Susan Silas

Art

Peeling Back the Layers of Alina Szapocznikow's Bodily Sculptures

As a new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth demonstrates, part of Szapocznikow's extraordinary accomplishment as an artist was her ability to represent what many after World War II felt was unrepresentable.

Art

The Understudied History of Enslaved Women in Colonial Cape Town

At the Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town, an exhibition gives voice to a group of women whose lives were written out of history because they were considered too marginal to bother with.

Art

Inspired by Photos Taken by His Murdered Father, an Artist Offers an Eloquent View of Memory and Trauma

Ellis's manipulated drawings, watercolors, and photographs — based on shots taken by his father — are a window into the life of someone who experienced extreme deprivation and loss.

Art

Walid Raad Uses Fact and Fiction to Tell a Powerful History of Beirut

Raad exposes the way in which our accepted notions of historicizing events are simultaneously fact and fiction.

Art

Remembering Barbara Hammer, Who Envisioned Spaces for Women to Be Themselves

She opened up a space for women to be themselves — fully realized on their own terms. And that impulse is evident both in her life choices and in the formal decisions she made in her films.

Art

Martha Wilson Tries on Prescribed Female Roles, from Housewife to First Lady

An early proponent of feminism, Wilson has been exploring female identity in patriarchal society since the early 1970s.

Art

Remembering Robert F. Kennedy's Funeral Train, 50 Years Later

In The Train: RFK's Last Journey, an exhibition at Les Recontres d'Arles, photographs shot from RFK's funeral train in June of 1968 take on new political relevance.

Art

Childbirth and Menstruation in Defiant Art by Latin American Women

It is interesting that so many works in the Brooklyn Museum show Radical Women refer to the one form of power that men cannot dominate.

Art

Barbara Hammer Refuses the Male Gaze in 1970s Photographs

Hammer came out in 1970 and her work during that period feels tied to her declaration of independence from social norms.

Art

With a Wall of Photos, Bernadette Mayer Evokes a Landscape of Memories

Bernadette Mayer's installation of a wall of images from 1971 is far too evocative of my own history for me to step back and see it “objectively.”

Art

Botticelli's Venuses and Our Enduring Need for Beauty

The Botticelli exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, so filled with the hopes and ambitions of the Renaissance, seems especially timely in our deplorable political moment.

Art

Incorporating Photography into Art History, Starting with August Sander

An exhibition at Hauser & Wirth uses the theme of seriality to drag photography out of isolation and into the larger framework of art making.