Audrey Chan.

This year’s Feminist Art Project day of panels organized by artists Audrey Chan and Elana Mann gauges the present and future of feminist artistic thought and practice. What are the stakes—and who are the stakeholders—of the feminist future? The day’s conversations will reflect the greater inclusivity of a contemporary feminist art that embraces a multiplicity of identities and philosophies.

Topics of discussion will include: feminist art educational models, the roles of men in feminist art, interventionist art strategies, radical queer art making, and feminism as a daily humanist practice. These panels will build upon a tradition of feminism in Los Angeles through new readings and modes of engagement with this vital movement. Speakers will share their perspectives as artists, educators, curators, art historians, filmmakers and writers who are invested in the feminist future.

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited. For more information and a full schedule of the day’s discussions, please visit: http://sharesandstakeholders.com.

Saturday, February 25, 2012
9am-5pm
Ahmanson Auditorium, MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

The Feminist Art Project is an international collaborative initiative celebrating the aesthetic, intellectual and political impact of women on the visual arts, art history and art practice, past and present. The project promotes diverse feminist art events, education and publications through its website and online calendar; and facilitates networking and regional program development throughout the world.

Nancy Buchanan, National Mortality Consciousness Day, 1982, image and text. Published in Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2, Issue 14.

Nancy Buchanan is a key figure of the performance art scene and of the feminist art movement that emerged in Southern California during the 1970s. Her works have often positioned the audience as participants in a wider conversation on the gendered and defamilarised body, the perils of commercialised spectatorship and consequences of the increasing militarisation in contemporary society. There is an ethical core to Buchanan’s artistic practice, grounded in the observation of lived history. At the same time, a disarming element of ‘serious play’ characterises many of her performances, installations and works in image and text.

Audrey Chan interviewed Nancy Buchanan at her home and studio in the Mount Washington neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Here, the artist maps her trajectory in her own words, beginning with her education in the progressive and influential art programme at University of California-Irvine, alongside a selection of artworks from the past forty years.

Buchanan’s works are currently featured in the ‘Pacific Standard Time’ exhibitions: ‘Under the Big Black Sun’ at LA MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary (through February 13th 2012), ‘Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971’ at the Laguna Art Museum (through 22nd January 2012), and ‘L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy’ at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (22 January–20 May 2012). She is co-curator with Kathy Rae Huffman of ‘Exchange and Evolution: Worldwide Video Long Beach 1974-1999’ at the Long Beach Museum of Art (through 12 February 2012). ‘Pacific Standard Time’ is the Getty Foundation’s unprecedented initiative to present Los Angeles art made during the formative post-War period of 1945-1980 in an expansive series of exhibitions across Southern California.

–Audrey Chan

Read the full interview with Nancy Buchanan in Afterall Online: http://afterall.org/online/nancy-buchanan/

Car Hood, Judy Chicago, 1964. Sprayed acrylic lacquer on Corvair car hood, 42 15/16 x 49 3/16 x 4 5/16 in. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Acquired 2007 with means from The Second Museum of our Wishes. © Judy Chicago, 1964. Photo © Donald Woodman

In 1964, while a student in UCLA’s graduate program in painting and sculpture, artist Judy Chicago enrolled in auto-body school—the only woman in a class of 250 men. They were all there to learn how to custom-paint cars with candy-colored lacquer finishes and pinstriped detail work, hallmarks of the hot-rod car culture of Southern California in the 1960s.

Chicago’s Car Hood, featured in the exhibition Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970, was her final project: an early ‘60s Chevrolet Corvair car hood sprayed with glossy acrylic lacquer. In her 1977 memoir, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist, she described the gendered symbolism of Car Hood: “the vaginal form, penetrated by a phallic arrow, was mounted on the ‘masculine’ hood of a car, a very clear symbol of my state of mind at the time.”

–Audrey Chan

Read more on the Getty Iris Blog: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/question-of-the-week-is-it-still-a-mans-world/