Ben McCoy. Photo by Ginger Robinson. Image courtesy of the author.

When I was asked to be the guest editor of this issue, I immediately thought that, as a writer, performance artist, and visual artist, I am constantly exposing myself: on stage, websites, blogs, social media sites, Instagram—and, yes, all of those formative years utilizing the free therapy known as open-mic nights. I encouraged the writers in this issue to write about the subject they know best: themselves. I’ve always been far more interested in hearing what writers and artists have to say about themselves and their work than hearing some Artforum-style critique that is as dry and stale as the bread of the patriarchy. I’m excited that much of what you will see and read will be from the artists.

But following the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the term and theme of “Exposed” took on a whole new meaning.

In the sacred space of nightlife at a gay club, queer men and women, queer people of color, gays and lesbians, and transgender men and women were dancing, celebrating, kissing, laughing, performing, and—most importantly—existing. These individuals were not cowering before a heteronormative society ruled by fear and religious dogma or hiding themselves away in a private pity party of one. No, they were simply sharing space, building community, living, and loving. And for this, they were exposed. An individual armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, who was not the author of their life, declared that evening that he would be the author of their death.

I am heartbroken, devastated by the event, the wrongful taking of lives that evening, and the responses of many individuals to this tragedy. The Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, a Republican and evangelical Christian, tweeted just hours after the horrific event, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.” The pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento, California, asked from the pulpit, “Are you sad that fifty pedophiles were killed today? No, I think that’s great. I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida, is a little safer tonight. The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is—I’m kind of upset he didn’t finish the job!”

Quickly following this, within days, there were more attacks: a gunman heading to the LA Pride festivities in Los Angeles; an armed hostage-taker in a Walmart in Amarillo, Texas; and a shooting in Oakland, California, during a peaceful vigil for the lives lost in Orlando.

It is a time in which we could be scared, hurt, afraid, devastated, broken, and without hope. As a trans lady, I have led a life in which I have daily been accosted by the bigotry, discrimination, fear, hatred, and violence that others would eagerly see me subjected to. But I’m still here. I’m still alive.

I chose the writers and artists in this issue because they are a diverse, eclectic group of individuals who are creating community with their works, words, bodies, creations, and stories. Their art and activism stand as a place for healing, solidarity, and empowerment: deep lez anti-capitalist installations and nightlife art; dancing in the night, bodies sweating, bodies breathing, bodies loving; bodies sacred and alive; dolls pieced together, narratives that have the chance for rebirth, their beauty at once haunting, and captivating, painted like the faces of the departed to whisper final, sweet, farewells; remembrances of the past; inspirations for the future; bellies out, mouths open, words spoken, with doughnuts and culinary delicacies in between; disassembly of the culture that starves, kills, mocks, makes you feel worthless; an ally that truly knows what pride means; mythical phantasms that portray fairy-tale portraits that resonate more with you and your personal reality than your 9-to-5 job; images so lush, so decadent—how can they mirror your own?; feminist, queer, mystic-spiritual collages that make you realize the importance of each piece, layer, and decision made toward the collective whole.

I am so proud of these individuals, and I’m more than happy to share not only their works but also their artistic processes and their words.

Because now, more than ever, each one of us—writer, artist, performer, DJ, witch, curator, painter, joker, queer, ally, creator—we need you. We need each other. Because if I’ve learned one thing after the Orlando shooting, it is this: We are now exposed. We are now vulnerable. It’s open season against us, and we are raw, we are targets, we are hunted. But we are not weak, we are not choosing a racist, bigoted, slut-shaming, body-shaming phobic system—a violent and bratty child born from old, hateful patriarchy and its new right-hand man, Donald Trump.

No, because we are artists. We are not the authors of others’ deaths. We are the authors of our lives. And now, it is vital to shower the world with our paintings, our words, our activism, and our ability to create space, to build community, to find common ground, to show solidarity, to honor peace, life, and love above all—to kiss, to make love, and to fuck as we please. Now, more than ever.

I encourage you to look at each individual’s work, words, images, and presence as a gift because that’s what they are. Embrace it. Embrace each other. We may be exposed, fragile, delicate little creatures. But the worst danger is not being hunted or hated; the worst danger is to surrender in fear and lock up the beating, pulsing, fist-size beauty that is your heart.

Views of the exhibition Liz Magor. Habitude presented at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, from June 22 to September 5, 2016. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.

The largest survey of Liz Magor’s work to date is currently on view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal. Delicate assemblages of clothing, animals, and toys appear at first as the work of an obsessive hoarder, but closer examination rewards viewers with an intimately poetic take on materiality in relation to the manmade and natural worlds that surround us. Curated by Dan Adler, an associate professor of modern and contemporary art at York University in Toronto, and Lesley Johnstone, the head of exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the exhibition tunes into the melodies explored and expressed by the artist over several decades.

Magor’s work is more relevant now than it ever has been. “Her work has been a part of our psyche for many years,” Johnstone said, remarking on the resurgence of materiality in sculptures by many of Canada’s emerging artists.¹ “I think it’s about giving permission to another way of making and thinking about art,” Adler continued; “We live in a world where the immaterial has become so much more powerful in our lives as ’net-based experiences are becoming more pervasive.”

Liz Magor. Carton II, 2006. Polymerized gypsum, cigarettes, gum, matches, lighter. Edition ½ , 29 x 53 x 48 cm. Collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.

Liz Magor. Stack of Trays, 2008. Polymerized gypsum, chewing gum, found objects, 25 x 45 x 47 cm. Private collection, Calgary. Photo: Scott Massey.

The works in Habitude are presented non-chronologically, showcasing a forty-year career that has maintained a truthfulness through sculptures that speak to one another across decades. “We’re trying to create conversations,” Johnstone explained, “placing works from the ’70s and ’80s in dialogue with works that are more recent.” Adler added, “We’re trying to create unexpected relationships. [Liz] has been discussing the same things in different ways throughout her career.”

Filling three galleries, Habitude begins with sculptures of similar scale that address notions of hoarding and production. A custom shelving unit was built for the second gallery, where Magor’s sculptures are carefully arranged in dialogue with one another. The artist’s aversion to pedestals exemplifies her dedication to finding meaning in the ordinary, but it presents a curatorial challenge that requires unique solutions like the custom shelves and sculptures held up by cast cardboard boxes. The final gallery differs dramatically from the two preceding ones, holding a single installation: a cabin, titled Messenger. “One of the biggest challenges was the selection—sifting through everything Liz has done over the past forty years, and trying to understand what would work well together,” said Adler, “but it was a really fun challenge.”

Liz Magor. Messenger. Views of the exhibition Liz Magor. Habitude presented at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, from June 22 to September 5, 2016. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.

The exhibition’s title refers both to the habit of repeated actions and to the theme of addiction consistently expressed in Magor’s work. Cigarettes fill gloves, stacks of plates hide liquor bottles, and chocolate appears in the piles of possessions that conspicuously lack clear references to the humans who created, arranged, and abandoned them.

“I have a huge respect for an artist who has continued to explore materials and ideas, over a long period of time, always trying to find a new solution to something,” Johnstone said, “and also for the way that [the artist is] playing with things that are highly recognizable and still constantly surprising us.”

“There’s confusion between what’s been cast and what’s real—you’re really not sure what you’re looking at,” Johnstone continued, “going back and forth between the objects and the way that [the artist] involves us in that discussion. It’s a very active kind of perception: it’s about asking us to look at the way the world is, and when you leave the gallery, you look at things differently.”

Liz Magor. Pearl Pet, 2015. Polymerized gypsum, polyethylene, 27 x 29 x 26 cm. Courtesy of the Shlesinger-Walbohm Family Collection, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Magor’s work shows no signs of the artist slowing down. “The level of intimacy and profound isolation that you can feel when confronting these newer works is remarkable, given how humble their materials are,” Adler said. “A work that comes from such mundane origins can convey something so profound… In her work, her understanding of materials comes through in different ways. I see her as one of the great assemblage artists—a master of making.”

“When it comes to Liz’s work, it’s really about the first-hand experience,” Johnstone said, “Much of it resists description. You need to actively move around it and feel it, not just visually but with your other senses as well.” In Magor’s work, curiosity and contemplation are on par with meditation. “People who think they know Liz’s works will come across a number of unexpected works in the show,” Adler said.

What do the curators hope viewers will take away from the exhibition? For Johnstone, “surprise, curiosity, respect”; for Adler, “a renewed faith in what sculpture can do.”

Views of the exhibition Liz Magor. Habitude presented at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, from June 22 to September 5, 2016. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.

1. All quotes are from a phone interview with the author on June 14, 2016.

Virgie Tovar. Photo courtesy of the author.

I

I’m a donut-slinging vigilante, patriarchy’s hard-cock nightmare. My 250-pound body—jiggling proud—represents femininity uncontained. I didn’t make the terms; I’m just living under them. When people ask me how I got this way, I reply that I didn’t create a #churrosexual anti-assimilationist persona just to say “fuck you” to some boring-ass respectability politics. I was born into a world where any gesture not derived from shame or apology is constructed as an act of rebellion. I didn’t make my cleavage political; you did. I didn’t make this bikini anarchic; you did. I didn’t make my open-mouthed laugh, my belly flopping free, my high heels and short skirts, my bright lipstick, my self-documentation, my watermelon-flavored-gum-smacking declarations of dissatisfaction into gestures of subversion; you did. But, hey: you’re welcome.

II

I used to wake up every day with the thought, “I hate this body. Let me be someone, anyone else.” I dreamed of slim waists and pert belly buttons, pink nipples, denim rolled up so high you could see my deepest fears. I lived off iceberg lettuce, barbecue sauce, and toast in the summer of ’93. I cried with Richard Simmons, cried for our lives, believed we were the problem. I was the girl at church who sat on the stage, putting up the transparencies with the words to the hymns. I sucked in my stomach, scooped out my tits from my Kmart bra (I knew that, unlike me, they were worth something). I lived for the leers of the old men at the Pentecostal church where pompadours reigned, where white boys came in the bathroom, dreaming of the white girls—small in body, small in mind—they’d someday own.

