The Memorial Art Gallery is pleased to announce the presentation of a Season of Women in celebration and commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing and protecting women’s right to vote. Throughout the Season, which includes Women’s History Month, MAG will prominently feature the work of female artists recently acquired for the permanent collection in four exhibition spaces. The passage of the 19th Amendment marks the longest social movement in American history. This movement did not initially extend voting rights to all women until nearly half a century later with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited voting discrimination and allowed all to exercise their right to vote.
The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter’s Stained-Glass Art
February 16 – May 24
Featured in MAG’s Docent Gallery, The Path to Paradise: Judith Schaechter’s Stained-Glass Art is the first survey and major scholarly assessment of this groundbreaking artist’s 37-year career.
From her start in the 1980s, Judith Schaechter (b. 1961) has stretched the medium of stained glass into an incisive art form for the 21st century, boldly paving her path in the diverse arena of contemporary art. With deep respect for history, a provocative rebelliousness, and a feminist sensibility, Schaechter has aptly been called a “post-punk stained-glass sorceress.” Her meticulous and awe-inspiring stained-glass panels are intentional seductions, alternative visions of beauty, and radical statements of female experience.
Drawing from both private and institutional collections, MAG will present over 40 of Judith Schaechter’s stained-glass panels along with a selection of related drawings, sketchbooks, and process materials. The exhibition and its companion publication will explore the range of critical registers Schaechter’s work spans, illuminating and contextualizing the artist’s unique contributions to the contemporary canon. The full-color, 160+ page catalogue is published by RIT Press in association with the Memorial Art Gallery.
Lead support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, with additional funding from the Gallery Council of the Memorial Art Gallery, the Rubens Family Foundation, Pamela Miller Ness and Paul Marc Ness, Corning Incorporated Foundation, the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass, James C. and Geraldine Biddle Moore, Charlotte and Raul Herrera, Partners + Napier, and Elizabeth L. Stauderman. The exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional gifts are provided by Marion Swett Robinson, Jim and Marguerite Quinn, the Holmes Family Foundation, and an anonymous donor. The exhibition is also made possible by the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Fund, the Grant Holcomb Endowment, the Margaret Davis Friedlich and Alan and Sylvia Davis Memorial Fund, the Irving and Essie Germanow Fund, the Elizabeth and Eric Rennert Family Fund, the Kayser Fund, and the Robert A. and Maureen S. Dobies Endowment Fund.
Ja’Tovia Gary: Giverny I (NÉGRESSE IMPÉRIALE)
December 20, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Featured in MAG’s Media Arts Watch Gallery is the single-channel, six-minute video installation Giverny I (NÉGRESSE IMPÉRIALE) by Ja’Tovia Gary. Gary is an American artist and filmmaker whose work interrogates the ways in which visual and media cultures shape our perceptions around race, gender, and specifically Blackness. Giverny I (NÉGRESSE IMPÉRIALE) re-contextualizes archival images by combining documentary elements and direct animation, connecting the artist’s everyday experience as a Black woman with art history. By contrasting the luxury of Claude Monet’s historic gardens with the vulnerability of her own body, Gary shows how connections between colonialism, state violence, and media shape visual perception: how we see, experience, and understand the visual world.
Chitra Ganesh: Sultana’s Dream
February 28 – June 14
Featured in MAG’s Lockhart Gallery, the Indian-American artist Chitra Ganesh’s Sultana’s Dream was inspired by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s early-20th-century feminist utopian fantasy of the same title. The prints—all black linocuts on tan paper—both illustrate elements of the text and use its imagery and themes to explore urgent topics of the political present.
The portfolio of 27 prints, in the artist’s words, “connects with problems shaping 21st-century life: apocalyptic environmental disaster, the disturbing persistence of gender-based inequality, the power of the wealthy few against the economic struggles of the majority, and ongoing geopolitical conflicts that cause widespread death and suffering.” Like much of Ganesh’s work, Sultana’s Dream engages these subjects through the lens of history, literature, and mythology not only to examine the relationship between imagined and lived worlds but also to consider how utopian fantasies might be realized.
Suffrage Centennial Spotlight on 19th-Century Women Artists
Featured in the Cameros Gallery is a small tribute to 19th-Century women artists and the Suffrage movement. Included in the tribute is Lily Martin Spencer’s Peeling Onions, along with other still lifes by women artists, and a landscape by Grandma Moses. The gallery also features an installation of impressive embroidery from the permanent collection, and a contemporary glass sculpture by Rochester-based artist Elizabeth Lyons.
Also on view are Suffrage and anti-Suffrage postcards that illustrate the struggle of women who fought for voting rights.
Programming
Women-centric programming will also take place throughout Season of Women and will include a lecture and book signing with Judith Schaechter on Sunday, February 16th, a screening of the movie Suffragette on February 28th during MAG’s $5 Friday; a conversation with artist Ja’Tovia Gary and Hyperallergic’s Dessane Lopez Casssell on March 15th, and the Badass Babes: Women of MAG DeTOUR℠on March 19th.