Visibilities: Intrepid Women Of Artpace

Group Exhibition

Exhibition: Jan 9 – Dec 27, 2020


For Artpace’s 25th anniversary year, Artpace has committed to focusing all non-residency exhibition programming to woman artists in 2020. With this in mind we will begin our 25th year with the exhibition Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace.

A fair number of exhibitions in recent years have focused on the work of female artists, but none has focused on those coming out of Artpace’s International Artist-in-Residency program. With an eye to equity, the exhibition seeks to highlight and amplify global voices of a bold and powerful female-identifying artistic community. As Linda Pace once said, “As an artist, I realized artists must work in environments in which they can be understood and respected. Later, as a patron, I tried to put this lesson into practice, creating a climate that encouraged individual experimentation in the way I had experienced it in that course.”

The project focuses keenly on presenting a diverse grouping of work addressing issues of identity, femininity, gender, feminism, and womanhood (in whatever form that may take) in an age when Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” still resonates.

Curated by Erin K. Murphy, Artpace Director of Residencies and Exhibitions, Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace includes a wide array of mediums brought together in an exhibition with an astounding voice. Among the featured artists are the late Laura Aguilar, Jenelle Esparza, Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Janet Flohr, Regina José Galindo, Mona Hatoum, Koo Jeong A, Autumn Knight, Margaret Meehan, Katrina Moorhead, Wangechi Mutu, Lorraine O’Grady, Artpace founder Linda Pace, Joyce J. Scott, Wu Tsang, Martha Wilson, and Kathy Vargas.

“Two of the works in the exhibition are by women with strong ties to Artpace: one work by Linda Pace (founder of the organization) and another by Janet Flohr (of Hare & Hound Press, with whom many resident artists have worked since 1995),“ remarked Erin K. Murphy, “The other artists in the exhibition all not only participated in our residency program, but their works address issues of identity, femaleness, gender, or feminism, which have been even more powerful statements in the past few years and is extremely relevant in the coming election year. Artpace celebrates its 25th birthday, but also in 2020 the U.S. will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote.”

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Artists

Laura Aguilar

Rosemead, California, USA

Born in 1959 in San Gabriel, CA, Aguilar lives and works in Rosemead, CA, outside of Los Angeles. She has studied photography at East Los Angeles Community College and has participated in the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. She has received grants from Art Matters Inc., LACE, the California Arts Council and Lightworks. She has had a number of solo exhibitions at venues including the Los Angeles Photography Center, CA; LACE, Los Angeles, CA; Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, CA; Zone Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, England; and the Fundacio la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain. Her work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Sunshine et Noir: Art in L.A. at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” In Feminist Art History at the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; In a Different Light at the University of California, Berkeley; and Bad Girls at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She also participated in the Aperto Section of the 1993 Venice Biennale.
Photographer Laura Aguilar has investigated portraiture since she emerged in the late 1980s. Her stark black-and-white photographs document subjects whose images and stories are under-represented in mainstream culture—people of color, gays and lesbians and large people. Her portraits are known for their collaborative sensibility—the subjects are encouraged to investigate and negotiate with the artist from both sides of the lens. In the late 1990s, Aguilar turned the camera on herself, making dramatic nude self-portraits in which her body is contrasted with the rough terrain of the desert landscape and in which the body and landscape become one. The works continue her efforts to challenge societal assumptions about beauty, offering an alternative to the airbrushed, artificial depictions of women generatSpring 2020 Hudson Showroom Exhibitor
Spring 2020 Main Space Exhibitored by advertising and media.

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Jenelle Esparza

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Jenelle Esparza is originally from Corpus Christi, Texas. Primarily a photographer, Esparza also works in multi-media installation and abstract photo-based work. She received her BFA in photography from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2010. She was recently awarded the 2015 NALAC (Nat’l Association of Latino Arts and Culture) Artist Grant for her project El Color de la Obra, exhibited at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. She has exhibited nationally and is currently Education Coordinator at the McNay Art Museum.
Photo Credit: Rigoberto Luna
Jenelle’s Website

