accompanying the exhibition
THE UN-HEROIC ACT:
Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women's Art in the U.S.
Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery
(September 4 – November 2, 2018, Mon-Fri 10-6 PM)
5:00-5:30 PM – Tour of the exhibition with curator Monika Fabijanska, Shiva Gallery, ground floor
5:40-6:00 PM – Opening Remarks: professor Katie Gentile (John Jay College), the Moot Court, 6th floor
6:00-6:30 PM – Introduction to the Iconography of Rape: curator Monika Fabijanska
6:30-7:30 PM – Panel I: The Social Dimension and Political Action:
Guerrilla Girls, Bang Geul Han, and Sonya Kelliher-Combs
moderated by Nancy Princenthal
7:30-8:30 PM – Panel II: The Iconography of Rape and History of Art, Literature and Film:
Natalie Frank, Kathleen Gilje, and Naima Ramos-Chapman
moderated by Carmen Hermo (Brooklyn Museum)
8:30-9:00 PM – Social time in the gallery
the symposium will be streamed live
*****
Monika Fabijanska is a New York-based art historian and independent curator, who specializes in women's art and feminist art. She originated the idea and provided curatorial consulting and institutional support for The Museum of Modern Art acquisition and retrospective exhibition of the feminist sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (2012); consulted on WACK! Art in the Feminist Revolution with curator Connie Butler (MoCA LA, 2007); and Global Feminisms with Maura Reilly (Brooklyn Museum, 2007). She produced and co-organized Architectures of Gender: Contemporary Women’s Art in Poland (SculptureCenter, 2003) with Aneta Szylak. Fabijanska organized and spoke at the international conference Art and Theater of Tadeusz Kantor at the Graduate Center CUNY and curated Tadeusz Kantor's "Theatre of Death" screening series and exhibition at La MaMa E.T.C., NYC (2008-2009). She curated the exhibition Polyphony of Images. Cutting-Edge Contemporary Art from Poland: Video, Performance, and Other Media (De Lamar Mansion, NYC, 2006). www.monikafabijanska.com
Natalie Frank explores contemporary discourse on feminism, sexuality, and violence. Recent drawings and books The Story of O and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice use literature as inspiration. Her gouache and chalk pastel drawings of the unsanitized Brothers Grimm tales, bring back, with Jack Zipes’ translations, aspects of incest, rape and physical violence left out of our familiar stories. The 2015 exhibition at the New York’s Drawing Center travelled to Blanton Museum, Austin, and University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, accompanied by Tales of the Brothers Grimm: Drawings by Natalie Frank, published by Damiani, 2015. Frank earned BA from Yale University, 2002, and MFA from Columbia University, 2006. She is a Fulbright Scholar, Oslo, Norway. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in NYC; Art Institute of Chicago; and Yale University Art Museum. She lives and works in New York, NY. www.natalie-frank.com
Katie Gentile, Ph.D. is Professor of Gender Studies and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She is the author of Creating bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival and the 2017 Gradiva Award winning The Business of being made: The temporalities of reproductive technologies, in psychoanalysis and cultures, both from Routledge. She is the editor of the Routledge book series Genders & Sexualities in Minds & Culture and a co-editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is in private practice in New York City. www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/katie-gentile
Kathleen Gilje holds BFA from the City College of New York; she later studied 16th & 17th c. Italian Art and Conservation at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, 1967-71. In her paintings, Gilje employs “a tour de force of technical bravura” (Linda Nochlin) revisiting some of the iconic works of Western art while subverting their meaning with feminist and ecological perspective. Solo exhibitions include the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA; and University of Rochester, NY. Her works are in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Yale University Art Gallery; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA; Musée Ingres, Louvre Museum, Montauban, France; and Bass Museum, Miami. She lives and works in New York, NY. www.kathleengilje.com
Guerrilla Girls is a group of anonymous feminist activist artists launched in 1985 in response to the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, 1984, which included only 13 women among 165 artists. Since its formation, over 55 people have been members. Wearing gorilla masks in public and using names of deceased female artists as their pseudonyms, they employ facts and statistics, humor and catchy visuals in their posters, stickers, and street projects to expose gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in art, film, pop culture, and politics. 2005 Venice Biennale opened its main exhibition with a selection of their works. Recent exhibitions and retrospectives include Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, 2017; Baltimore Museum of Art, 2017; Tate Modern, London 2016; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2016; and Matadero, Madrid, 2015. www.guerrillagirls.com
Bang Geul Han employs digital technologies to explore language, body politics and race, and blurs our understanding of private and public territories. She earned her BFA in Painting from the Seoul National University in Korea, 2002, and her MFA in Electronic Integrated Art from the Alfred University, NY, 2005. She had solo exhibitions at NURTUREart, Brooklyn, NY, 2018; Projét Pangée, Montréal, 2016; Art Museum of SUNY Potsdam, NY, 2015; and A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2012. Selected group shows include those at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC; Art Museum of Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea, 2017; Queens Museum, NYC, 2016; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2012, 2011; Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, 2012; and SangSangMadang, Seoul, 2011. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. www.whatbunny.org
Carmen Hermo is Associate Curator at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. There, she curated Roots of “The Dinner Party”: History in the Making, and co-curated the current exhibitions Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection and Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas. Hermo serves on both the Council for Feminist Art and the Young Leadership Council. Previously, she was Assistant Curator for Collections at the Guggenheim Museum (2010–16), where she served on the museum’s Young Collectors Council acquisition committee. She co-curated Now’s the Time: Recent Acquisitions (2012–13) and Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim (2015). Hermo received her B.A. in Art History and English from the University of Richmond and is pursuing an M.A. in Art History at Hunter College.
Sonya Kelliher-Combs is an artist of mixed decent: Iñupiaq from the North Slope of Alaska, Athabascan from the Interior, German and Irish. She uses imagery and symbols that speak about culture and the life of her ancestors, and marginalization and the struggles of Indigenous peoples. Group exhibitions include SITE Santa Fe, 2016; Nordamerika Native Museum, Zurich, 2015; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2013; National Museum of the American Indian, NYC, 2010; FiveMyles gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2008; Museum of Art & Design, NYC, 2005; Cheongju International Craft Biennial, South Korea, 2005; and the Arts from the Arctic, Anchorage Museum of History and Art, 1993. Solo exhibitions include the Northern Norway Art Museum, 2018; Institute of American Indian Art, Santa Fe, 2006; Anchorage Museum of History and Art, 2005; and Alaska State Museum, Juneau, 2001. She lives and works in Anchorage, AK. www.sonyakellihercombs.com
Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames and Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. A former Senior Editor of Art in America, where she remains a Contributing Editor, she has also written for the New York Times, Parkett, the Village Voice and many other publications. Princenthal is the author of Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), and a co-author of two recent books on women artists. Her essays have appeared in monographs on artists including Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold and Alfredo Jaar. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A.), Hunter College (M.A.), and the Whitney Independent Study program, she has taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; and Yale University, and is currently on the faculty of the MFA Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts. Princenthal is the author of the forthcoming book, "Unspeakable Acts: How Women Performance Artists of the 1970s Made Sexual Violence Visible" (Thames & Hudson, fall 2019).
Naima Ramos-Chapman is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. She tells stories of transformation and understated bravery that stem from true accounts and uses choreographed gestural movement to render psycho-spiritual realities we cannot see. She trained at The Alvin Ailey School for Dance, The Barrow Group for Acting, Howard University, and has a BA in Journalism from Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her writings were published in Huffington Post, The Nation, NPR, Colorlines, Saint Heron, and Postbourgie. Her debut short, And Nothing Happened premiered at the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival, and screened at the Brooklyn Museum, L.A. Film Festival, BAMcinemafest, Blackstar Film Festival, Rooftop Films, Urbanworld, CinemAfrica in Stockholm and Tacoma Film Festival – where it won Best Director. It is now a Vimeo Staff Pick. In 2017, Ramos-Chapman received a fellowship from the Sundance Institute for Screenwriting Intensive for her first feature-length script. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. www.naimaramoschapman.com
Image: Kathleen Gilje, Susanna and the Elders, Restored, 1998/2018, X-ray image on Arches paper, 52.5 x 36.75 in. ©2018 Kathleen Gilje. Courtesy of the artist