Virgie Tovar. Photo courtesy of the author.

III

I came to realize that my starvation was a metaphor. My plate was the ring, the battlefield, a tiny physical space (my whole world) where I could live out all the unnecessary satisfaction I had inherited, that I sensed all around me, in real time. I was being starved emotionally and spiritually—no meat, just bones—and so of course I learned to accept it and do it and love it. Eating meant freedom, which I had no appetite for. Each bite represented the most unfeminine of acts to me. Bites were the units I used to measure the distance to my biggest dreams. Food was failure. I found one of my diaries from childhood: it was small and pink, with a bear ballerina on the hard shiny cover; the edges of the pastel-rainbow-colored pages were delicately scalloped. It was part crush updates, part food journal. I wrote about my grandmother’s tamales; how I hated the way she tempted me. I couldn’t see her cooking as anything but our collective failure. We were brown and fat, and my grandfather had gold teeth, and my mother was possessed by a demon that made her sleep all the time, and I masturbated in the bathtub (each time thinking, “Surely this time Jesus will break my coochie!”), and none of the boys at school loved me, and we were bad at being Americans. My lunch was wrapped in foil: chicken breast or tuna, wheat bread that was soggy from the steam of the cooling chicken or from the oozing tuna. Joey Bree’s lunch signaled his clear ability to effortlessly convey his unassailable belonging: hermetically sealed fruit-flavored gelatin creatures, plastic bags that proudly announced the contents (nothing to hide here), peanut butter and jelly, juice boxes with heroes from the television.

Virgie Tovar. Photo courtesy of the author.

IV

One day I opened a book, and it said that dieting “is a process by which the individual claims control over her body and thus shows her ability to understand her role in society.”¹ It blew my damn mind. I read it over and over, even though I knew it was true from the very first reading. My role in society just wasn’t quite good enough for me, you know? Like I traveled a bazillion light years from a heretofore-unknown planet/star/galaxy through the magical vagina of my mother just to calorie count for the patriarchy? I don’t think so, boo.

V

Power is the public declaration of non-complicity. Power lies in the public consumption of tacos. It’s difficult to be a woke person. It’s difficult to remind myself that the illness is outside me, not inside. I don’t have to starve it out anymore. I don’t have to suck it up or suck it in.

Virgie Tovar. Photo courtesy of the author.

1. Sander L. Gilman, Fat: A Cultural History of Obesity (Wiley, 2013).

Vinsantos. SHE LIVES ALONE, detail, 2016. Polymer clay, cosmetics, quartz crystal, vintage and antique jewelry and accessories, 16″ x 46″. Courtesy of the artist.

I’ve always surrounded myself with things that look like me, accumulating objects worn and distressed. Piles of antique and vintage ephemera cluttered my home for years, long before I had the idea of putting these things to use. I admit it: I was a hoarder. But instead of collecting out-of-date magazines or cereal boxes or plain old garbage, I was drawn to anything handcrafted.

The idea of throwing away these objects, which someone had poured their heart and soul into, was unacceptable to me. Whether an ornate candleholder, or a broken piece of costume jewelry, or some old, decorative hardware: it was someone’s art, and all art should be preserved. My visual-art career began with mosaics, which led almost seamlessly into assemblage art, created from things that I found both beautiful and interesting, often from the street. In my assemblages, characters began to form and grow. This was never my intention, it just happened. Soon, I was introduced to the world of art dolls through a friend working in the medium. My entry into the world of doll making felt organic, like the next natural step.

Vinsantos. SHE LIVES ALONE, 2016. Polymer clay, cosmetics, quartz crystal, vintage and antique jewelry and accessories, 16″ x 46″. Courtesy of the artist.

As a drag performance artist and a musician, I have spent most of my adult life on the stage. Being in the spotlight definitely feeds the ego, but at the same time it taxes the private life that I hold dear. Doll making allows me to work with the tools of my trades within a degree of anonymity. It also justifies my habitual collecting. The characters I create are inspired by my life as an entertainer and the people who I have been so fortunate to work beside. Musicians, drag and burlesque performers, circus and sideshow folk, costumers, and hair and makeup stylists all contribute the ideas that form these one-of-a-kind creatures. The old and mostly discarded objects that decorate my dolls give them an immediate sentimentality; these repurposed and reinvented objects hold decades and centuries of stories within themselves.

My commissioned works take the art of the sentimental in a deeper direction; clients first rummage through their collections, putting together objects with personal value and historical significance. I’ll often consider these items for weeks before I feel they have found their proper places. I don’t want to be too mystical, but I often sense that I am channeling the energy left in these items by their previous owners. In this process, the lines between art and magic become blurred. I see the art that I create as a mash-up of sculpture, assemblage, fashion design, makeup, and hair artistry. I also see it as the reinvention and preservation of beauty.

Vinsantos. BELLA BLUE, detail, 2016. Polymer clay, cosmetics, acrylic, found objects. Courtesy of the artist.

Vinsantos. WITCH, 2016. Commissioned work. Polymer Clay, cosmetics, clients personal items, 14″ x 36″. Courtesy of the artist.

Kate Durbin. Hello Selfie, photo documentation by Jessie Askinazi. Courtesy of the artist.

Which parts of ourselves do we choose to bare in public? What are the likes, experiences, and frustrations that we carefully curate to represent who we are to the world? With a color wheel of social-media platforms, reality TV, selfie sticks, and constant surveillance to choose from, it makes sense that we feel an uncomfortable distance between the professional selves we convey online and the selves we actually are. Kate Durbin’s work focuses on that space, gently bridging the gap between our exposed and hidden parts through a merciless girliness (think pink!) and a conceptual commitment to remaining nonjudgmental.

Durbin gracefully holds up a mirror to the twenty-first century’s societal quirks. Her book e! Entertainment consists entirely of transcripts from reality shows. Her performance Hello Selfie questioned why a scene of women consistently taking pictures of themselves seemed so out of place in a society where their looks constitute the bulk of their value. In the project Cloud 9, Durbin confronted the users of a cam-girl site, sharing stories anonymously submitted by women artists about the craziest thing they’d done for money, while asking chatroom members to do the same. In The Supreme Gentleman, Durbin read the transcript of the final, hysterically masochistic 2014 YouTube video made by Elliot Rodger, the shooter in Isla Vista, California, to a selfie stick. All involving an element of personal and community exposure, Durbin’s projects scream for the women kept silent, revealing the most uncomfortable, embarrassing aspects of society that make their way inside all of us.

This interview includes ART21 Magazine’s exclusive release of the artist’s restaging of A Supreme Gentleman.

Lindsey Davis: You told FEM magazine that when you were younger, feminist art saved your life. Can you remember which artists or artworks you first encountered that made you realize feminist critique wasn’t just important but necessary?

Kate Durbin: I went to conservative Evangelical Christian schools all the way through my undergrad education at Biola University, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. My whole childhood and adolescence I was taught that feminists were man-hating baby killers, that men should be the heads of the household. The Internet was still nascent then so I had no access to real feminism until two poets I read in a college English class: Sylvia Plath and Marge Piercy. Plath’s Lady Lazarus was so angry, so sarcastic and shimmery and slippery. And Piercy’s A Work of Artifice was the story of my own life up to that point: the bonsai tree that could have grown sixty feet tall on a mountainside, planted in a small pot, trimmed down and lied to. I remember reading that poem and feeling so angry at every adult I’d ever known, thinking: “Why didn’t you show me this before?” After that I started the first feminist group at Biola. This made me famous on campus, and hated. I taught the classic feminist texts to myself, then to others on campus who wanted to learn, as the school had no women’s studies program. My whole life changed because of those two poems.

LD: What do you think about the idea of “leaning in”? Is there really a way women can battle the distorted expectations we’re faced with?

KD: I have read a few articles, including one by bell hooks, talking about how the lean-in phenomenon doesn’t address some of the larger problems with labor and capital in our world today. Do we really want to lean into a sixty-hour workweek, producing more consumable goods the world does not need? Do we really need more CEOs? Also, leaning in has never worked for me. Some of us just can’t fit with the dominant paradigm, no matter how hard we try. So I make art instead.

Kate Durbin. Cloud 9 screen shot. Courtesy of the artist.

LD: What does it mean for you as an artist to expose yourself, physically and emotionally online? What’s the line you won’t cross?

KD: I thought about this a lot with Cloud 9, an interactive online performance where I shared all the things I have done for money as well as all the things other women artists had done for money (they submitted their stories to me anonymously) on a sex cam site. Money is a greater taboo than sex in our society, so strong is our shame around it. My ethics around performing online have to do with getting to a point of vulnerability, about crossing lines to get to something true and difficult, not stopping at a performance that is done for applause. This kind of work is, for obvious reasons, hard. It’s hard whether online or IRL, although online can be harder in some ways because people are meaner.

LD: Do you see your work as satire, a societal critique, or something else?

KD: Critique is a part of my work, but it’s not the ultimate goal. Critique or satire suggests this separate mind reproaching something, even though it can be a loving reproach. I want to challenge myself to move beyond that to the ways in which we are not better than the Kardashians, but rather how we collude with them to create a world where Kardashians are our Queens and we their worker bees in a dazzling, dying hive.

LD: How does the way you’re exposed in The Supreme Gentleman relate to the way Elliot Rodger exposed himself to the world online?