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Jennifer Ling Datchuk

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Jennifer Ling Datchuk is a ceramic sculptor and artist born in Warren, Ohio and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother came to this country in the early 1970s from China; her father born and raised in Ohio to Russian and Irish immigrant parents. Beyond initial appearances, the layers of her parents’ past and present histories are extremely overwhelming and complicated – a history of conflict she has inherited and a perpetual source for her work. She captures this conflict by exploring the emotive power of domestic objects and rituals that fix, organize, soothe and beautify our lives. Trained in ceramics, the artist works with porcelain and other materials often associated with traditional women’s work, such as textiles and hair, to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity and personal history.
She holds an MFA in Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BFA in Crafts from Kent State University. She has received grants from the Artist Foundation of San Antonio, travel grant from Artpace, and the Linda Lighton International Artist Exchange Program to research porcelain clay as a conceptual material. She was awarded a residency through the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum to conduct her studio practice at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany and has participated in residencies at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Vermont Studio Center, and the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands. In 2017, she received the Emerging Voices award from the American Craft Council. Currently residing in San Antonio, Texas, where she is a Professor of Art at the Southwest School of Art. On Inauguration Day 2017, she opened the Porcelain Power Factory, a 4-year body of work that reclaims the past lives of objects to raise the social awareness of causes that we need to fight for.
Photo credit: Mark Menjivar

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Regina José Galindo

Cuidad de Guatemala, Guatemala

Regina José Galindo’s performances and poetry address social injustice, gender discrimination, and racism, focusing mainly on the governmental atrocities of the Guatemalan dictatorship. Through the process of physical interrogation, the artist effaces individuality, thus representing a collective body—one that personifies social turmoil.
Regina José Galindo was born in Guatemala in 1974. She currently lives and works in Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala. She has exhibited and performed at numerous locations including Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, Netherlands (2008); prometeogallery, Milan, Italy (2007, 05); Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporánea, Trento, Italy (2006); and Ciudad de Guatemala (2003). Her group exhibitions include Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2008); Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Spain (2007); Venice-Istanbul, Istanbul Modern, Turkey (2006); Into Me / Out of Me, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, traveled to Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2006-07); and Venice Biennale, Italy (2001, 05).

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Mona Hatoum

London, England

Born in 1952 in Beirut, Lebanon, Hatoum lives and works in London, England. She studied at the Beirut University College, the Byam Shaw School of Art and The Slade School of Art in London. Since the early 1980s, Hatoum has exhibited extensively, including solo exhibitions and performances at Franklin Furnace, New York; Western Front Art Centre, Vancouver, Canada; The Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, England; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA; Capp Street Project, San Francisco, CA; De Appel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; White Cube, London, England; and Alexander & Bonin, New York, where she is represented. In 1997 a major solo exhibition was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and The New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York. She has been included in a number of major international exhibitions: Sense and Sensibility, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Cocido y Crudo, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the 1994 Havana Biennale, Cuba; the 1995 Venice Biennale, Italy; ARS 95, Helsinki, Finland; as well as the Turner Prize exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, England.
Mona Hatoum’s work is both deeply personal and quietly political, investigating her individual and cultural relationships with contemporary social injustices. Grounded in feminism and with a sensitive global approach, she has employed minimalist tools to present formal and social concerns, examining issues of subjectivity, emotional space and the human body. Using metaphor and poetry, found material and fabricated objects, her evocative works offer viewers their own experience as they read and contemplate her enigmatic expressions. Her work has taken many forms, ranging from performance and video to sculpture and installation.

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Koo Jeong A

Seoul, South Korea

A train ride away from Koo Jeong-a’s family home in Seoul, Korea, an eight-hundred-year-old frog lives in the side of a mountain. Over a number of years Koo traveled four times to its mythic home, but the golden creature would not appear. Despite not having lain eyes on it, she knew it was there: Koo defended its existence to friends who came but did not see and protected its ancient status from scientific naysayers. Her constant belief was finally rewarded: on a fifth trip the wrinkled being emerged.
Koo’s ephemeral installations suggest rewards for the constant believers—for those with unwavering confidence in the existence of alternate realities. She breathes life into the usually inert, creating miniature worlds through ordered scatterings of such everyday material as aspirin, sugar cubes, cigarettes, and light.
In A Reality Upgrade & End Alone (2003), Koo’s piece for the 50th Venice Biennale, she carved out a space for subtlety in the midst of insistent politics. The artist brought the upper regions of two walls alive by embedding prismatic buttons into their cracks and crevices. These constellations sparkled with hope and made visible the state of in-betweenness: the realms that could be—and for Koo are—layered all around us.

