Museum Exhibits Recommendation: ‘HERSTORY’ JUDY CHICAGO; ‘NOTHING NEW’ PUPPIES PUPPIES; ‘ECOROVE’ (The New Museum, NYC)

“Herstory” spans Judy Chicago’s sixty-year career to encompass the full breadth of the artist’s contributions across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking. Eschewing the boundaries of a traditional museum survey, “Herstory” will place Chicago’s work in dialogue with work by other women essential to the history of art and Chicago’s own practice. Entitled “The City of Ladies,” this exhibition-within-the-exhibition will feature artworks and archival materials by more than eighty women artists, writers, and thinkers.  Contextualizing Chicago’s feminist methodology within the many art movements in which she has participated—and from whose histories she has frequently been erased—“Herstory” will showcase Chicago’s tremendous impact on American art and highlight her critical role as a cultural historian claiming space for women artists often omitted from various canons.  

Featured in “The City of Ladies”:  Hilma af Klint,  Eileen Agar,  Anni Albers,  Lola Álvarez Bravo,  Anna Atkins,  Alice Austen,  Djuna Barnes,  Simone de Beauvoir,  Otti Berger,  Annie Besant,  Hildegard of Bingen,  Rosa Bonheur,  Marianne Brandt,  Nannie Burroughs,  Claude Cahun,  Julia Margaret Cameron,  Leonora Carrington,  Countess Virginia Oldoini Verasis di Castiglione,  Elizabeth Catlett,  Pop Chalee,  Elizabeth S. Clarke,  Ithell Colquhoun,  Imogen Cunningham,  Sonia Delaunay,  Maya Deren,  Emily Dickinson,  Sophie Drinker,  Suzanne Duchamp,  Leonor Fini,  Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,  Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn,  Artemisia Gentileschi,  Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein),  Emma Goldman,  Natalia Goncharova,  Martha Graham,  Alice Guy-Blaché,  Florence Henri,  Barbara Hepworth,  Hannah Höch,  Kati Horna,  Georgiana Houghton,  Zora Neale Hurston,  Frida Kahlo,  Gertrude Käsebier,  Käthe Kollwitz,  Emma Kunz,  Dorothea Lange,  Edmonia Lewis,  Mina Loy,  Dora Maar,  Jeanne Mammen,  Maria Martinez,  Maria Martins,  Mary Louise McLaughlin,  Maria Sibylla Merian,  Paula Modersohn-Becker,  Louise Nevelson,  Maria Longworth Nichols Storer,  Anaïs Nin, Georgia O’Keeffe,  Méret Oppenheim,  Agnes Pelton,  Mary Richardson,  Margaret Sanger,  Augusta Savage,  Ethel Smyth,  Gertrude Stein,  Varvara Stepanova,  Florine Stettheimer,  Dorothea Tanning,  Sophie Taeuber-Arp,  Toyen, Sojourner Truth,  Remedios Varo,  Pablita Velarde,  Beatrice Wood,  Virginia Woolf, and  Unica Zürn.

For her first New York museum solo exhibition, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (also known as Puppies Puppies) transforms the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery into a mise-en-scène for her daily activities, with a portion of the space functioning as a duplicate of the artist’s actual bedroom. Using a fogging glass mechanism, Puppies Puppies will alternately obscure and reveal her activities in the gallery to visitors, foregrounding themes of visibility, representation, and cultural consumption. By allowing a spectacularized view into her daily existence, Kuriki-Olivo celebrates the nuanced layers of her own identity, eliding tokenization and reductive narratives of racial and trans identities.

Continuing the New Museum’s Screens Series, a platform for the presentation of new video works by emerging contemporary artists,  Where Can We Be Found? (2023; أين يمكن أن تجدنا؟) by EcoRove is a research project and film that focuses on the state of Lebanese Cedar trees (Cedrus libani). Shown in two parts and accompanied by a pair of animated drawings, the film  distinguishes the Lebanese Cedar as an autonomous being from the various ways in which it has been used as a national, cultural, and ecological symbol.