KD: Rodger shared his hatred of women and people of color online on discussion boards and his YouTube channel for months leading up to the Isla Vista shooting, but no one cared because this type of violent language is considered normal on the Internet. I performed The Supreme Gentleman for the Yes All Women Benefit in Los Angeles, curated by the brilliant Jessie Askinazi, using the script from Rodger’s last YouTube video, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.” I wore a grotesquely long Lady Godiva blonde wig & a thong bikini bottom with the BMW logo stitched on it. I did this because Rodger wanted to possess blondes and BMWs, two symbols of high status in US culture. Other than my stringy hair and string bikini bottom, I was naked except for my selfie stick. I performed in a squeaky, adolescent “mouse” voice, then halfway through switched to a demon voice, the voice of U.S. white male entitlement that says the same things as the mouse child but now he is big enough to have guns. I wanted to embody Roger’s text as one of the things he so objectified (I am a blonde white woman). I wanted to embody these things in a kitschy way to emphasize that what he wanted is a mirage.

I think The Supreme Gentleman ultimately exposes neither Rodger nor me as individuals, but rather the violence that hides in plain sight online, these toxic ideas circulating in our media that feed into IRL violence. My body became a kind of feedback loop or live feed or wire transmuting that violence URL/IRL.

Kate Durbin. Hello Selfie Men. Documentation photo by Anna Jacobson. Courtesy of the artist.

LD: What connections do you see between societal expectations for men and women, and the way we express ourselves online?

KD: I did a version of Hello Selfie with men in Australia. It was so hard to get men to participate, and once I finally had a group willing to take off their shirts and take selfies for an hour straight at an outdoor mall, the crowd was incredibly standoffish. Most people barely even glanced at this spectacle of shirtless selfie-taking men! Some of that is probably related to cultural differences between the U.S. and Australia, but with the femme versions of Hello Selfie, people felt entitled, getting in the women’s space, ogling. Funnily enough, I think women’s selfies are seen as vain, but very femme and sexy—women’s selfies are the selfies the culture wants to look at (and then get upset about). I’d like to see more dude selfies please!

Kate Durbin is performing a new work, Hoarders (based on the television show) at Human Resources Gallery in Los Angeles on August 6th.

Carolyn Carr. Table from the Painter’s Studio, 1996-2016. Lizella Clay, artist glazes, natural and mineral pigments, wood, plaster, glass, 58″ x 28″ x 28″. © Carolyn Carr. Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta.

Feminist themes materialize in the works in Radical Plastic, the exhibition bringing to mind my initial exposure to feminism. In 1973, when I was an undergraduate art student, the sculptor Jane Kaufman was an artist-in-residence at my school for three weeks. Kaufman was one of the few women artists to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the early 1970s. She was both a leader in the Pattern and Decoration movement and a founding member of the early feminist art movement. At Florida International University, Kaufman encouraged us to empower ourselves through consciousness-raising meetings. Sharing frustrations about the misogynist attitudes that we encountered as students, artists, mothers, wives, and lesbians was pivotal for my identity as a feminist artist. The artists in Radical Plastic are part of this feminist-art legacy, even as they broker new strategies to explore current issues.

Opportunities for women have expanded in the past forty years, but gender parity remains as elusive as ever. The curator and writer Maura Reilly cited recent statistics in her essay, “Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes,” for ARTnews in May 2015. Between 2007 and 2014, only 29 percent of solo shows at the Whitney Museum were of women artists. At the Museum of Modern Art in April 2015, only 7 percent of the works on display were by women. With sexism still flourishing in art-world politics, how are women artists responding today?

Carolyn Carr. Table from the Painter’s Studio, 1996-2016. Lizella Clay, artist glazes, natural and mineral pigments, wood, plaster, glass, 58″ x 28″ x 28″. © Carolyn Carr. Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta.

Radical Plastic, curated by Rachel Reese at the CUE Art Foundation, New York, works to answer this question. Reese, the associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia, brings together artists ranging in age from the late twenties to the fifties—millennials, generation Xers, and baby-boomers. These artists explore subjects such as gender identity, domesticity, craft, and advertising. Their mediums include performance, sculpture, installation, graphic design, digital printing, assemblage, and video. Because of my personal history, I approached the show with an eye toward feminism’s past and with questions regarding its present and future: What feminist issues, if any, do these artists address? To what extent are issues about gender, autonomy, lifestyle, and domesticity covertly or overtly embedded in their practices? Are all-women exhibitions still necessary?

As it was in the past, to be a female artist today is to be political. The Radical Plastic artists Becca Albee, Ria Roberts, and Rachel Debuque directly speak to feminist issues through works based on personal history, consumer advertising, and gender identity. Their individual approaches take into account today’s shifting cultural landscape and make arguments for change.

Becca Albee. Radical Feminist Therapy series, 2016. 
Letterpress prints and shadow-registered emboss on paper, 
9” x 6”, unframed. 
This work was made possible with a Publicide Production Fellowship. © Becca Albee.

Becca Albee’s series, Radical Feminist Therapy (2016), was inspired by the underlined passages and notations she made in a book, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence by Bonnie Burstow, which she read in undergraduate school. For this work, the artist scanned each annotated page and then removed the printed text, leaving only her handwritten marks. Collapsing the scanned pages into fifteen chapters, Albee deconstructs the original treatise while creating an inscrutable visual archive of her earlier thinking. The compounded blue lines and scribbled words remain the singular evidence of her experience and suggest her internalization of the author’s thesis. Albee’s revisionist work reshapes reactionary feminism into a subtler political statement.

The editor and designer Ria Roberts takes aim at the commercial advertising industry by creating what she calls “lifestyle magazines for realists,” using the tropes of graphic design to counter certain fictions and suggest an alternate reality. One of her publications featured in this exhibition is devoted entirely to sweat: Oikos Issue 2 (2016) focuses on the occurrences of this body fluid brought by anxiety, sex, work, or exercise and includes an interview in a sauna. Confronting the constructed fictions presented by popular lifestyle magazines, Roberts pitches a lifestyle aligned with realistic expectations. Taking a humorous approach, Methods Issue 3 (2016), co-edited by Erin Knutson, is devoted to the subject of contraception. Roberts invited artist friends and designers to create advertisements and essays on reproductive rights. Countering the popular media’s tactics that play to women’s desires to love and be loved, the content is drafted as a democratic sexuality, in a conversation about intimate lives.

Methods, Issue 2, 2015. Publication, edited by Ria Roberts & Erin Knutson. Approx. 8.5″ x 11″. © Leisure Press.

Gender identity is undermined by Rachel Debuque’s Glisten (2016), a performance installation in which an androgynous female bodybuilder completes a workout routine while a woman depicted in a video monitor encourages her to push her physical limits. The radical concept of gender fluidity is at the core of Debuque’s project. The work questions how we define ourselves as gendered beings and the relative inclusivity of the definition of female. The performance argues that socially constructed gender roles are malleable and that boundaries can be extended to include alternatives to binary categories.

Domesticity, a major source of content for second-wave feminists working in the 1960s and ’70s, resurfaces with a new twist in the works of Michelle Grabner and Carolyn Carr. Originally inspired by the paper weavings her son brought home from school, Grabner’s vernacular works transmit the beauty of the colors and textures of commercially produced gingham fabric, a pattern from eighteenth-century England. The high-resolution photographs in the exhibition measure 30-by-24 inches and provide a close-up view of the intricacy of the woven grid and the play of color, light, and space. As artifacts of the artist’s lifelong interest in repetition, patterning, and mark making, these digital images conflate the past with the present in an objective display of visual pleasure.

Michelle Grabner
. Untitled, 2014
. Ed. 1/1 AP. 
Archival inkjet print, 
30″ x 24″. © Michelle Grabner. Courtesy of James Cohan, New York.

Carolyn Carr creates fictional environments in which the past, the present, and the influences of powerful women intermingle. After reading Virginia Wolfe’s A Room of One’s Own, the artist was inspired to develop a way to shape her own creative life. In Carr’s installation, Table from the Painter’s Studio (1996–2016), a large table-top structure serves as the artist’s worktable. On it, ceramic pots, cups, saucers, and bowls are strewn about. Organic and mineral pigments spill out of the vessels and onto the table: it’s a palette for either an alchemist or an artist and suggests transformation. In this messy tableau, Carr’s search for structure embraces the experimental chaos of the artist’s studio. Wolfe’s journey is mirrored in Carr’s willingness to take risks, to revise, and to succeed on her own terms.

Through provocative methodologies, the artists in Radical Plastic ask the viewer to consider the mutable conditions of identity, gender, the body, and the environment. While not all the artists in the exhibition address feminist issues directly or identify as feminists, their distinctive experiences and commentaries as women are important to the art-historical record. Until women achieve parity in the art world, there continues to be a need for all-women exhibitions, as part of a larger need to recognize all marginalized artists.

Carolyn Carr, A Photographer’s Studio and the Problems of Posing (in progress image), 1978-2016. Hand-built vessels made of Georgia red clay, pine beam, shutters, van dyke, cyanotype, silver gelatin print, painter’s brush, canvas, tin pitcher, stoneware butter churn, bench, painting, installation dimensions variable. © Carolyn Carr. Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta.

Carolyn Carr, A Photographer’s Studio and the Problems of Posing (in progress image), 1978-2016. Hand-built vessels made of Georgia red clay, pine beam, shutters, van dyke, cyanotype, silver gelatin print, painter’s brush, canvas, tin pitcher, stoneware butter churn, bench, painting, installation dimensions variable. © Carolyn Carr. Courtesy of the artist and Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta.

Editor’s note: This essay was written by the ART21/CUE Writer-in-Residence in conjunction with the exhibition Radical Plastic, on view at CUE Art Foundation July 16 – August 20, 2016. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.

The ART21 + CUE Writing Fellowship provides each writer with a mentor, an established art critic appointed by the International Association of Art Critics USA Mentoring Committee. Davis worked with the art critic Lilly Lampe.

Photo of Vera Rubin. Courtesy of the artist.

