BY NADJA SAYEJ
The pandemic has brought a new dawn upon us—the online viewing room. Countless art galleries have started hosting online exhibitions, newsletter exclusives, slideshows, and more. And a selection of these galleries are showcasing women artists.
Though it has only been one week since Women’s History Month has ended, the celebration for women artists continues. A number of New York galleries are showing women artists, from ceramic artists to filmmakers and illustrators.
Here are five galleries showcasing women artists, which you can view from home.
Katie Paterson
The last place you’d expect to see literary legend Margaret Atwood is in a Norwegian forest. However, she is in this video, thanks to Scottish artist, Katie Peterson, who created a film, Future Library: A Century Unfolds, which was commissioned by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and is now online.
The film opens with the phrase: “When you write a novel, you have to have faith that the story is going to take you somewhere beautiful.” The artist, who is represented by James Cohan Gallery, created the piece as a 100-year art project, as Future Library is like a time capsule book that will only be printed and read in 2114. Each year until then, a writer will create a piece of writing.
James Cohan is also hosting an online exhibition of works by New York-based artist Firelei Báez until May 10, who shows a survey of paintings alongside a video and stills, shot in her studio. She says: “Painting is an incredibly generous medium that allows both the viewer and the maker to navigate between imagined and real worlds.” She adds: “In my paintings, there are massive movements of water, of me having to extend my body to create big, abstract gestures—and also very meticulously-rendered figuration. They are two ways of tracing me, as a painter, into this depiction of body: a melding of both the depicted illusory body and the materiality of my own presence.
Zoya Cherkassky
Fort Gansevoort is presenting Lost Time, new drawings by Tel-Aviv based artist Zoya Cherkassky. This collection of daily drawings started when the coronavirus pandemic began, as the artist is confined to her home studio. They’re not all literal, however. Cherkassky has imagined a pre-WWII Jewish society in Eastern Europe as a way to reflect on our current crisis. From weddings to lonely portraits, scenes from domestic life and rituals, there’s a lonely nostalgia to them. “These drawings are similar to the feeling we have right now, that the world will never be the same,” said Cherkassky.
Sara Greenberger Rafferty
The Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty, who is no stranger to using comedy to get her point across, is showing a 10 year survey of works online with the Rachel Uffner Gallery. forthcoing solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, she here shows a selection of artworks. It includes pieces like The Ring, a lonely seemingly wedding ring trapped in a sheet of iridescent glass, or this work above, what looks like an accidental selfie (which we could all relate to). As the artist once said: “I’ve always been interested in the ways in which photographs become objects and the way that objects translate back into photographs.”
Hannah van Bart
The Amsterdam-based artist Hannah van Bart is showing new paintings like this piece above, entitled Young Woman, alongside drawings, many of which depict women. “I think I always paint places to be—spaces that capture a feeling or memory and hold my stories,” says the artist. “What does feeling look like?” she has asked. Check out the artworks on the website of the Marianne Boesky Gallery until April 19.
Material Matters
Four women artists— Lynda Benglis, Arlene Shechet, Yin Xiuzhen and Van Bruggen—are shown together in the Material Matters group show with Pace Gallery, until April 21. With the artists working in glazed, moulded and fired porcelain, clay and cast, they all have a spontaneous quality to them. Benglis shows ceramic works, one which is tar black, whileUfan’s sculptures are terracotta. The show is co-curated by Joe Baptista, Danielle Forest, and Andria Hickey.
