[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Montclair Art Museum has a really big show, as in the art is huge. One piece is 40 feet long, and that's the point. It's called Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale. We know women are underrepresented in the major art institutions. Here's a stat to consider. According to a report that studied approximately 350,000 works acquired and 6,000 exhibitions at 31 museums across the US from the years 2008 to 2020, "Works by female-identifying artists made up just 11% of acquisitions and 14.9% of solo and group exhibitions during that period."

In this show at the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey, women make up 100% of the artist show. Almost half the pieces are from the Montclair Art Museum's collection and the rest are on loan. The original version of the show was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, the centennial of the 19th Amendment. Featured in the show are some of the most well-known artists from the museum's collection: Barbara Kruger, Carrie Mae Weems, Alice Neel, Betty Parsons, and Kara Walker's Virginia's Lynch Mob, which is on view for the first time in five years. Joining us to discuss the show, which is up until January 7th, is chief curator of the Montclair Art Museum, Gail Stavitsky. Gail, welcome back.

Gail Stavitsky: Thank you so much for having me back.

Alison Stewart: Taking Space has several meetings, first is the actual size, how much space. How many pieces are in the show, and how many square feet approximately is the show?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, there are 23 works in the show, 10 from the original show at the Pennsylvania Academy in 2021, 13 from Montclair, and it is around 5,000 square feet.

Alison Stewart: Some of the pieces are huge. There's a sculpture that's 14 feet long and 10 feet high of punched aluminum and stainless steel from Alyson Shotz, for example. How does scale, specifically large scale, impact the viewers' experience in the show?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, I think the monumentality of the work really draws people in different ways. You're mentioning Alyson Shotz's Plane Weave sculpture, which was a special commission for Pennsylvania Academy, and that's right in the central space within our largest gallery. That really physically occupies a lot of three-dimensional space. Whereas the Kara Walker: Virginia's Lynch Mob, from 1998 that you were mentioning at 40 feet, is along the longest north wall in one of our galleries. There are different ways of staging with space.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about that Kara Walker piece, and that is from the Montclair Art Museum's collection, the cut-paper silhouettes. It's entitled Virginia's Lynch Mob, and at first, it might look like a parade, because it looks like marching band at the front of bass drum, and then you realize from the cutouts, it's the lynch mob, and they're chasing children. What have you observed watching people look at that piece?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, it's very interesting because Kara Walker herself talked about using beautiful form, which these in very elegant black cut-paper silhouettes are indeed aesthetically pleasing, and somehow using that beautiful form to draw people into recognizing the ugly history of lynching and racism. I think what happens is people at first they may think it's more innocent than it is when they start really looking at the details up close, like the Ku Klux Klan mask, for example.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale. It is now at the Montclair Art Museum. My guest is Gail Stavitsky, the chief curator. We talked about physical space, but there's also the figurative meaning of taking space. It's funny, so I even found myself once typing taking up space, which is very different. What comes to your mind when you think about women artists taking space? What does this mean in the context of the art world?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, a lot of it is trying to claim space and make people pay attention to something that has been perhaps not as visible as it deserves to be. One of the things I've been thinking about is we had a wonderful program here last night, and the artist Clarity Haynes talked about her work, which is very much related to notions of body positivity and upending what conventional notions of beauty are. She talked about her work in the show, which is a torso portrait of a body positivity activist named Janie. This is someone who was an artist and activist who talked about trying to claim space for, again, bodies that may even perhaps in more conventional terms certainly not be deemed beautiful, maybe in conventional male erotic gaze terms.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's a nude of a larger-bodied woman.

Gail Stavitsky: Right, exactly. I think these ideas related to identity and claiming space, even someone like Alice Neel, for example, there's a portrait of the artist Isabel Bishop who was a close friend of hers. Her work, that portrait of Isabel Bishop, along with Carrie Mae Weems's work framed by modernism, which features Carrie Mae Weems as a nude in the corner of Robert Colescott's studio, and therefore interrogating the whole history of women as nudes in art, and who is determining their importance. In the past, of course, it was always male artists, but here she's making commentary on the role of even the exotic views of nudes and the art of Picasso and Gauguin, for example.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's so interesting, because those two pieces are in the same proximity to one another. They couldn't be more different. The image of the Alice Neel portrait, she's done with this woman, Isabel Bishop, she's in very bright, vibrant blue, older woman, the white background. What is all that white space do to this image? It almost looks like it's somewhat raw or unfinished.

Gail Stavitsky: Yes, well, I think, and again, there's of course, a whole tradition of using that raw space, Cézanne, for example, to really, I think create almost a sense of luminosity, that this is older woman. Again, often we disregard the contributions of senior citizens and older women, but I think it's makes her into this very vibrant and lively figure.

