Feminism

Pat Steir (b.1938) is an American painter and printmaker, whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades while maintaining enthusiastic critical support. She graduated from Pratt in 1962 and in 1964 was included in the show Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York. She first came to prominence in the 1970s, when her work concentrated on signs and symbols and was close to minimal and conceptual art.

Six powerful native women gather up to celebrate a new beginning and the end of the world as we know it.

Featuring: Alanis Obomsawin, Nadia Myre, Swaneige Bertrand, Nahka Bertrand, Emilie Monnet, Caroline Monnet

This title is also available on the compilation What Was Always Yours and Never Lost.

Small Miracles is a suite of eight video animations in which the artist conjures up and controls forces of nature. Ignoring rational constructs of what is possible, Hechtman creates imaginary works to ground science fiction in the everyday experience. Coupling feminism and natural phenomena, the videos are located in the liminal space between fantasy and the everyday.

This video collects public service announcements created by a number of independent producers, including Jem Cohen and Michael Stipe of R.E.M.  Powerful and provocative, these PSAs address issues such as organic farming, abortion rights, street harassment, and the environment. Included are:

They Have Dreams by Natalie Merchant and Abigail Simon which focuses on the plight of homeless children.

"The dream and the waking is a documentation of my commute between New York and Boston, which I make every week for my job. I wanted to document not only the fact of the commute--where I go and how I get there, what I am leaving behind and what I am going to--but also the stream of thought that runs through my mind on this commute. The trip was not something I would normally do unless I absolutely had to, and for almost a year it was the one part of my life that never changed. The space of the commute is like a non-space, like a recurring dream.

Lucy Lippard (b. 1937) earned degrees from Smith College and New York University before beginning her career as an art critic in 1962, when she began contributing to publications such as Art International and later, Artforum. In 1966, she organized an exhibition entitled Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City.  

By focusing on the blindfold, kore explores the eye as purveyor of desire, sexual fear, and the fantasy of blindness. An alternative sexuality is founded in touch-based (feminine?) pleasure as opposed to a vision-based (masculine?) pleasure. An examination of institutional blindspots towards women, and people of color, concerning AIDS expands on the issue of vision, visibility and the disease.

This title is also available on Tran, T. Kim-Trang: The Blindness Series.

Woman as Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero is an invigorating look at the 40-year career of acclaimed feminist artist Nancy Spero, who, in her own works, is concerned with “rewriting the imaging of women through historical time.” With Spero’s own voice as narration, this documentary tracks her development as she matured against the grain of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art when “there wasn’t room in the art world to make way for political or activist art.” This tape includes footage of the artist at work on installations in the United States, Northern Ireland, and

Open Conch is a spell for pleasure and queer desire.

Open Conch takes fragments from portraits of lesbians and queer identified women from Bonn in spaces they requested to be recorded in. Choices include houseboat homes, kitchens, dining room tables, bridges, tunnels, graffiti and other public spaces. A main character with pink hair follows the conch to find what is actually natural; such as circles of women dreaming, the slaying of the patriarchy by a red wooden sword and the calling in of queer love through movement, fabric, sound and circle.