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Autumn Knight

Houston, Texas, USA

Autumn Knight is a Houston-based interdisciplinary artist. Knight’s performance and installation work has been included in group exhibitions at various institutions including Diverseworks, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AK, and Artpace San Antonio. She has upcoming collaborative performances at Skowhegan Space (NY) and the New Museum, New York. Knight recently completed residencies with In-Situ (UK), YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan) and Artpace (San Antonio, TX.) Autumn received her B.A. from Dillard University and M.A. from New York University.

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Margaret Meehan

Dallas, Texas, USA

In her expansive multimedia installations, drawings, and photographs, Dallas artist Margaret Meehan juxtaposes the grotesque with the delicate, evoking questions of race, gender, and cultural memory. Some of her previous awards and residencies include The Lighthouse Works Fellowship, Fishers Island, NY (2013), Bemis Center, Omaha, NE (2009), the Dozier Travel Grant, Dallas Museum of Art, TX (2008). She has shown at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Dallas Museum of Art, Soil Gallery in Seattle, David Shelton Gallery in Houston, and Conduit Gallery in Dallas, among others.

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Katrina Moorhead

Houston, Texas, USA

Katrina Moorhead’s drawings, objects, and installations focus on the seemingly ordinary. Whether translating bathroom graffiti into a planted garden or paint chips into a billboard the colors of the sky, the artist often explores artificial representations of nature and approaches each project with a delicate, spare hand that casts the familiar anew.
For her contribution to the recent 51st Venice Biennial Moorhead crafted On or About December 1981 (2005), a pair of iconic gull- wing doors from the short-lived DeLorean car, produced from 1981-83 in Northern Ireland. The artist revived the natural origins of this once-touted symbol of industrial utopianism by draining the car parts of their metallic and mechanical past. Sculpted in bass and plywood, the doors were removed from their adjacent body and lay isolated on the gallery floor like now-broken wings. This minimal work, like Moorhead’s others, is both poetic homage to intricate engineering and a melancholic exploration of the synthetic ways humans experience the natural world.
Born in Coleraine, Northern Ireland in 1971, Katrina Moorhead currently resides in Houston, TX. She received an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland, in 1996. Solo shows include Inman Gallery (2006) and Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX (2002, 1998). She has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2005); the 51st Venice Biennial, Italy (2005); and The Vardy Gallery, University of Sunderland, England (2004).

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Wangechi Mutu

Brooklyn, New York, USA

Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu combines fashion magazine imagery and ink to create elegantly grotesque collages of the female body. Surreal and distinctive, the works at once reference ethnology, war, and portrayals of the female figure in mass media. Realized both on Mylar paper and directly on the wall, Mutu’s seductive hybrids—swan necks, talons for feet, distended bellies, mechanical appendages—use beauty to smuggle in the politics of violence and mutilation.
In the 1990s Mutu explored stereotypes of femininity and her African heritage through performative works. Since then she has primarily made drawings. That’s my death mask you’re wearing (2004) is emblematic of the collages—kaleidoscopic pools of reds and browns form a lithe female framed by tufts of savannah grass. The vamping body and magazine cutout eyes and lips imply glamour, yet swirls of ink create the impression of skin grafts. A missing arm, protruding prostheses, raw face, and heavy diamond earring support a darker narrative about the bloody effects of conflicts in Africa waged over scarce resources controlled by the West. Ever-sensuous, Mutu’s drawings are powerful critiques of contemporary media and cultural genocide.
Wangechi Mutu received her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT in 2000. Solo shows include Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, CA and Jamaica Center for the Arts and Learning, Queens, NY, both in 2003. Group exhibitions in 2004 include Fight or Flight, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, NY; Pin-up, Tate Modern, London, England; and Figuratively, The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY. The artist lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Lorraine O’Grady

