#wewantedarevolution

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). We will be featuring a woman artist every day this month, and highlighting artists in our current exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection which explores a wide range of art-making, focusing on enduring political subjects—encompassing gender, race, and class—that remain relevant today. The show is on view until March 31, 2019.

Together we hope to draw attention to the gender and race imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women to everyone’s lists.

Stacy Lynn Waddell’s practice is characterized by her use of fire, gilding, and alchemical processes, and explores issues of personal experience and American culture and history. In recent years, her work’s physical and material transformations are utilized in works that honor under-recognized African American figures, primarily in portraiture. This particular portrait is of Maren Hassinger, an artist featured in the acclaimed EASCFA exhibition, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, creating an intergenerational connection between female artists of color and honoring the legacy of Hassinger and her peers. Hassinger is wearing a “WWAR” t-shirt, the title of which glows like a protest slogan from the complex, gold-leaf background. The work also engages in contemporary discussions of memorialization, monuments, and the Black Lives Matter movement, as Hassinger stands above the empty plinth that carried Confederate General Beauregard and that was dismantled during Waddell’s New Orleans residency that produced this work.

👋 Boston! We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 opens today at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and will be on view until September 30. It is the first exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. If you have a friend in Boston who you think will enjoy this show, tell them to check it out!

👋  Buffalo! We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 opens today @albrightknox and will be on view until May 27. The exhibition features a wide array of work, including performance, film, and video art, as well as photography, painting, sculpture, and printmaking by a diverse group of artists and activists who lived and worked at the intersections of avant-garde art worlds and radical political movements during this period. If you have a friend in town who you think will enjoy this show, share this with them and tell them to show up.

Filmmaker Julie Dash is renowned for breaking boundaries of race and gender in Hollywood. Her first feature film Daughters of the Dust (1991) is a landmark in American cinema, as it was the first feature film directed by an African American woman to be distributed theatrically in the United States. Set in 1902, the film explores the black Gullah communities of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Alva Rogers—a member of the Rodeo Caldonia performance collective—starred as Eula Peazant, one of the leading roles. Dash is a part of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of black filmmakers who attended UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television starting in the late 1960s. 

Her first three films Four Women (1975), The Diary of an African Nun (1977), and Illusions (1983) are on view in We Wanted a Revolution and Daughters of the Dust was screened this past April as part of our opening weekend celebrations.

We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 closes this Sunday, September 17—but not without a final celebration! Join artists, activists, and scholars today for our daylong Closing Celebration honoring the trailblazing artists in the exhibition.

Click here for details and tickets!