Category Archives: lesbian art herstory

Archiving Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

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Gender Studies and Body Politics Session 2 | published by The New School, Nyc. USA, 2010

Ann Cvetkovich, Professor of English and Professor of Womens and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Cvetkovich discusses the problems of continuity/discontinuity across feminist generations. What turns have we taken, and how do we assess those now? Prof. Cvetkovich shares her experience in archiving Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. She also presents works by a new generation of lesbian feminist artists who embraces the 70s sisterhood and radical lesbian femininsm; among others works by Allyson Mitchell, Tammy Ray Carland, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Angela Jimenez, and points out that art can be an innovative form of public archiving.

Art Herstory – Marie Laurencin

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Marie Laurencin (1883 – 1956) was a French painter who became a member of Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon in Paris in the 1920s. She is known as one of the few female Cubist painters. She created a visual vocabulary of femininity, which characterized her art until the end of her life. Her personal iconography can be seen as a response to the more masculine imagery of her friends the Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Lesbians Seeing Lesbians – Artist & Curator Panel Discussion

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Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art has launched a videostream at Vimeo and I would like to recommend their videos documenting a panel debate held alongside the museum’s inaugural show in 2011:

Lesbians Seeing Lesbians – Artist & Curator Panel Discussion (part 1) and part 2 of the panel debate.

These two videos present excerpts from the Artist & Curator Panel Discussion for the Lesbians Seeing Lesbians: Building Community in Early Feminist Photography exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, September 14 – October 22, 2011. Curators Jonathan David Katz and Ilana Eliot talk with artists Cathy Cade and JEB (Joan E. Birnen).

Related Links

Press release: New York: Lesbians Seeing Lesbians

Painter Romaine Brooks

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Slideshow with paintings by Romaine Brooks

Romaine Brooks

Lesbian Art Herstory: American Painter Romaine Brooks (1874 – 1970) worked in Paris and on Capri in the 1920s. She best known for her images of women in androgynous or masculine dress having, and has among others painted a painting of a young boyish looking girl titled “Peter, A Young English Girl”, 1923-24, which is included in the above slide show (3:21). The slideshow also includes some of her portraits of beautiful women, a series of her mysterious symbolic paintings and a couple of self-portraits (0:12 Self-Portrait, ca. 1905 and 3:11 Self-Portrait, 1923). The longest and most important relationship of Brooks’s life was with Natalie Clifford Barney, whom she met around the start of World War I in Paris. From 1920 to 1924, most of Brooks’s subjects were of women who were in Barney’s social circle or who visited her salon.

Related Links

Romaine Brooks at Wikipedia

Hall of Fame – Bernice Abbott

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Présentation de l’exposition Berenice Abbott. Published by Jeu de Paume, Paris 2012.

Présentation de l'exposition Berenice Abbott
The above video is a presentation of “Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), photographies” at Jeu de Paume, Paris, France 2012. The exhibition (February 21 – April 29, 2012) a substantial retrospective with 120 photos including lots of vintage prints was co-organized by The Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto) and the Jeu de Paume (Paris).

About Photographer Bernice Abbott
American Bernice Abbott (1898 – 1991) moved to Europe in 1921, to she studied sculpture.”Among her lovers in Paris were artists’ model Tylia Perlmutter and sculptress and silverpoint artist Thelma Wood. In Paris, between 1923 and 1925, she studied photography while working as Man Ray’s assistant. In 1926, she opened her own portrait studio and had a successful one-person exhibition.” (- www.glbtq.com) where she would photograph the rich and famous Parisians and a number of the younger American expatriate lesbian writers, who were living in Paris in the 1920s.

Related Link
The official Bernice Abbott website