EDITOR’S LETTER
by Andrea Blanch
“Why don’t I get the juicier assignments?” I asked Gloria
Gersch when I was photographing for Vogue. She told me,
“Don’t you know why, darling? You’re a woman.” I was
worried it was because they didn’t like my work; it never
occurred to me that it was because of my gender. To put
it succinctly: WTF?
This past June in The Guardian, novelist Kamila Shamsie
proposed making 2018 the Year of Publishing Women– an
entire year in which the only titles published are by women
authors. Shamsie writes, “What would happen in 2019?
Would we revert to a status quo or would a year of a radically
transformed publishing landscape change our expectations
of what is normal and our preconceptions of what is
unchangeable?” My only thought was: why not start now?
Inspired, I took up Shamsie’s challenge. The 13th issue of
Musée solely features artists and insiders who are women.
The point is not to box these artists into a single context.
Rather, it’s to show that these artists can’t be boxed, to put
on display the inexhaustible range of the female voice– too
often stifled. Not everyone’s art practice in this issue responds
specifically to gender, but as Ann Hamilton wonderfully
puts it in her interview, “My experience is as a female
body. I think that has everything to do with the work,
even if it’s not the subject of the work.”
This issue asks, “What does it mean to be a woman artist?”
Catherine Morris, curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center
for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, said in our previous
issue, “When you come from an experience of oppression
and repression, or lack of equity, part of the job becomes
reinforcing the validity and currency of your experience.”
Equity for women in the art world remains an uphill battle,
one that the members of vigilante art collective Guerrilla
Girls have devoted their lives to fight. As they say in their
interview, “it’s rare to find a contemporary museum that has
more than 30% women artists in its collection. In fact, most
have much less.” Women have always needed to assert their
own definition of themselves and of womanhood in the face
of a social construct that would define it for them.
So how do women define themselves today? This question
doesn’t have a simple answer, if the artists in this issue are
any indication. This issue features over 30 established artists
and industry insiders, as well as 50 emerging artists, all from
diverse backgrounds, with different social and aesthetic concerns,
yet all are united in their “experience as a female body.”
With such a wealth, there’s only space to mention a few:
Rineke Dijkstra shares stills from her new video art piece The
Gymschool, which follows eleven gymnastics students from
a Russian Olympic School, and explores some of Dijkstra’s
career-long concerns: performance, the human form, and
adolescent girlhood. In Zanele Muholi’s new series, Somnyama
Ngonyama, the artist breaks from her previous work
photographing her South African LGBTI community, turning
the camera on herself in a series of fierce self-portraits. Collier
Schorr selects work from her ten year career in fashion to
“introduce a female gaze into the debate about female representation”
in her series 8 Women. LaToya Ruby Frazier, recipient
of the MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant”, follows the
tradition of social documentarians Walker Evans, Dorothea
Lange, and Gordon Parks with her series about life in deindustrialized
Rust Belt communities, specifically her hometown
of Braddock, Pennsylvania.
In conjunction with the Guggenheim’s Photo-Poetics: An
Anthology, a group exhibition focusing on poetic experimentation,
we speak with artists Erica Baum and Sara
VanDerBeek. Baum’s practice combines her background
in anthropology and linguistics to create surprising photographs
of everyday objects that blend fact and fiction.
VanDerBeek creates sculptures to photograph then subsequently
destroys the sculptures to explore “translation and
transformation” as well as “the lack of fixity in the mediums
[of sculpture and photography].”
Lillian Bassman is this issue’s Master, a fashion photographer
whose darkroom experiments with bleach and toning
agents led to a haunting, high-contrast style and forged
new possibilities for the medium.
This issue’s Filmmaker is Laura Israel, whose documentary
Robert Frank: Don’t Blink is an exclusive peek into the mind and
process of photography’s most notoriously reclusive master.
Curator and former Visuals Editor at The New Yorker, Elisabeth
Biondi, guest edits this issue with a selection of 20 artists.
Insiders are Hammer Museum curator Ali Subotnick, who
talks about the L.A. art scene, and author/ art critic Linda
Yablonsky, who I think of as a modern-day Flâneur, talks
about chronicling our time by writing about “art, artists,
and the power structure of the art world.”
Recently, I attended a photography auction where the
women didn’t sell as well as their male counterparts. Yes,
we’ve come far and accomplished much, but the road to
equality is long, and “there are miles to go before I sleep.”*
The list of women I would have liked to include is encyclopedic,
but–with the well-being of my creative team in
mind–I decided to cap it here.
Hillary for president!
Tina Barney. The Pink Satin Bra 2015 ( Double Magazine). Courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
*Robert Frost.
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