Intersections

MoMA | Tag: Black Lives Matter

Thanks to all of you who read and shared associate curator Thomas Lax’s recent blog post “How Do Black Lives Matter in MoMA’s Collection?” Read two new blog posts from associate director Kathy Halbreich and chief of archives Michelle Elligott in response to Thomas’s post. 

[Faith Ringgold. American People Series #20: Die. 1967. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2016 Faith Ringgold/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York]

“They’re really two sides of the coin of social inequality. Museums increasingly are warehouses of wealth, capturing surplus in the form of artworks that are no longer financially productive. Prisons are institutions that warehouse surplus labour and populations that have been economically excluded from the labour market.” Andrea Fraser talks to The Guardian about her new site-specific work, Down the River, on view through March 13. 

Like Every Day by Shadi Ghadirian

Shadi Ghadirian (born 1974) is an Iranian woman photographer who continues to live and work in Tehran. Born shortly after the Iranian revolution, she was one of the first to graduate in photography from the University of Azad (in Tehran). After finishing her B. A., Ghadirian began her professional career as a photographer. She says that “quite by accident”, the subjects of her first two series were “women”. Her work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. Nonetheless, her art also deals with issues relevant to women living in other parts of the world. She questions the role of women in society and explores ideas of censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women.

Her ‘Like Every Day’ Series was made after her marriage to fellow photographer, Peyman Hooshmand-zadeh. In this body of work, Ghadirian comments upon the daily repetitive routine to which many women find themselves consigned and by which many women are defined. Each of these color photographs depicts a figure draped in patterned fabric in place of the typical Iranian chador. However, instead of a face, each figure has a common household item such as an iron, a tea cup, a broom, a pot or a pan.