As They Saw It: Women Artists Then and Now
Through January 14, 2024
A Gathering: Works from Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists
Through March 24, 2014
Ways of My Ancestors: We Are Nipmuc
Through February 25, 2014
Springfield Museums
The five building complex at 21 Edwards Street in Springfield, Massachusetts doesn’t get as much love as it deserves. Other than the Basketball Hall of Fame, the city is best known for its association with Theodore Geisel, aka/ Dr. Seuss. Many visitors never even enter the Seuss museum; they head for the sculpture park to let their kids climb on the oversized statues there (signs forbidding it notwithstanding). Three current exhibits give reason to check out a few non-Seuss treasures.
As They Saw It is a 60-piece sampling of women’s art displayed in the D’Amour Museum of Fine Art culled from the museum’s own collection and borrowed from the MFA in Boston and the Fenimore in Cooperstown, New York. It wasn’t that long ago that women’s art wasn’t taken seriously by the art world and the handful of those whose work hung on museum walls were pretty much confined to domestic themes. Mostly the ones seen weren’t artists at all, rather the subject for men with paintbrushes, cameras, and chisels. Is it any wonder that in the 1970s feminists began using the phrase “the male gaze?”
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| Mary Ann Wilson |
The earliest piece in the exhibit comes from Mary Ann Wilson whose “Maremaid” [sic] was made in 1815. It’s a delightful folk art image from an artist from New York State whose work remained unknown until 1943. I was struck, though, by the number of women who turned to self-portraiture. Call them the original selfie creators, though what they created in far more interesting than today’s cellphone snappers. Ellen Day Hale (1885) created hers in a manner evocative of John Singer Sargent until you take a closer look at her boyish face peering outward with… well, what exactly? Defiance? Insouciance? It mesmerizes me when it hangs in Boston and I appreciated getting closer to it in Springfield. Oriole Farb (1978) used looser lines to capture herself in a visual pun. It’s a painting but she’s looking in a mirror, holding a camera, and is poised to snap a selfie decades before such a word appeared! And then there’s Mary Bero’s modernist and abstracted look at her bare-breasted self (1980s).
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| Ellen Day Hale |
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| Oriole Farb |
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| Mary Bero |
As one can easily observe, women often bring a different way of looking at the world. That is certainly true of Dorothea Lange, who would get my vote as the greatest of all American photographers. In the 1930s, there were still folks around who were once enslaved. Lange turned her lens on one such individual in 1937 and gave it a telling title: “Ex-Slave with a Long Memory.” Isabel Bishop evinces Reginald Marsh in her 1942 “Ice Cream Cones.” It’s two young women eating their frozen treats on a street corner without constraint as if they couldn’t care less what anyone thinks. There’s certainly a don’t mess-with-me vibe in Cara Lucia Arla’s 2020 photo “Lucia.” In which we see a Native American woman staring full face forward and dressed as a befeathered Wonder Woman. And then there’s Faith Ringgold, the preeminent African American fiber artist. Note that her subjects are literally untethered in “Dancing on the George Washington Bridge” (2020).
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| Dorothea Lange |
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| Isabel Bishop |
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| Cara Lucia Arla |
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| Faith Ringgold |
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| Aisha Harrison |
I’m usually not a big fan of ceramics, but I adored A Gathering, which shows works from the very first traveling show of Black American ceramic artists originally organized by the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis. The moment I saw Aisha Harrison’s “Ancestor 1” I wondered, “What in the blazes took so long? Ellamaria Foley-Ray’s “Earth Seed Quilt” is as it sounds, ceramics as fabric. For poignancy, there is Earline Green’s “Henrietta.” It’s amazing in how she gives us the illusion of drapery in stiff form, but note the name in at the bottom left. Green evokes Henrietta Lax, the African American woman who died in 1951 whose cell line has been used in research since her death–without family permission. A more recent unsettling homage is Janthiel Shaw’s “Grief for Philando Castile,” a reference to a young black man’s 2016 death at the hands on Minneapolis police officers. You can be excused if you want to wonder back to Kristina Batiste’s calm “prospect and refuge” to recenter.
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| Ellamarie Foley-Ray |
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| Earline Green |
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| Janthiel Shaw |
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| Kristina Batiste |
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There’s a small exhibit in the Museum of Science to the Nipmuc, Massachusetts Algonquin peoples. Stories of Native Americans are often those of extermination but the photographs behind a diorama of traditional life tell a different tale. They silently scream, “We’re still here and we’re proud.” They also want you to know they are "freshwater people." Mission accomplished. Take a peek and you’ll need no words from me.
Rob Weir
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