Alison Stewart: The Met had a huge blockbuster show of Alice Neel's work in 2021. Why do you think there's been a renewed interest in Neel?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, I think that her work has both a timeless quality and yet also it was very specific to her views of New York City and the vast variety of people. I think the fact that she engaged with such, I would say, multicultural diversity in terms of the people whom she treated and painted in a very respectful and sympathetic manner.

Alison Stewart: There's another piece that people may recognize. It's a Barbara Kruger piece. This is also from the Montclair Art Museum's collection. It is 72 by 62 inches. It's a woman's face, and we see the words, "Seeing Through You Over It." It's sort of tinted, a green color. When you think about that phrase, what questions does that provoke, especially over the image of this woman?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, I think again, because it shows how Barbara Kruger uses the language of advertising and graphic design, probably to provoke people into thinking, "Well, how often do we just see through, look past, and maybe not fully engage with the actual individual woman or person in front of us?" I think it's playing with those ideas of stereotypes and how we perceive people.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale. It's currently at the Montclair Art Museum. I'm speaking with chief curator, Gail Stavitsky. Gail, when you first saw this show in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, what did you think?

Gail Stavitsky: Oh, it was such an incredible show. I do have to give the co-curators Brittany Webb and Jodi Throckmorton credit because what they did is they created a very large-scale show. They have bigger galleries than we do at the Montclair Art Museum. I was immediately engage with Brittany about how could we reimagine this show. At first, I thought it would be literally a smaller version of the show there, but then when they became open to the idea of how we might give it another identity specific to Montclair, and specifically with the opportunity to show Kara Walker's Virginia’s Lynch Mob, which we don't get to show very often because of its large size. When they became open to that, it became really a wonderful collaboration and conversation between the two museums.

Alison Stewart: Were there certain pieces from the original show that you knew you wanted in the show?

Gail Stavitsky: Yes. I knew right away, for example, that I wanted Clarity Haynes' work that I just talked about. Definitely, Alyson Shotz's large-scale plane wave sculpture, the wonderful Mickalene Thomas's work fits in the show, and of course, Elizabeth Murray, and Eiko Fan's large wooden sculpture Life is a Cycle. There were certain anchor pieces like that I knew and I wanted in. It was just so generous of PAFA to share those with us.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the Mickalene Thomas. She was recently a guest on our show. She has a New Jersey connection. She was born in Camden. It's an 8 by 10-foot portrait of a Black woman seated. It's a collage in acrylic, rhinestones, enamel on wood panels. The woman the way she sits, she's looking at the camera with all different prints and textures around her, but there's a formal portraiture of her image. What interests you about this piece, and her work, and the pose of the model?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, it's so interesting because we have a work by Mickalene Thomas in the museum's collection, and we had shown that particular work in a show called Inspired by Matisse. That's part of what attracted me to this work because I think she engages this history of art masters like Matisse and Picasso, for example. Of course, completely updates them with, actually, what Mickalene Thomas likes to call the bling and glitter of contemporary culture.

The pose and the figure very much reminds me of Matisse's work. In fact, we included an image on the label to make that historic connection, but again, here's an artist who really has monumentalized friends and women whom she admires and knows. I think by making them so large scale again, you're really maybe paying attention to people perhaps you might not pay attention to or just glance at.

Alison Stewart: When we talked to Mickalene a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the bling [laughs], and she described it this way her use of rhinestones and other textured media and/or pieces where a woman's body is featured. This is Mickalene Thomas.

Mickalene Thomas: Yes, I definitely want it to play with the dimensionality of it and thinking of how the collage elements are layered, almost like a relief-like, and sort of repositioning the body and juxtaposing the different shapes on one another, because I really wanted them to feel like they're coming off the wall, and that the engagement and create some monumentality to them.

Alison Stewart: There you go, it's Mickalene Thomas. We're talking to Gail Stavitsky, the chief curator of the Montclair Art Museum. The name of the show is Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale. What are the politics of scale?

Gail Stavitsky: Well, the politics of scale in terms of if large scale, large size, repetition, which is an element in a lot of these works, it really is about how those can be interpreted as political gestures, ways of really getting people to notice, pay attention, and think about. I think how all these women artists are trying. I think successfully commanding our attention in a multiplicity of ways.

Alison Stewart: Is there one piece you'd like people to spend an extra 10 seconds in front of?

Gail Stavitsky: Oh, wow, that's a great question. There are so many great works. In terms of details, things to notice, I guess I have to say maybe the Jennifer Bartlett subdivision painting, there are a lot of details. I think about that because we're in Montclair, we're in a suburb, and it's addressing some of the conventional ideas of the ticky-tacky houses, subdivisions, and everything looking the same. That's the kind of a stereotype about suburbia, which really is not true of Montclair, I might add, with multiplicity of offerings, and it's very engaging and multiculturally diverse community.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale. Thanks, Gail.

Gail Stavitsky: Oh, thank you so much.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.