A beautiful photograph conveys what the artist sees as its rightful and best composition. A photo, said to express a thousand words, has millions of thoughts put into it. One can deconstruct and analyze a photographic image through its use of shutter speed, aperture, and exposure—the amount of light allowed to reach the negative as well as the amount of public attention it receives. The image can be under- and overexposed in both senses, depending on the artist’s view. I am consistently let down by the obligation to bring my work to light. But I am often told exposure is necessary if I would like to sustain myself, if I would like to not be poor, if I would like to gain further popularity and build long-term relevance. And a lot of what I am told is true.

It’s tough to find the right balance of exposure for my work. My practice and performance are reaching a relatively stable place now. I don’t know if would call myself emerging because I have always operated within an underground scene. Most of my life has been under the radar of relevance, as I grew up in and out of homelessness and a myriad of other annoying tragedies. My life has existed mainly in the nighttime, as I believe in the redemptions of nightlife and the fundamental expression of queer culture that is manifested within it. For most of my life, my body, my intellect, the way I love, and how I fuck (or do not) have been deemed as not relevant to the mainstream conversation. In the daytime and above ground, I find myself confused, misunderstood, upset, and making little sense to most people.

Vera Rubin, Bananas Flyer. Courtesy of the artist.

This is why I have made my place in the nightlife underground, where I have been making art prolifically for seven years. I’m stoked by my parties, fashion, music, visual art, and writing, and by a community that seems to be really into what I do. All of my art is guided by a general concept of lunacy: a femme energy that controls the night and controls us. This delight in exploring the cerebral irrational and to embracing darkness has helped me tap into a queer collective consciousness and new femme ethic I never knew I was missing but was always starving for. This bliss has its secrets, and its ups and downs.

But to share these secrets with others means exposing them, bringing them to light. Until now, there really has been no reason to do so. But now I am thinking about navigating the exposure to this bliss of the night. Being part of queer culture—that not only involves a new ethic against assimilation, against visibility, against hegemony but also creates a greater, collective, cyborg consciousness—requires care with exposure. I can only take my lunacy seriously to the extent to which I want to recognize the light of the moon.

Vera Rubin. The Night is Femme exhibition. Courtesy of the artist.

A. Laurie Palmer. Heap Leach Field, Nevada (silver). Courtesy of the artist.

In 2015, Black Dog Publishing released A. Laurie Palmer’s book, In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction, which documents multiple visits the artist made to sites of industrial extraction around the United States. Describing trips to Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Wyoming, and California, among others, Palmer’s essayistic account weaves personal experience and history, philosophy, science, politics, and economics, revealing the complex and reciprocal relationship between humanity and the materials on which it relies. Palmer is a sculptor based in California; she has exhibited widely since 1988, collaborated for twenty years with the artist group Haha, and cofounded the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials.

Caroline Picard: Can you talk about how In The Aura of a Hole developed?

Laurie Palmer: There were many seeds for this project. One is from the early 1980s, when a friend gave me Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura while I was living in San Francisco. In that philosophical poem, Lucretius asks straightforwardly: What is this place? What is it made of? How does it work? His answers are as helpful now as they were in 50 BCE, in the sense that his curiosity, detailed observations, and empirical imagination still reverberate. He was an early proponent of a DIY ethic: he trusted his own experience to make sense of things. As an Epicurean, he believed the gods and their spokespersons were not authorities to be trusted, while being nevertheless supremely humble, in his desire to hear the opinions of others.

Two thousand years later, the world is materially different—perhaps destroyed, certainly drastically altered—and we now question how certain human practices and ideologies have become naturalized, as if they are forces that can’t be changed, that are part of the nature of things. Lucretius’s direct approach is helpful in a different way for questioning the intransigence of these practices and ideologies, but really it was his poetic imagination and inflamed curiosity that moved and affected me so many years ago. And his willingness to ask simple questions…

A. Laurie Palmer. Iodine evaporation, Oklahoma. Courtesy of the artist.

CP: Was the book at all influenced by your studio practice?

ALP: In the early 1990s, while writing about art, making art, and teaching art, I had the idea to write a book about materials that might be relevant to teaching sculpture. I thought I could write a sort of handbook of descriptions and associations; I would write about the world of matter as if it were art. But I didn’t write it because I didn’t think it had any ground. By ground I mean a more located politics, addressing the privatization of space and resources.

I found the ground for the book when I began to question land use in my own practice of making. Haha’s work had always been place-based, and that long collaboration is another important seed. But in the late ’90s or early 2000s, I started thinking about land as both abstract space and tangible material and to explore its status as a “fictional commodity,” in Karl Polanyi’s term. This led to visiting mines, where land as space and material becomes explicitly commodified—turned into an object. The question of thingness (what makes a thing cohere) has always been an art question for me, a sculpture question. From 2003–04, I was given the unbelievable gift of time to read and think at Radcliffe College; the experience both opened and unhinged me. It took a long time for me to filter out all the joyful noise, and in the end the book is something different from whatever I had hoped would result. The research that went into it has become a bountiful source for making new projects, and the writing helped me find new ways to think about being in the world. As an artist I want to be changed by what I make, through the process of making it. Working on the book did that. I crafted it as a porous whole, to create a certain picture of the world. Even if it’s unevenly geeky, digressive, personal, or didactic at times, it’s nevertheless a porous whole made of eighteen holes. The golfing analogy didn’t occur to me until after it was published. In my mind, it is an art project because it is constructed more as a thing than a coherent narrative and because that thing consists of different kinds of voices, or of information, which might not exist together except perhaps in the permissive context of art. As in artmaking, I let more in than I could make explicit sense of, with the hope of giving the reader and receiver a lot to work with.

A. Laurie Palmer. Copper waste piles, Utah. Courtesy of the artist.

CP: In the introduction, you say you want to break the script, to take a “reparative rather than paranoid approach.” I feel ever more aware of how embroiled I am in systemic violence, in no small part due to the modes of industrial extraction on which my daily life relies. While I recognize that entwinement, it seems like a dead end to simply say, “I will not participate,” partly because it’s impossible not to participate. But I also worry that struggling to maintain a refusal might require so much of my energy that I would end up blind to alternative, nonviolent possibilities. I find that your book stirs up a different kind of awareness, but I’m not sure what to call it.

ALP: I’m not sure what to call it, either. In some ways this project involved digging deeper into a wound—learning more about and specifying my complicity in the interconnected violence you speak about—of ecosystem/world destruction, resource depletion, militarism, surveillance, poverty, racism, and unemployment as necessities of capitalism, and other outrageously wrong systemic priorities, all of which support and perpetuate each other. Alternatively, drawing connections between the materiality of the Earth and our bodies reveals our vulnerability and our complicity in a larger-than-human frame and points to a different kind of connection, to focus on and explore as a way forward. Of course it is facile to say everything is connected, but it’s interesting to try to specify how they are connected. And the closer one looks, the more surprises one finds, creating a picture for which the laws of non-contradiction do not apply! I think of art as a really big net, with a broad tolerance for contradictory reality. With writing, one is always struggling against an exclusive logic, which makes it so hard to write and which makes really good writing so exquisite because it refuses that logic. I would like to be a writer, but I am an artist. But to return to your question: a reparative approach assumes disaster has already happened, is happening, and is ongoing alongside a lot of other things that have happened, are happening, are perhaps not so visible, might come to the surface as useful, could offer the seeds for different understandings…

A. Laurie Palmer. Silver Mine pit, Nevada. Courtesy of the artist.

CP: In the “Iron” chapter, you begin with a quote: “There is enough iron in the body to make a fairly large nail.” I feel like your narrative makes the individual commensurate to these massive systems of commerce, technology, and science, and to the level of atomic material—that you’ll illustrate why metal is strong. How did the scope of these systems envelop you?

ALP: When I visited extraction sites, my body always seemed out of place, in terms of the scale of the excavations, the presence of free-floating toxins, and the machines that would not notice a living thing. And I felt overwhelmed by the sensory details, more than I could make sense of. But I also felt this sensory overload created a link between my body and the place, the material, and the human guides who seemed so engaged with their work. I know that there is a certain idealization involved in this perception, but my guides knew a lot about what they were working with, and this knowledge created an unexpected intimacy with the material and the place, in contrast to the massive and distancing scale of the excavations (and their long-term effects). A friend described my mine visits as “aesthetic encounters.”

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton wrote that aesthetics was born as a discourse about the body—that aesthetic philosophy, as it was developed in Germany in the 1700s, had to account for the body and its sensuousness to allow power, in the form of reason, to maintain control. If it were possible to redefine the term aesthetics for my own purposes, I would rip it open: a capacious process of coming to know that lets in more than we can necessarily make sense of, one that maybe even accesses a certain formlessness, or a version of Michael Taussig’s bodily unconscious. That might sound overwhelming, but it gives us more to work with than what seeps through a finer-grained sieve; it makes room for creative acts of interpretation, for making new shapes with what is latent and immanent. But complexity is incredibly intimidating and humbling, and I found myself identifying with a vole, a blind burrowing rodent, motivated by hunger and an obsessive nature.

A. Laurie Palmer. Geothermal Resources, Nevada. Courtesy of the artist.

CP: I feel that you are also vulnerable to the logic of these massive industrial sites, maybe especially in the face of those who guide you…

ALP: What does one do with vulnerability? I think about vulnerability as openness to change. Vulnerability is a kind of potential. Change can happen in any and all directions. Fear and shame are two defenses against vulnerability and desire, against needs that might not be met. Pleasure and connection are effects of opening oneself to vulnerability and the possibility that needs might be met, that one might be recognized. Some might say one first needs to create a secure space to enjoy these effects, or they might say there is a limited supply of resources. But cause and effect are all mixed up in a complex world, and showing vulnerability can also be the precursor to feelings of continuity and connection. I am speaking in dangerously ungrounded abstractions. But it does seem that most of our destructive human practices are built in defense against a material or bodily condition that we share with other humans and with the nonhuman world. I am enamored with Michael Marder’s writing about plants because, among other reasons, he uses the plant/human analogy to expose our vulnerability. Plants are turned inside-out, oriented in their tissues toward the material world, from which they derive all their sustenance, and they are rooted in place, exposed to whatever happens there, where they are. We also derive all our sustenance from the material world and are also in some sense rooted—by our physical bodies and by the Earth’s gravity and specific atmosphere with which we evolved. One can’t sustainably separate a plant from its environment, and now we can’t separate our environment from us. An individual is a working fiction, a thing that has only fictional coherence, imagined boundaries; both fictions are useful but not fixed. The boundaries are subject to change, and even slight, incremental change can help. It is already happening, with contributions coming from many different directions.

