About the Exhibition
Opening reception Friday, January 22, 5 - 8 pm
Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg are names synonymous
with the Pop Art movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Drexler,
Webber, and Chryssa, however, are far less familiar: they
are members of the lost legacy of female Pop artists.
Like their male counterparts, these and many other women
artists enjoyed long careers creating Pop Art. And like the
work of men in that movement, their work was characterized
by themes drawn from popular culture: advertising, comic books,
and mundane objects. Yet they are not mentioned in the same
conversations with their male counterparts. Is this discrepancy
because Pop Art by women didn’t sell in galleries or
because the galleries didn’t feature their work because
it didn’t sell? Was there some sort of artistic “glass
ceiling?”
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958 –
1968, the first major exhibition of female Pop artists,
will be presented at the University of the Arts January 22
- March 15, 2010, taking aim at these questions in an attempt
to more accurately reflect the depth of women’s contributions
to Pop Art.
“Traditionally, Pop Art has been defined and dominated
by small group of Anglo-American male artists,” said
exhibition curator Sid Sachs, who has been developing the
exhibition for six years. “This show expands this narrow
definition and re-evaluates the critical reception of Pop
Art. Many of these artworks have not been shown in four decades.”
Seductive Subversion features Marisol’s “John
Wayne” sculpture, commissioned by Life magazine
for an issue on movies; Black Rosy, an eight-foot-tall
“Nana” sculpture exploring the role of women,
by French sculptor, painter, and filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle;
Rosalyn Drexler’s oil and acrylic works Chubby Checker
,” the basis of which was the poster for the movie Twist
around the Clock, and Home Movies, which is
broken in to frames from old gangster movies; the Times Square-inspired
Ampersand, a multi-layered stylized and illuminated
neon ampersand in a Plexiglas cube by Chryssa, one of the
first artists to utilize neon in her work; and 17-foot-long
triptych by Idelle Weber.
Paintings and sculptures by Pauline Boty, Vija Celmins, Dorothy
Grebenak, Kay Kurt, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Lozano, Mara McAfee,
Barbro Ostlihn, Martha Rosler, Marjorie Strider, and Alina
Szapocznikow are also featured in the show.
The University has secured loans of artwork from the National
Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington,
DC) and Neuberger Museum (Purchase, NY) and major private
collectors.
The University’s director of exhibitions, Sachs has
been researching Pop Art, Fluxus, and Minimalism for years
and a great number of his exhibitions have reflected this,
including Pop Abstractions at the Pennsylvania Academy
for the Fine Arts in 1998 and exhibitions of work by Drexler
and Robert Crumb at the University’s Rosenwald-Wolf
Gallery. But it was a 2002 Yvonne Rainer retrospective at
the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery that sparked his interest in the
lack of acknowledged women Pop artists.
“After the Rainer show, I wanted to know what happened
to the rest of this generation of women artists,” Sachs
said. “There was an entire missing entire generation
of women artists. This exhibition came out of pure curiosity
of what really happened. This is the first exhibition in the
world to examine this.”
Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958 - 1968,
was organized by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University
of the Arts. This project has been funded by the Pew Center
for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions
Initiative, with additional support from the Marketing Innovation
Program. A documentary film by Glenn Holsten is being funded
by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia
Exhibitions Initiative, with additional support from the Marketing
Innovation Program. Additional funding for the film is generously
provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
and the Quaker Chemical Foundation. The exhibition is free
and open to the public.
The show’s main staging will be at the Rosenwald-Wolf
Gallery (333 S. Broad St., Philadelphia), with the Hamilton
Hall Galleries (320 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia) and Borowsky
Gallery (401 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia) hosting the balance
of the art work.
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