New York, New York, USA

Lorraine O’Grady’s work as an artist, writer, and critic presents hybridized notions of beauty and identity to rediagram the politics of diaspora. Since the early 1980s, O’Grady has challenged racial and sexist ideologies in performances and photo installations that combine both opposition to philosophies of division and exclusion, and humanist studies of women throughout history.
In Miscegenated Family Album (1980-1988), the artist created a series of diptychs, juxtaposing photographs of her sister and nieces with images of Egyptian queen Nefertiti and her daughters. The obvious visual resemblance makes evident the continuity of a shared cultural heritage across thousands of generations, connecting the histories of countless peoples.
Lorraine O’Grady was born in Boston, MA, and currently lives and works in New York, NY. Selected solo projects have been presented at Galerie Fotohof, Salzburg, Austria (1999); Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY (1998); and The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (1996), among others. O’Grady’s work has also been included in Between the Lines, Daniel Reich Gallery Temporary Space at Hotel Chelsea, New York, NY (2006);Love Supreme, La Criée centre d’art contemporain, Rennes, France (2001); and Déjà Vu: Reworking the Past, Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (2000).

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Joyce J. Scott

Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Joyce Scott was born in 1948 in Baltimore, where she resides today.  She received her MFA from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende Guanajuato in Mexico. Her extensive exhibition record includes solo exhibitions at The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Art Institute, CA; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO; Gallery of Contemporary Art, Raleigh, NC; Susan Cummins Gallery, Mill Valley, CA; and numerous other venues.  Among the major group shows in which she has participated are Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art at The Bronx Museum of the Arts; Bad Girls at the New Museum in New York; World Glass Now ‘94 at Hokaido Museum of Modern Art in Sapporo, Japan; American Dreams, American Extremes at The Kruithuis Museum in Hertogen Bosch, The Netherlands; and Surface and Structure:  Beads in Contemporary American Art at Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.  A performance artist as well as an object-maker, Scott creates finely-crafted works made of beads, blown glass, and other materials.  In order to investigate universal concerns with an African-American viewpoint in powerful, unexpected ways, she draws on a provocative mixture of cultural, religious, and decorative symbols.

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Wu Tsang

Los Angeles, California, USA

Wu Tsang is an artist, performer, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles who works with the voice as a medium and representational metaphor. In 2012, Tsang was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Tsang’s first feature WILDNESS premiered at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and won the Grand Jury Prize for Outstanding Documentary at Outfest in Los Angeles. Tsang’s work has also been featured in the Whitney Biennial, Hammer Museum’s biennial, New Museum Triennial, Gwangju Biennial, The Tate Modern, Stedelijk Museum, and MOCA, Los Angeles. Her recent short YOU’RE DEAD TO ME premiered on PBS and won the 2014 Imagen Award for Best Short. Tsang was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Photo by Tosh Basco

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Martha Wilson

New York, New York, USA

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and art space director, who over the past four decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity. She has been described by New York Times critic Holland Cotter as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.” In 1976 she founded Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artist books, temporary installation, performance art, as well as online works. She is represented by P.P.O.W Gallery in New York.
Martha Wilson received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in 2013. She has received fellowships for performance art from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; Bessie and Obie awards for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression; a Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts; a Richard Massey Foundation-White Box Arts and Humanities Award; a Lifetime Achievement Award from Women’s Caucus for Art; and the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

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Kathy Vargas

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Born and raised in San Antonio in 1950, Kathy Vargas received her MFA degree from the University of Texas, San Antonio in 1984. She has had numerous one-person exhibitions at spaces including Sala Uno in Rome, Galeria Juan Martin in Mexico City, the Women’s Center at The University of Santa Barbara, and a retrospective in Erlangen, Germany. Vargas’ work was included in the seminal exhibit, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) organized by UCLA’s Wight Gallery, and Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry, organized by  the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Vargas is also the Visual Arts Director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio.

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Janet Flohr

San Antonio, Texas, USA
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Linda Pace

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Linda Pace used the symbolic potency of everyday objects in her drawings and assemblages. She frequently captured ideas from her dreams and explored the idea that utilitarian objects can convey an aesthetic power not otherwise imagined, especially when expressed through the transformative process of being rendered into works of art. Linda began her contemporary art practice later in life, and though she gravitated towards drawing, she also worked in mediums such as assemblage and sculpture. She founded the Artpace International Artist in Residency program in 1995 in order to bring creative awareness to San Antonio, and give a space to contemporary artists to create their work. She relished the ability to spend time with the artists and be able to assist in their creative process.

More information about Linda can be found at Ruby City.

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Curator

Erin Murphy

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