A. Laurie Palmer. Sulfur pile, BP refinery, California. Courtesy of the artist.

Matthew Morrocco. Paul, 2015. Inkjet Print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

In the world of contemporary art, we are inundated by images. From art made to be photographed and shared, to Internet art, and “post-Internet” art, to Instagram and Tumblr celebrities. The normalizing of image making has made one thing clear: if art is not easily Instagrammable, it risks being unnoticed; it risks poor exposure. This prompts a new spin on the thought experiment about trees falling in woods, and yet still, the question remains: if art is not shared, reproduced, perpetuated ad infinitum, does it really matter?

As a medium, photography has a long history of mattering, specifically for the purposes of social progress. From Lewis Hine, whose photographs of child factory workers led to necessary labor reform, to Alice Seeley Harris, who exposed the subhuman exploitation of people in the Congo by Leopold II of Belgium for rubber and ivory. Consider also Robert Mapplethorpe, who drew major attention to homosexual men at a time when most people, particularly President Ronald Reagan, denied their existence, and later, their deaths. More recently, the image of Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy found washed up on the shore in Turkey, made by Nilüfer Demir, captured the world’s attention as we watched the swelling numbers of refugees flee their homes for safety. From the beginning, photography has been an arbiter of historical information that sets trends, guides politics, and brings awareness to the unknown.

Matthew Morrocco. Self Portrait with Scott, 2012. Inkjet print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

Other artistic mediums—sculpture, painting, printmaking—speak in metaphors. They are aesthetically advanced, and their histories are long. But photography—youthful, exuberant, still in a relative infancy—remains consequential, speaking not with metaphor but with direct engagement.  Here is the place where the morally questionable can still experiment, where the ethics of society can be restaged and forged anew.  Here is the place where anyone with Internet access can find identity and, like Carrie Mae Weems, take control of their own history. It is from this place that I create photographs. Using the pre-photographic aesthetic lexicon of nineteenth-century painting, and the contemporary obsession with self-imaging, I create photographs that engage with a world that I struggle to understand and a history I am compelled to confront.

Matthew Morrocco. Elliott by the Lake, 2015. Inkjet print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

Good photography is not just an emblem from the past; it is history itself. How would we remember the anguish of the dust-bowl era without Dorothea Lange’s searing portrait of a migrant mother or understand adolescence without Rineke Dijkstra’s beautifully empathetic portraits? Exposure is not about baring it all but about revealing a point of view that remains unknown, a sensibility that must be seen to be understood. Exposure is about Michael Brown’s graduation portrait, Alton Sterling’s family portrait, and images gathered after a mass shooting in South Carolina, or San Bernadino, or Orlando. Exposure is about an image of President Barack Obama embracing a Hiroshima survivor or of First Lady Michelle Obama on the cover of Vogue. Exposure is about Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of Caitlyn Jenner or the first all-transgender ad campaign by & Other Stories. Photography matters not just because it is easily reproducible but because within every frame there is the potential to unlock a new discovery for humanity, a new way of feeling or seeing or thinking, a formulation of identity and self worth. Photographs that endure call forth the past from the lost moments of time to animate us in the present and reinvigorate us from the depths of our own individual spirits. Choose your angles wisely.

Matthew Morrocco. Keith in the Mirror, 2015. Inkjet print, 30″ x 24″. Courtesy of the artist.

Siobhan Aluvalot. Bird. Courtesy of the artist.

“A place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain…” —The Wizard of Oz, 1939

Pouring through musty magazines, collaging began as a process of extracting moods and feelings and playing with abstractions. Revealing powerful images that were held captive and concealed by collective fears of feminine power. I transport myself through layers and textures that soothed my sore spots as I traveled. In the warm darkness are the most colorful lights, sticky pearls stringing together songs and teasing out movements; wild and unrestrained that originate in the body and inform the brain through rhythm and vibration. Reinterpreting, re-imagining, forecasting, truth, seeking, escape (sometimes). Presenting desires of representation; dreams through dramatic reenactments in dimensions transcribed from nonverbal communications and sensations; shuffling images and following threads of attraction.

Siobhan Aluvalot. Magic. Courtesy of the artist.

beach on the walks and speaking without words
i make myself art
open
vulnerable
combining elements and forces awakens living trajectories
diving into the darkest depths surfacing with shadowy elements
transformed into iridescence upon inspection.
collector and muse of angles and possibilities
working with all of my senses
exploring hidden languages of my spiritual queer ancestors
developed out of necessity
when keeping safe was (is) keeping secret

make up
pleasure
satisfaction

performance that reveals through
steps and missteps
the hips don’t lie

radioactive memories that seep slowly through the pores
photographic paper in my emotional body develops

listening with breath

filling in and repositioning
millionsofcolors
grainsofsand

Siobhan Aluvalot. Untitled. Courtesy of the artist.

The curtain is raised and behind it not only does the emperor have no clothes, he has no skin or blood, no heart or brain or tissues or veins—just a dusty skeleton taking your money and wiping blood on your hands. Disassociation and blackouts are popular accessories in a culture built upon a dynasty of genocide, of violence, of shameful histories spun as hero’s journeys. The truth doesn’t protect you. Free Chelsea Manning.

“These documents were important because they relate to two connected counter-insurgency conflicts in real-time from the ground. Humanity has never had this complete and detailed a record of what modern warfare actually looks like. Once you realize that the coordinates represent a real place where people live, that the dates happened in our recent history, that the numbers are actually human lives–with all the love, hope, dreams, hatred, fear, and nightmares that come with them–then it’s difficult to ever forget how important these documents are.” —Chelsea Manning

“A SYMPHONY OF DEATH RATTLES.

HISTORY WILL NOT FORGET

THIS HOLIDAY OF DEATH.

HISTORY WILL NOT FORGET

THIS HOLIDAY OF DEATH.”

—John Waters, Desperate Living, 1977

Liz Nielsen. Ring of Runes, 2016. Analog Chromogenic Photo, Unique. Printed on FujiFlex. 39 7/16 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Danziger Gallery, SOCO Gallery.

Inside Liz Nielsen’s studio, my gaze floated across a large wall filled with chromogenic abstractions in various sizes. Amid the brightly colored totems and constructed landscapes, the Brooklyn-based photographer shared a bedtime story told by her mother when Nielsen was a little girl:

My mom used to sit with me before I fell asleep. I didn’t like the dark nor going to bed, so she made up these nice mental exercises for me to do. Instead of counting sheep, she would say, “Let’s go into the swimming pool and fill it up with all kinds of underwater colored lights,” and I would imagine us there together. It was calming.¹

Though it’s a lightly made reference, related threads to the story and its influence run through Nielsen’s life and work. The artist continues to establish her place in the tradition of cameraless photography, most recently illustrated in her solo exhibition with Danziger Gallery. Working in an analog color darkroom and replacing traditional negatives with hand-cut collages of colored gels, Nielsen exposes chromogenic paper to controlled light to create her distinctive abstractions. As she explains, “The final outcomes are preplanned with strong intention and formally composed, yet because I’m working with light, they always have some surprises. The light bleeds and spills and doesn’t want to be contained.” The concept of exposure and its transformative effects also has a more esoteric connection to Nielsen’s work as a gallerist and curator in a series of collaborative projects with her partner, Carolina Wheat. Their most recent project sheds light on the power of vulnerability.

Elijah Wheat Showroom Logo, courtesy of EWS.

In 2008, Nielsen founded the Swimming Pool Project Space in Chicago. The original mission of the project, embodied in an intimate storefront gallery with a signature blue floor, was to inspire conversation and play in relation to art: a platform for the exchange of ideas, where emerging artists, curators, writers, and performers could meet and connect. Soon after, Nielsen and Wheat joined forces as collaborators and co-curators at the gallery known affectionately as “The Pool.” Over the course of a few years, the project hosted about thirty exhibitions and participated in a handful of art fairs, embracing an experimental approach: events included a dog-fashion show on a catwalk, an environmental Room-A Loom installed for public weaving, and the Living Room exhibition, created in response to a single piece of furniture (specifically, a blue brocade sectional sofa from the 1970s). A job opportunity for Wheat brought the couple to New York in 2011, and both were soon balancing full-time jobs, raising a family, and art careers.

In early 2014, their lives tragically turned when their sixteen-year-old son Elijah took his life. Described as a fiercely independent and extremely charismatic force, Elijah also had a generous and playful spirit. He loved to laugh and bring people together. Skateboarding and video games were interests matched by his budding investigation of Buddhist philosophy and meditation. In addition, he was a talented violinist and dancer who could move effortlessly between Bach and hip-hop. Wheat shared that before he could even talk, Elijah would hum to music with perfect pitch. Busking at street festivals and in New York City subway stations, he loved to make people smile and feel relaxed with his dancing and music. With strong ideas about equality and justice formed at an early age, Wheat knew her son as a deeply empathetic soul who truly felt the weight of the world.

Elijah. Courtesy of Liz Nielsen.

