Los Angeles, California.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is proud to persent “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States”, on view at the museum from January 29th through May 6th. Co-organized by LACMA and the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Mexico City, “In Wonderland” is the first large-scale international survey of women surrealist artists in North America. Past surveys of surrealism have either largely excluded female artists or minimized their contributions. This landmark exhibition highlights the significant role of women surrealists who were active in these two countries, and the effects of geography and gender on the movement.
Spanning more than four decades, “In Wonderland” features approximately 175 works by forty-seven extraordinary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Louise Bourgeois, and more. Surrealism called for the destruction of bourgeois culture and traditional standards and advocated intellectual and political liberty. When promoted in North America, these ideals flourished especially among the supposedly “second sex.”In standard studies on surrealism, female artists have been cast primarily as mistresses, wives, or muses—the inspiration for the male fetishized subject matter. This exhibition however explores the legacy of the movement in the United States and Mexico through its influence on several generations of women artists. Unlike their male counterparts, these artists delved into the unconscious as a means of self-exploration that enhanced an often haunting self-knowledge in their quest to exorcise personal demons. For women surrealists—whether natives by birth, émigrés, or temporary visitors—North America offered the opportunity for reinvention and individual expression, a place where they could attain their full potential and independence. “In Wonderland” illuminates the work of a diverse group of artists—both well-recognized and lesser known—who were active during a period that witnessed both the internationalizing of surrealism and the professionalizing of women in the visual arts in urban centers such as Mexico City, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
The survey presents an extensive range of work, including paintings, works on paper, sculpture, photographs, and film. The works date primarily from about 1930 (the period when Lee Miller and Rosa Rolanda first experimented with surrealist photograph techniques) to 1968 (the year that Yayoi Kusama, working in New York City, presented one of her landmark happenings, “Alice in Wonderland,” in Central Park). A selection of later works is also included to illustrate surrealism’s historical overlap and influence on the feminist movement. “In Wonderland” is organized according to nine major themes that demonstrate recurrent issues in the women’s lives and art: Identity; The Body and Fetishes; The Creative Woman; Romance and Domesticity; Games and Technical Innovations; North America: The Land, Native People, and Myths; Politics, Depression and the War; Abstraction; and Feminism. Most prominent in the show are portraits and self-referential images, ranging from bluntly honest to disturbing, that reveal unresolved issues haunting the artists. Equally telling are the many double, couple, and group portraits, and narrative fables that exemplify the women’s friendships, loves, and families, and convey the difficulties and dramas often involved in such relationships. For instance, the portrayal of love and marriage ranges from storybook romances by Sylvia Fein and Remedios Varo; cynical, somewhat eerie courtship scenes by Leonora Carrington and Gertrude Abercrombie; and an obsessive fascination for a lover (i.e., Diego Rivera) by Frida Kahlo. The struggle of motherhood and domesticity versus an artistic career is often cast in terms of houses, dolls or other toys in the works of Carrington, Ruth Bernhard, Louise Bourgeois, Gerri Gutmann, and Kati Horna.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection extending from ancient times to the present. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract nearly a million visitors annually. Among the museum’s special strengths are its holdings of Asian art, housed in part in the Bruce Goff-designed Pavilion for Japanese Art; Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemente Orozco; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world. LACMA has its roots in the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, established in 1910 in Exposition Park. In 1961, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a separate, art-focused institution.
In 1965, the fledgling institution opened to the public in its new Wilshire Boulevard location, with the permanent collection in the Ahmanson Building, special exhibitions in the Hammer Building, and the 600-seat Bing Theater for public programs. Over several decades, the campus and the collection have grown considerably. The Anderson Building (renamed the Art of the Americas building in 2007) opened in 1986 to house modern and contemporary art. In 1988, Bruce Goff’s innovative Pavilion for Japanese Art opened at the east end of campus. In 1994, the museum acquired the May Company department store building at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, now known as LACMA West. Most recently, the Transformation project revitalized the western half of the campus with a collection of buildings designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. These include the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a three-story 60,000 square foot space for the exhibition of postwar art that opened in 2008. In fall of 2010, the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion opened to the public, providing the largest purpose-built, naturally lit, open-plan museum space in the world, with a rotating selection of major exhibitions. Ray’s restaurant and Stark Bar opened in 2011, invigorating the central BP Pavilion near Chris Burden’s iconic Urban Light. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.lacma.org