by Jessica Dallow, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art and Art History at University of Alabama at Birmingham
Materiality, the final installment of Space One Eleven’s three-part exhibition series Women with their Work, marks the thirtieth anniversary of Blue Angel: The Decline of Sexual Stereotypes in Post-Feminist Sculpture, an exhibition curated by Juli Carson and Howard McCalebb that opened at Space One Eleven in 1988. Blue Angel sought to broaden understandings of “women’s art” within the pluralistic landscape of postmodernism by showing that there is no such readily identifiable thing. Yet by bringing together a “constituency” of women sculptors working across different media and subject matter in an all-female exhibition, the curators also sought to challenge postmodernism’s cooption of feminist artmaking strategies and the neutralization of feminism’s politics by showing varied, deeply personal, and historically specific responses to a woman’s existence in the 1980s. Women with their Work continues this exploration of women’s artistic responses to their contemporary moment. What is the purpose of an all-women exhibition in 2018? Not only are some women artists hesitant to be viewed through the lens of gender, but the recent surge in all-women’s shows also raises questions about whether these shows perpetuate the gender inequity in the artworld or help to correct it. Women with their Work claims the latter, that building on the history of feminist and women’s art exhibitions is one means of correcting the exclusion of women from art history and the contemporary art world. And in a moment in which the legacy of identity politics is increasingly contested, gender increasingly destabilized, and women’s rights increasingly at risk, recognizing women’s voices as individual and collective feels all the more urgent.
Materiality echoes Blue Angel through its focus on three-dimensional, sculptural forms. But only some of the artworks are discrete objects. Others are site-based installations. And still others combine sculptural elements with mediums like printmaking and photography. Common to all, however, is an attention and responsiveness to materials. During the feminist art movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, women artists often purposefully selected materials coded as feminine or associated with domestic space to recognize women’s work and collapse hierarchies of what is considered acceptable as sculpture. Or they intentionally chose hard materials like steel and stone to assert a space for women in a traditionally male-dominated field. But if materials were selected as gendered symbols, they also became conduits of meaning, contingent on new contexts and entangled in dynamic relationships of power and culture. To follow the materials, or to act with them, rather than upon them, Petra Lange-Berndt writes, is to investigate transpersonal societal problems and matters of concern. The artists in this exhibition could be said to do just this, selecting and employing materials to reflect on personal relationships, contemporary events, family history, race and ethnicity, spirituality, the female body, and organic processes.