As Wheat and Nielsen tried to come to terms with their son’s passing, they discovered the true strength of their community. “We felt supported, lifted, completely carried by our friends. They held our broken hearts together for us,” said Nielsen. She spoke of those who went above and beyond: friends who “slept at our house, let us sleep at theirs, embraced us while we cried, opened their homes to us, fed us, and took some of the weight away.” Nielsen continued:

The empathy and generosity that we came to know from our group of friends is unparalleled by any other experience in our lives. Suicide is one of the most tragic ways to die and it is almost impossible to accept. Sometimes it feels like an accident and sometimes you can’t help but blame yourself for what you did or did not do. There are so many unanswered questions. It is so difficult to know that someone who you love so much didn’t know how much he was loved.

Alchemy Exhibition, 2016. Courtesy of Elijah Wheat Showroom.

The following year, in 2015, they established Elijah Wheat Showroom (EWS), to continue with a deeper sense of mission some of the ideas they explored in Chicago. Named after their late son, the gallery honors his spirit of “creative insight, righteous vision, and stylistic voice for trendsetting.” Combating the stigma of suicide and encouraging openness about a challenging topic, they also seek to keep Elijah’s name alive in a positive light. As Nielsen explained, “People say that you die two deaths: the first when your physical body dies and the second when someone utters your name for the last time. We want to keep Elijah’s spirit alive every day by saying his name over and over.”

EWS now thrives as a curatorial project that allows Nielsen and Wheat to be involved with community organizing while sharing political and artistic voices in varied settings. They are, in a sense, continuing to gather those colored lights. Programming at their Bushwick gallery is scheduled to resume in the fall of 2016, and they will be showcasing videos and paintings by Lauren Gregory at the Satellite Art Fair at Art Basel Miami in December. Meanwhile, their most recent exhibition, Transaction, was on view at the Knockdown Center in Queens through July 2016.

Transaction Installation, 2016. Courtesy of the Knockdown Center and Elijah Wheat Showroom.

Transaction features personal artifacts contributed by twenty-three artists and explores the energy of beloved objects from a personal landscape in a gallery setting. The unique installation of suspended objects at the Knockdown Center—a 50,000-square-foot former door factory recently celebrated by Jerry Saltz as a breathtaking experience—provides ample room for viewers to consider each object in a space that engenders reverence. None of the work is for sale; the value lies in the willingness of the artists to share and the viewers to contemplate in an alternative way.

The concept of the exhibition recalls a parting story about one of the prints on the wall of Nielsen’s studio:

That piece…I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somehow I left the negative on top of the paper—probably because electrons kept it there. So, when I sent the paper through the machine, I couldn’t find the negative, and I thought it fell on the floor. It is pitch black inside the color darkroom, so I really didn’t know where it was. I was paranoid because if you actually send something other than paper through the chemical tanks in the machine, it is likely to break or damage the processor. But the negative came out of the machine on top of the paper, and the image had still developed. Whether or not the piece is fixed is another story, but it seems to have held its color. In any case, this photograph is a personal one and not for sale. The image is a druid, a spiritual leader that one would follow. I imagine—I know—it is a manifestation of Elijah.

Elijah. Courtesy of Liz Nielsen.

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes by Nielsen and Wheat are from a conversation with the author on June 7th, 2016 in Nielsen’s Bushwick studio.

Elijah Wheat Showroom’s upcoming exhibition is organized by the artist-run collective ZVX, and features works by Brett Burton, Morgan Ersery, Chris Grady, and Monica L. Bernal. WIDE OPEN SOURCES runs August 5–15, 2016. An opening reception is being held in the Bushwick space at 1196 Myrtle, on Friday, August 5th from 7-10pm.

Paul Gagner. Enough Is Enough, 2015. Oil on canvas, 10 x 14 inches. © Paul Gagner.

For the “New Kids on the Block” column in the “Exposed” issue, acclaimed art-world self-help author Howard Moseley, PhD, answers readers’ questions about gallery representation, the nature of creativity, and commissioned works.

Q: I am very upset by the haughty, superior attitudes of gallery owners in my area. I want to get my art into a gallery, but do I need to crawl on my knees to get someone to show my work?

A: Galleries are often difficult to approach, and their owners can be cold and even hostile to the public. This is because gallery owners are, in fact, a super-high-functioning alien race with highly evolved powers of observation. Did you know that they see three million more colors than we can? Who better to set the standards of taste than an alien that also has the power to persuade collectors with a hypnotic gaze?

So, the best approach is, as you suggested, crawling on your hands and knees. However, be careful to not be excessively ingratiating since gallery owners can also smell insincerity. They are a shrewd and wily bunch and should not be underestimated, nor should you stare them directly in the eyes. Once you’re in, it’s all about the art, am I right?!

Paul Gagner. Don’t Fuck it Up, 2015. Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the private collection of Rod Malin. © Paul Gagner.

Q: Will studying art stifle my creativity? Artists have told me that you can become subconsciously influenced by bad art, and as a result, your inner visions may be harmed by too much exposure to it.

A: I like to think of creativity as a precious egg: it’s hard on the outside and gooey on the inside. You see, our egos are the brittle shell holding our gooey creativity together. We need to be very careful how we handle our eggs. You wouldn’t want a brute like Picasso handling your precious eggs, would you? He’s liable to stomp on your eggs or, worse, soufflé them with a nice Gruyere, a pinch of nutmeg, and piment d’Espelette. This is why you need to build an enormous enclosure to keep out the would-be Picassos from stealing and breaking your precious eggs. This is why I always recommend to my followers—I mean, clients—to ignore all outside stimuli. This will prevent any and all influence, and only then can your gooey creative expression really flourish.

Q: I am trying to find a gallery to represent my work. I follow the gallery’s instructions for submitting links to my website, and I write polite notes, but I never get a response. What am I doing wrong?

A: The process for finding a gallery to represent one’s work is really quite mysterious. To counter this dearth of knowledge, I recently wrote a book on this topic: How to Make Them Understand Your Genius-ishness. The trouble is that you probably don’t stand out from all of the other artists who are vying for attention. This is why you need to do something outrageous. My suggestion is a performance tailored specifically to the gallery owner. Many of these gallery owners have a cat or dog. What you need to do is lure their beloved animal with some delicious treat. Then send them photos of their precious animal with a message telling them how much fun you’re having with “Marcel” or “Frida,” expressing just how sad the world would be without their beloved critter. Believe me, they will respond quickly! You will be surprised at how much attention you’ll get with this harmless little stunt.

Paul Gagner. Hexes, Curses and Spells, 2015. Oil on canvas, 10 x 14 inches. © Paul Gagner.

Disclaimer: The questions and answers above are fictional and not intended to provide factual insights into the art world.

When he was a younger artist, Paul Gagner read self-help books and consulted a therapist. He created Dr. Howard Moseley, a fictional author of self-help texts, to probe his anxiety about being an artist. The contrived covers for Moseley’s books are the subjects of a series of paintings by Gagner. Titles such as Fortify Your Delicate Ego and Enough is Enough are humorous, but Gagner explains, “I am sincere, and the humor is a means to cope with the darkness behind the paintings.”¹ Gagner views this body of work as a constructive and direct way to consider the existential questions that accompany the practice of making art.

Paul Gagner (born 1976, Wisconsin) holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, in New York, and an MFA from Brooklyn College. He has exhibited extensively in New York City and nationally. Gagner’s work is on view at Linda Warren Projects, in Chicago, and in the group show “A Series of Movements” at Driscoll Babcock’s Project Space in New York through August 2016. Gagner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

1. From a conversation with the author, June 1, 2016, Brooklyn, New York.

Tino Rodriguez. Invocation, 2008. Oil on wood, 17″ x 19″. Courtesy of the artist.

My work emerges from a need to express and question who I am. Using myself as the subject of my work both questions and reaffirms my position, not only in society but also in the macroscopic world, both physical and metaphysical. Some of the themes in my work are: The Self, Dreams, Gender, and Fairy Tales.

The Self:

The medieval invention of the self-portrait introduced a dimension of mystery to the practice of painting. It is impossible to count the painters who, like master masons carving the keystone of an arch, succumbed to the temptation to leave a record of what they looked like. At first, they slipped portraits of themselves into groups of worshippers in their paintings: Hans Memling stands as a curious onlooker behind the retable of Sir Donne, and Botticelli painted himself in the proud posture of one of the powerful men in Florence, with whom he spent his time.  The power of the self-portrait over the spectator comes from the fact that the painter’s relation to his/her image incorporates the mirror, which evokes a transparent field; with a gaze and a few signs, the self-portrait creates a novel in itself.

I mostly paint self-portraits, and since an interest in the self has always been linked with narcissism, I must redefine the position as the subject of my work. Unlike Narcissus, I do not see the image of myself as an illusion that I may fall in love with. I see myself in the mirror, but the mirror is broken, shattered; each little piece of mirror reflects a different me. I am multiplied, like cells multiply inside the body. I transform myself for each painting. I carefully investigate fashion, architecture, landscape, flora, fauna, and symbolism. I don’t just paint fantasy; I paint a reality that goes beyond the borders of the framed painting. Most of these paintings depict clothing or objects I possess. Each of my paintings is a performance that I perform for myself. I offer myself to my own gaze. I see myself through my own eyes.

Tropical Lullaby, 2007. Oil on wood, 12″ x 16″. Courtesy of the artist.

Dreams:

Dreams are involuntary products of the psyche. They present us with a bewildering array of images and feelings, familiar and unfamiliar, all of which have something to teach us. The communicative power of dreams has been acknowledged for millennia: the ancients credited them with the power of prophecy, and in Egypt, the gods were believed to speak through the dreams of the pharaohs. However, the interpretation of dreams has always been fraught with uncertainty because the messages they carry emerge in an ambiguous and indistinct form. A dream is a narrative and often a highly condensed one, spanning an awesome amount of material with specialized, symbolic shorthand. Although many dream symbols are associated with universal archetypes, their precise meanings are mutable, depending on the psychology of the dreamer and on the context in which they appear in the dream.

