To expand on the Elles: Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou, Paris survey on the Fourth Floor of SAM Downtown, the curators at SAM have organized a series of exhibitions in the Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries on the Third Floor that build and react to each other. Through diverse media, these installations and exhibitions offer a glimpse of the startling innovations attained and a reminder that these achievements were often hard fought for in a cultural landscape that was not always welcoming to women. Fully aware that many artists question or reject the label “woman artist,” we focus on them as a group not to segregate but to recognize them as seminal artists whose contributions collectively yield a whole greater than its parts.
Nine interrelated shows and installations in the Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries constitute Elles: SAM and highlight some of the connections and breaks in artistic developments during the last 50 years.
The installations begin with a look at key works by Georgia O’Keeffe and her spiritual kinship with photographer Imogen Cunningham. A room of paintings by the female founders of the American Abstract Artists Group follows.
Yayoi Kusama: A Total Vision brings together drawings, paintings and sculptures from key moments of the artist’s career. This will be the first museum exhibition in Seattle of the radical and mesmerizing works by Kusama, celebrated today as an art world superstar.
Modern Masters: Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler features three American heavyweights who work in the context and aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. Exhilarating and tough, these soaring paintings from Seattle collections pay homage to three visionary painters who developed distinctive painterly styles. Celebratory and ironic, “modern masters” bestows this much-deserved designation upon them, in recognition of their hard-won accomplishments in what was a male-defined domain.
Abstract Currents and Countercurrents shows the constant push and pull between abstraction and figuration with surprising visual affinities among artists of different generations. Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Elizabeth Murray, Agnes Martin, Ellen Gallagher, Ghada Amer and others are shown here in an intense dialogue.
Proposed Land Use Action, an exhibition of all new works by Seattle-based Victoria Haven, will be a contemporary and personal interpretation of a minimal vocabulary that centers on found objects.
More issue-driven and conceptual is the probing video installation Cornered, by Adrian Piper, which addresses questions of race and racial identity. In addition, Jenny Holzer recreated her celebrated poster wall, Inflammatory Essays, for one of our galleries and a second version will be installed outside at the corner of Second Avenue and Union.
Last, but not least, a designated video gallery will present a selection of thought-provoking videos by women artists, both classic and recently completed works.
Elles: SAM extends to the other museum locations as well. In the Olympic Sculpture Park’s PACCAR Pavilion, Brazilian artist Sandra Cinto’s ambitious wall drawing Encontro das Águas (Encounter of Waters) offers a mesmerizing view of an expansive waterscape.
At the Seattle Asian Art Museum, Women’s Paintings from the Land of Sita delves into the work of nine Indian women painting in the distinctive Mithila style of their region. In Where Have They Been? Two Overlooked Chinese Female Artists, the works of nonagenarians Chang Ch’ung-ho Frankel and Lu Wujiu give voice to two artists who prioritized the careers of their husbands, and as a result have been neglected and marginalized by the art world. And in Tooba, Iranian-American Shirin Neshat offers a poetic narrative about individual and collective identity in this mesmerizing video installation.
And SAM Gallery presents a survey of emerging and established Northwest women artists.
–Catharina Manchanda, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art
No title, 1964, Eva Hesse, American, (born in Germany), 1936–1970, oil on canvas, 61 x 41 1/2in., Seattle Art Museum, Promised gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum