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Showing posts from November, 2015

Gizonak

San Francisco

Homage to Man Ray

In 2013, the Basque director Oskar Alegria introduced his film " The Search for Emak Bakia" at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival. An exceptional experimental film, it weaves documentary, storytelling, and history while revealing aspects of Man Ray's time in the Basque Country that are difficult to appreciate otherwise. Emak Bakia means "leave me in peace" in Basque and it was also the name of the house that Man Ray lived in. In this movie there are scenes of women sleeping whose eyes are captured just at the moment of awakening. These reminded me of some of my favorite Man Ray photos, such as the one of Kiki de Montparnasse.  http://emakbakiafilms.com/fotos/?pid=1 Kiki and the African Mask, by Man Ray 1926

Why Are There No Women Artists in the Congo?

The “Beauté Congo” exhibit at the Fondation Cartier in Paris was so successful that it was extended until 2016.   Famous men such as Congolese politicians, Barak Obama and Muhammed Ali were the subjects of many works. I rarely saw the image of a woman- even then, they were provocatively dressed or a showcasing a car or pregnant with a male writer/artist.   Most wall labels indicated the artists were men. This is not unusual, in any part of the world.   According to the Guerrilla Girls, in 2012 less than 4% of artists in the modern art section of the Metropolitan Museum of New York were women. Ken Johnson wrote about this same issue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  51 Contemporary Artists, but Just Three Women In 2016, in a major art capital like Paris, at an exhibit representing an entire country and spanning a century, I had hoped for more.  I asked someone working at the museum if there were any women artists in the exhibit. One assistant said: “Ther...