My work deals with dreams, but my goal is not to depict or describe dreams. I find dreams as an inspiring source of information because they represent enigmas. I connect the process of dreaming with irrationality; when we’re conscious, we rationalize everything by virtue of our intellect. I have always admired the bizarre, obscure, incongruous, unknown, and mysterious because these qualities are often shadowed by irrationality and because they represent fear and darkness. In our society, we tend to forget that the concept of light would not exist without the concept of darkness. Jean Genet said, “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”

The Strange Perfume of Love, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

Gender:

Our society has been successful in creating roles for both women and men. This creation has limited our performances in the sense that we are labeled from birth and therefore coerced to take role one or the other, but never both. Gender is not a natural occurrence; on the contrary, it is an artificial construction, a masquerade, a simulacrum. Anyone who does not fit in the role of woman or man is considered deviant. Gender is a constructed idea that I am trying to deconstruct with my work. I paint people who are neither feminine nor masculine; they are androgynous.

Many spiritual and occult traditions have taught that completeness of being can be achieved only internally, in the union of the male and the female principles that we each carry within us: the opposing active and passive forces of creativity. In the East, this idea of inner union finds expression in the tai-chi symbol and in Hindu and Buddhist tantra, in which a male and a female deity are entwined in an embrace so intricate that the two appear to inhabit a single body. Western occult and alchemical traditions express the attainment of inner reconciliation as the hermaphrodite or androgyne, a being at once male and female. In Jewish legend, Adam was hermaphroditic until Eve was separated from him. And in some Greek mythological accounts, Zeus was simultaneously male and female. Thus the androgyne questions the confining roles of male and female. It contemplates the idea of completion, of wholeness. It puzzles and confuses. Thus the sharp lines between being a woman or a man are blurred.

Persephone, 2003. Oil on wood, 12″ x 12″. Courtesy of the artist.

Fairy Tales:

Fairy tales are optimistic, no matter how terrifyingly serious some features of a story may be. This sets the fairy tale apart from other stories in which equally fantastic events occur, whether the happy outcome is due to the virtues of the heroine/hero, to chance, or to the interference of supernatural figures.

Fantasy, growing out of the fundamentally optimistic fairy tale, represents a uniquely positive response to dissatisfaction. The fantastic responds to destructiveness by building toward disorder through imagining order and to despair by calling forth wonder. My work responds to this characteristic of storytelling. I grew up in a harsh social environment, in which I had to protect myself on a daily basis. To endure, I invented fairy tales constantly in my mind, mostly about escape and transformation. In my stories, I was the hero and heroine; sometimes my escape was aided by someone else. I fantasized to survive.

My work does not offer concrete answers. Instead, the poetic essence of my paintings questions literal and rational meanings. I am not interested in answers because I do not think there are absolute ones. Most questions are enigmas that we carry within ourselves, and they are part of our multilayered, complex existence. Novalis said: “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” I think the same of my paintings, which I consider visual poetry.

Installation view of Art AIDS America, Bronx Museum. Willie Cole. How Do You Spell America? #2, 1993. Oil stick, chalk, wood and latex on Masonite, 49.2 x 96.5 x 4.5 inches. © Marisol Díaz, 2016.

A few months ago, Suzanne Moore wrote, “A generation of artists were wiped out by AIDS and we barely talk about it.” The sentiment rang painfully true for me, a gay man who lives in New York and spends my days looking at and thinking about art. But it also left me with heavy questions: How do we start this conversation? How do we keep alive the memory of all those untold thousands lost to AIDS? And how do we talk about it in a way that acknowledges the crisis is far from over and, in some parts of the world, has never been worse? Two excellent, challenging summer exhibitions—Art AIDS America at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—give this conversation the initiating jolt it needs.

Organized in partnership with the Tacoma Art Museum, Art AIDS America offers a broad survey of artists who grappled with the AIDS crisis, including a large number who died from it and many more who knew them well. Variously documentary, abstract, and propagandistic, the works haven’t lost much of their urgency, and together they reveal a community that harnessed the power of art to tell untold stories and to fight, even in small ways, for the dignity, exposure, and basic services it was denied. Just as crucially, they stand as a holistic-yet-fractured document of a moment generally defined by images of lesioned young bodies, wasting away and otherwise lost to history.

Installation view of Art AIDS America. Right: Izhar Patkin. Unveiling of a Modern Chastity, 1981. Rubber, latex, and ink on canvas. © Marisol Díaz, 2016.

Artworks by the usual suspects like David Wojnarowicz, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres are all included, but some of the more abstract works caught me off guard and left a haunting, more lasting impression. Izhar Patkin’s Unveiling of a Modern Chastity, the earliest work in the exhibition, was made as the first gay men were coming down with the then-unknown illness; it’s a sickly yellow painting, shot through with oozy, rust-colored wounds. Ross Bleckner’s massive, detailed painting Brain Rust evokes a foggy scan of a brain, weakened by the ravages of HIV or the experimental medicines used to treat it. Tony Feher’s lovely hanging chain of empty green bottles, Green Window, takes on a sadder, more poignant tone in the wake of his recent death after decades of living with the virus.

It’s no secret that mainstream LGBT history—if such a thing even exists—is usually a case study in whitewashing. The exhibition does little to buck this erasure, but its inclusion of works by a handful artists of color is at least a gesture toward involving black and Latinx artists in a critical, institutional conversation from which they’ve traditionally been excluded. Understated contributions from Bronx natives Glenn Ligon and Whitfield Lovell, as well as a neurotic, impressionistic chalkboard piece by Newark-born Willie Cole that soars over the lobby, infuse the exhibition with a racial consciousness, suggesting the ways that systemic racism intensified and continues to amplify the epidemic for certain populations. A suite of wonderful self-portraits by the young Kia Labeija, the only female HIV-positive artist of color featured in the show, brings us into the present moment.

Installation view of Art AIDS America. Center: Tony Feher. Green Window, 2001. Plastic bottles with plastic caps, chain, wire, water, rope, dimensions variable. © Marisol Díaz, 2016.

Inside the white cubes of MoMA, the raw, unfiltered grit of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is all the more audacious. Described by the museum as a “downtown opera,” the slideshow with a soundtrack gained a cult status in 1980s New York, thanks to Goldin’s frequent improvisational presentations of the work at theaters and bars around the city. The looping photographs document Goldin’s circle of friends and lovers in their shared pursuit of intimacy, showing them having sex, dancing in clubs, recovering from domestic abuse, shooting up drugs, and dying from AIDS. The images are joyous and tragic, uncomfortable for how confrontational they are and compelling for the same reason.

This showcase of Goldin’s subjective and urgently confessional work is a timely rebuttal to the major Robert Mapplethorpe retrospectives mounted earlier this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Where Mapplethorpe’s photographs are perfectly composed and focused, Goldin’s are crooked, cropped, and blurry. Where Mapplethorpe’s subjects, whether flowers or nude black men, seem like nothing more than aesthetic objects, the emotional and physical intimacy of Goldin with her subjects is almost overwhelming. It makes for a fascinating contrast to think that both bodies of work emerged from the same milieu and the same time. We need not rank the merits of either artist, but with Goldin’s pitch-perfect soundtrack and original 35 mm slide format, the revelations of Ballad seem as fresh today as they must have thirty years ago. The work transports you to a community of people whose lives, even as they were ravaged by drugs and AIDS, were rich with love and desire.

Nan Goldin. Trixie on the Cot, New York City. 1979. Silver dye bleach print, printed 2008, 15 1/2 x 23 1/8″ (39.4 x 58.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Marian and James H. Cohen in memory of their son Michael Harrison Cohen. © Nan Goldin, 2016.

Although the exhibitions address the AIDS crisis from markedly different points of view—the Bronx Museum’s broad, direct, and relatively inclusive, MoMA’s intimate, oblique, and subjective—each makes a pressing case for art’s relevance during times where confidence in politics, government, and the goodness of humanity are in short supply. Through their work, these artists created space to expose and make sense of the ravages of AIDS, apart from a world that didn’t acknowledge the problem for years. Their art allowed for the coexistence, however uneasy, of hope, criticality, ambivalence, and deeply felt emotion. It held the world accountable at the moment and created a record for posterity. Although no exhibition can fully account for the destruction AIDS wrought on artistic communities and the world at large, these two shows succeed as conversation starters.

Nan Goldin. Philippe H. and Suzanne Kissing at Euthanasia, New York City. 1981. Silver dye bleach print, printed 2008, 15 1/2 x 23 1/8″ (39.4 x 58.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © Nan Goldin, 2016.

Art AIDS America is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through October 23, 2016.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is on view at MoMA through February 12, 2017.

Tanya Wischerath. Feminist Christmas Miracle. Courtesy of the artist.

I recently submitted a painting of my partner, Kelly, to the BP Portrait Award competition. Accompanying it was this statement:

I painted Kelly in my apartment. The painting was inspired by the way in which, both consciously and subconsciously, all mannerisms and personal atheistic decisions are gendered and expected to adhere to a standard of normalcy. In the duration of my relationship with Kelly I’ve watched the ways in which her dress and posture incite aggressive and confrontational incidents with absolute strangers. Kelly’s confidence and lack of uncertainty in her gender presentation are a provocation to those around her, and as her lover I wanted to paint her assuredness in a world that perceives her as a threat. When a person presents themselves to the public in a way that contradicts the assumptions that have been affirmed to be “normal,” people often confuse what they are accustomed to with what is right. What does it mean for a person’s natural expression of self to be a challenge to the world around them?

