Tag Archives: Kate Millett

NASTY WOMEN AT GAVLAK

I don’t really look for inspiration. I just let it come to me, but I don’t stop working. Work comes from work. When I’m stuck I just keep working and make terrible looking things until something else comes out of it. That’s the creative process… You can’t think yourself out a right action. You have to act yourself into right thinking. You can’t sit there and smoke cigarettes and look at the wall waiting for inspiration. — Marilyn Minter

NASTY WOMEN—a celebratory group exhibition at Gavlak Los Angeles—”seeks to uplift communities underrepresented in contemporary art and American visual culture at large… [giving] a platform to a diverse array of perspectives and female voices throughout art history.”*

The show is dedicated to the memory of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. See link below for details.

NASTY WOMEN*

Through December 12.

Gavlak Los Angeles

1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, downtown Los Angeles.

NASTY WOMEN features work by Tiffany Alfonseca, Candida Alvarez, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Judie Bamber, Whitney Bedford, Andrea Belag, April Bey, Delia Brown, Deborah Brown, Karen Carson, Elizabeth Catlett, Gisela Colón, Patricia Cronin, Kim Dacres, Linda Daniels, Vaginal Davis, Sonia Delaunay, Florence Derive, Nicole Eisenman, Judith Eisler, Anonymous (Emilian School), Beverly Fishman, Helen Frankenthaler, Viola Frey, Francesca Gabbiani, Vania Gunarti, Trulee Hall, Jenny Holzer, Deborah Kass, Angelica Kauffman, Rachel Kaye, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Becky Kolsrud, Marcia Kure, Yayoi Kusama, Nancy Lorenz, Ann Magnuson, Kate Millett, Anne Minich, Marilyn Minter, Jesse Mockrin, Betty Parsons, Ebony G. Patterson, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Fay Ray, Katherine Read, Joan Semmel, Shinique Smith, Sylvia Snowden, Linda Stark, Sophie Tæuber-Arp, AlexisTeplin, Betty Tompkins, Patssi Valdez, Marnie Weber, Brenna Youngblood, and Lisa Yuskavage.

Nasty Women, Gavlak Los Angeles, October 31, 2020–December 31, 2020, from top: Lisa Anne AuerbachKeep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries, 2020, wool, image © Auerbach; Kim DacresWhitney, 2019, auto tires, bicycle tires, bicycle tubes, wood, bicycle parts, zip ties, and screws, photograph by Sebastian Bach, image © Dacres; Judie BamberNancy Nielson (Miss April 1961), 2019, watercolor on paper, image © Bamber; Viola FreyStubborn Woman, Orange Hands, 2004, ceramic and glazes, photograph by Chris Watson, image © 2020 Frey and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, licensed by ARS, New York; Nasty Women installation view; April BeyAtlantica Archives (Earth’s Feminism) II, 2020, digitally printed woven blanket with hand-sewn “African” Chinese knock-off wax fabric and glitter, image © Bey; Karen CarsonPower Mad, 2011, acrylic on unstretched canvas, image © Carson; self-portrait Woman Artist Painting, circa mid-17th century, anonymous artist from the Emilian School, oil on canvas; Lisa Anne AuerbachKarma is a Nasty Woman, 2020, wool, image © Auerbach. Images courtesy of the artists and Gavlak, Los Angeles and Palm Beach.

FLO KENNEDY

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“I feel that in a society where there is institutionalized oppression, the thing is to catch government and business in the grass—actually humping, you know. Forming a picket line or organizing a demonstration is not going to change the whole society, but there are cases in which it’s the sort of thing one ought to do. Every so often one just has to put one’s bucket down where one is…

“ ‘Revolutionary’ doesn’t always mean that you’re cocking a gun. Revolutionary means that you go precisely the opposite of the way the establishment had you programmed. Those of us who are unimaginative, unskilled, untutored must do routine things as putting our lives on the line. That’s not real revolution. That’s masochism. True revolutionary activity, in my opinion, is that which hurts the establishment without undue damage to the person who does the revolutionary act.” — Florynce “Flo” Kennedy*

*Quote in Richard Avedon, The Sixties, interviews by Doon Arbus (New York: Random House, 1999).

avedonfoundation.org/the-sixties

SHERIE M. RANDOLPH

FLORYNCE “FLO” KENNEDY: THE LIFE OF A BLACK FEMINIST RADICAL

(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018 paperback edition).

uncpress.org/florynce-flo-kennedy/

“Never pose for a photograph where everyone in the photograph is white.” — Gloria Steinem, to USC students in 2016.
From left: Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kennedy, Steinem, and Kate Millett in 1977. Photograph by Bettye Lane / UNC Press.
What's missing from this book? Pioneering black feminist Flo Kennedy's blazing personality

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KATE MILLETT

Kate Millett—the author of Sexual Politics and “a defining architect of second-wave feminism”—died in Paris this week while on vacation with her spouse Sophie Keir.*

“Kate was brilliant, deep, and uncompromising. She wrote about the politics of male dominance, of owning women’s bodies as the means of reproduction, and made readers see this as basic to hierarchies of race and class. She was not just talking about equal pay, but about woman-hatred in the highest places and among the most admired intellectuals.” — Gloria Steinem*

See Maggie Doherty, “What Kate Did,” The New Republic, March 23, 2016:

newrepublic.com/article/131897/kate-millett-sexual-politics

*Parul Sehgal and Neil Genzlinger, “Kate Millett, Whose Sexual Politics Became a Bible of Feminism, Dies at 82,” New York Times, September 8, 2017.

Image credits: Doubleday and The Lesbian Tide.

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