum in San Francisco is presenting a career retrospective exhibit of Judy Chicago, who emerged as a leading force in feminist art in the 1970s and remains one of the genre’s towering figures. (Chicago is also represented in the BAMPFA collection.)
BAMPFA director Julie Rodrigues Widholm said the Berkeley exhibition launches at a “deeply meaningful” moment for the UC-Berkeley-run museum, as it re-opens after the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to close for more than a year. “New Time” represents “one of the museum’s largest and most ambitious exhibitions in recent history” and comes when museums around the country need to carefully consider their purpose, Wildholm said.
“In the midst of social and political upheaval, what do museums need to do to remain relevant to our audiences and to address the most pressing issues of our time?” Wildholm asked at a preview for the show. She said a museum stays relevant “through programming that’s international, interdisciplinary, intergenerational and intersectional, that centers on the voices of the historically marginalized.”
Apsara DiQuinzio, recently departed senior curator of modern and contemporary art at BAMPFA, added that feminism has likewise become global, embracing the interests of the historically marginalized. For that reason, it “encompasses many complex issues and perspectives, which can’t be reduced to one signal subject style or agenda.”
The exhibition, put together by DiQuinzio, addresses this complexity by organizing around eight sections that explore such topics as race, sexuality and gender identity, the negative stereotypes of femininity, women in the workforce and in the domestic sphere, manifestations of female anger and feminism’s future.
And, yes, there are female nudes in the exhibition, but they are creations of women who have reclaimed the genre. Through paintings, photos, or even in an arrangement of 13 inflatable “Sex Dolls” by Elaine Sturtevant, the artists exaggerate women’s traditional passivity in art, or present bodies and body parts in frank, fragmented or even cartoonish ways. The point is to examine how the female form has long been an object of sexualization, oppression and violence.
On the subject of violence, one of the more haunting works is Lorna Simpson’s “Polka Dot & Bullet Holes #2,” made of India ink and screen print on Claybord. The work consists of a bifurcated image that shows a female form, from the neck down and seated demurely, dressed in an elegant polka dotted dress. But some of the dots are bleeding into bullet holes in an image below.
DiQuinzio said she was especially proud to include the works of another Black artist: The monumental installation by Kara Walker, “Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress” in the section that re-examines history. With Victorian-inspired silhouettes, Walker creates vignettes about the life of a young Black woman, who is probably a slave. The vignettes mix scenes of violence by European explorers with African tribal motifs, along with a figure that appears to pay homage to a dancing Josephine Baker.
“Too Nice for Too Long” is the section that is certain to speak to women’s frustration with being told much of their lives that they shouldn’t get angry, lest they are derided as un-ladylike or “hysterical.” Here, visitors will find “Grand Snake Arm 8,” a glass sculpture of a raised fist, a symbol of protest, by Judy Chicago, the pioneering radical feminist artist. The fist is wrapped in a snake, with all its biblical connotations of a woman who famously desired power.
Pussy Riot also is represented in this section, with the 2012 video “Punk Prayer,” which shows four members of the famous punk band storming a Moscow cathedral to protest Vladimir Putin’s government and the Russian Orthodox Church.
Returning to the anger of the Guerilla Girls, and the nude figure that riled them up, “New Time” offers another version of the “Odalisque” figure. It comes from Ellen Gallagher, who has fun with a famous Man Ray photo of Matisse sketching a model dressed in a harem costume.
Gallagher puts her own face on the reclining woman, and she’s in a therapy session with Sigmund Freud. This image, of course, pokes at the notoriously problematic views of women espoused by the founder of psychoanalysis. But like the rest of “New Time,” it also offers many layers of commentary about art, representation and gender.
‘NEW TIMES: ART AND FEMINISMS IN THE 21ST CENTURY’
Through: Jan. 30
Where: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley; open 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays
Admission: $11-$13 (free for BAMPFA members and UC Berkeley students); 510-642-0808, bampfa.org