When my painting was accepted into the contest, I experienced approximately twenty minutes of complete joy, about the time it took to call my boss, my mom, and my partner to inform them of the spectacular news: that I was going to London because my portrait was good, that I had made something good enough to be in a museum. But exposure is an alluring yet terrifying siren whose promises made quick work of the swell of pride that I felt after I read the contest’s acceptance email. With the prospect of tremendous impending publicity, the questions posed in the submitted painting and statement suddenly felt exploitative, and my identity as a queer female artist grew into a cartoonish, garish puppet. I felt that my painting had been accepted for its unusual subject and not for the quality of the painting itself—that its queerness seemed approachable enough to feel edgy to a heteronormative audience. I was plagued by the sense of being an imposter, long after the contest exhibition’s opening some months later.

Tanya Wischerath. 31 years, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

While issues about class and sex certainly contributed to my feeling of being an outsider, there was also a mysterious factor of escaped sincerity. I wondered: is the value of art activism conditional to the audience to which it’s presented? Making art about or depicting a marginalized community, for that community, is an act of solidarity. If the same piece is presented for the objective gaze of an audience with no ties or associations to the subject matter, its otherness becomes a commodity, and its value is articulated in a completely different currency. How does an artist address the complications of broader exposure and viewership, and is it even possible? To prevent the commodification of activism in art, must we make it inaccessible to a culturally objective viewership?

There are no clear answers to maintaining the integrity of an idea through a visual medium. About the same time I submitted my work to the BP contest, I was painting a mural in homage to trans women activists in San Francisco. The mural needed to be finished in three days, so I asked friends to help me. I used house paint donated by the furniture warehouse next to my old apartment. The project felt like a community effort, and the final image was of a church window, with all the women depicted as political saints. Though I was briefly proud of the acceptance of my work by the BP contest, I am more proud of that mural, which lives at the end of an alley, accessible to anybody, celebrating the accomplishments of a few radical activists.

Courtesy of the artist.

Vanessa Brook Williams. Untitled, 2012-2014. Thread, eye screws. Installation detail. Exhibited as part of MINT Gallery’s Leap Year Fellowship in 2014. Photo by Margaret Hiden. Courtesy of the artist. © 2016.

Suspended like an enormous spider web, Vanessa Brook Williams’ stunning installation, Untitled (2012–14), makes the invisible palpable and reveals the uncertainty of our perceptions. The work, made entirely of thread, fills an all-white room inside a private warehouse on the outskirts of Atlanta. Using simple materials like thread, paper, beads, glue, charcoal, and dye, Williams employs minimalist sculptural strategies to “reveal the intellectual space we inhabit.”¹

An emerging artist working in Atlanta, Williams is preoccupied with how best to communicate experiences such as the sweep of space between the human body and the ocean horizon, or the reach of the sun on one’s face. She identifies the horizon as “the representation of time that is our orientation to space.” Spatial and temporal experiences, evocative of the sublime, inhabit her thoughts as she conceives and meticulously plans her sculptures and installations.

Vanessa Brook Williams. Untitled, 2012-2014. Thread, eye screws. Installation detail. Exhibited as part of MINT Gallery’s Leap Year Fellowship in 2014. Photo by Margaret Hiden. Courtesy of the artist. © 2016.

Untitled begins with a 10 foot wide-by-8-foot high rectangle outlined in thread, floating close to the wall. This shape is followed by many successively smaller ones as the work progresses toward the end of the room. Suspended on an armature of crocheted thread, anchored with four eye screws, the work creates a three-dimensional form receding in space. The structure activates the fullness of the room and makes viewers aware of the space we share. It presents a perceptual conundrum, shimmering between the real and the surreal. With this barely-there installation, Williams brings us closer to a materialization of time and space.

Williams explained, “Time and physical space: we don’t have a tangible, accurate way to express them.” To give form to these intangibles, she spent two years conceptualizing, researching, assembling materials, testing, and constructing Untitled. To her small sculptures, she applies the same attention to plotting, planning, and calculating.

Vanessa Brook Williams. Surface Material No. 4, 2011. paper, gouache, glue. Sculpture. Photo by Michael Williams. Courtesy of the artist. © 2016.

Surface Material No. 4 (2012), a diminutive work of 3-by-4-by-½ inches, is a box covered with petal-like shapes made of paper dyed a pinkish color. The pattern of shapes creates the feeling of gentle movement, a slow flow across this tiny form, like water over a rock, wearing it down. It’s a snapshot of an idea, a small gesture left for the viewer to complete.

Surface Material No.1 (2011) bears a stronger relationship to the natural world: overlapping round shapes dyed various shades of blue hint at nature as a source. The work creates an illusion of dappled light and rippling water, providing a brief reverie that is broken only when one realizes the work is made of paper and paint and lacks a third dimension. In this piece, simple materials are magically transformed by light into a mesmerizing experience of space.

Williams’ ideas about representing space and time using light and simple forms are drawn from the work of the sculptors Robert Irwin, Tara Donovan, and James Turrell. She explained, “What I like about [these artists] is the stillness in their work.” Recalling a Tara Donovan installation of a mountain range of clear plastic cups at Pace Gallery in 2006, Williams observed, “The light flickering when clouds passed over the skylight above Donovan’s work was so simple, so complex.”

In this early stage of her career, Williams is finding a “language through the work” to transform the intangible experience of space into something perceivable.

1. All quotes are from a conversation at the artist’s studio in Atlanta on May 24, 2016.

Tala Madani. Love Doctor, 2015. Collection of Christina Papadopoulou. Photo courtesy of Josh White.

“I’m so sick of people shaming women for being sensitive or vulnerable. It’s so bizarre to me.”
—Winona Ryder, in a recent New York Magazine interview

Emotional vulnerability is often characterized as a female trait, one that positions women as, at best, diminutive and dependent, and at worst, neurotic and unhinged. From Freud classifying hysteria as a “women’s disorder” to Donald Drumpf classifying Megyn Kelly as “crazy,” women are advised to keep their emotions in check. In the rare instances when vulnerability is encouraged, it’s often only motivated by desires solely focused on improving our relationships with the opposite sex. Google “vulnerability” and “female” and you’re confronted with headlines ready to offer helpful inspiration: “Being vulnerable and increasing the attraction,” “The more vulnerable you look, the more men find you attractive,” “Why women should embrace their softer side.”

Thankfully, there are artists ready to offer a different form of inspiration. These women show us that being emotional isn’t synonymous with being weak and that vulnerability doesn’t need external justification, but is a strength in and of itself.

So in that spirit, here is a selection of quotes and work from women artists featured on ART21 who find power in exposing the parts we’re told to keep hidden.

“Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I’m working in.” —Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger, Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?, 2011.

“When I first started putting out these images, especially the ones including text, some people were uncomfortable: I was hitting too close to some of their experiences, feelings. The drawings were about situations that people don’t talk about. They were very private, personal thoughts, and in art, one just didn’t do that.” —Ida Applebroog

Ida Applebroog, I’m back on the pill,1986. Oil on canvas: 14 x 66 inches. Photo by Jennifer Kotter. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

“When everything is going well and I’m completely involved in it, I couldn’t tell you what I’m thinking about. If I get stuck in something, it’s frustration, anger. Or, it’s like stream of consciousness, the chatter, chatter, chatter of the mind.” —Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray. Inner Life, 2000. Photo by Ellen Page Wilson. Courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York.

“Expressing anger is necessary.” —Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer. Inflammatory Essays, detail, 1979–82. Photo: Mindy McDaniel, © 2007. Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“Your power is yours to take. You have to feel, first of all, that you’re powerful. If you don’t have this feeling, then they will walk all over you.” —Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović. The Biography Remix, directed by Michael Laub, July 10, 2005. Photo courtesy of Anne-Christine Poujoulati/AFP/Getty Images.

“Sometimes there’s bursts of laughter and I always see that as a good sign…There’s this intensity of whatever is coming up…it’s quite interesting to read when that comes up and I try to create occasions so that can come up in the work, for myself.” —Tala Madani

Tala Madani. Love Doctor, 2015. Collection of Christina Papadopoulou. Photo courtesy of Josh White.

“I wanted to work with the tradition of self-portraiture but also with the classical bust…I had the idea that I would make a replica of myself in chocolate and in soap, and I would feed myself with my self, and wash myself with my self. Both the licking and the bathing are quite gentle and loving acts, but what’s interesting is that I’m slowly erasing myself through the process. So for me it’s about that conflict, that love/hate relationship we have with our physical appearance, and the problem I have with looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Is that who I am?” —Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni. Lick and Lather, detail, 1993. Collection of Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Photo by John Bessler. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine.

“A cri du coeur is a cry of the heart, something of intense emotion, almost like praying or pleading with heaven.” —Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero. Cri du Coeur, 2004. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

“The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering … The Cells represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. When does the emotional become physical? When does the physical become emotional: It’s a circle going around and around. Pain can begin at any point and turn in any direction.” —Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois. Cell (Eyes & Mirrors),1989-1993. Copyright The Easton Foundation, Tate Modern, London.

“At this time in my life, I’m ready to accept or own a kind of romance and melancholy or melodrama that I wasn’t ready to reveal before. It was always there in my inner life as an artist, but I was too afraid to share it.” —Laurie Simmons

Laurie Simmons. The Music of Regret (Act II), 2006. Directed by Laurie Simmons; Music, Michael Rohatyn; Camera, Ed Lachman ASC; with Meryl Streep, Adam Guettel, and the Alvin Ailey II Dancers. Copyright Laurie Simmons, courtesy the artist and Salon 94, New York.

“Sometimes you sacrifice too much. You find yourself out on a limb and not knowing really quite how to get back down the tree. But it’s the space that you’re in because you have taken the risk.” —Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995.
Copyright Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

“I believe there need to be women visual in our every day landscape, working hard and doing their own thing, whether you like it or not, whether it’s acceptable or not.”
—Margaret Kilgallen

Margaret Kilgallen, Work on paper from installation at UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2000. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Deitch Projects, New York.

And to take us home, a song from Beyonce’s Lemonade—the vulnerability power album of the summer: