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.
Author Archives: Susan Silas
Susan Silas is a visual artist and occasional writer living in Brooklyn.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.