Revival and Re-Evaluation at the National Museum of Women in the Arts

Gloria Huangpu
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read

Revival is the current special exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. With this exhibit, this DC museum that focuses on women artists anchors us to fundamental experiences that unite us all as people. Themed around ideas traditionally associated with women — the body, children — it deals with these topics in a specific and nuanced way that allows the viewer to experience these tropes through the eyes of the artists themselves.


The Young Family, Patricia Piccinini

The first work one encounters at the vestibule to the exhibition is a perfect example of this. The Young Family by Patricia Piccinini is a sculpture of a mother with a human’s body and a pig’s head with her similarly frankenstein-ed suckling babies. The uncanny bit about this sculpture is the realism of the skin, hair, and folds. The viewer’s immediate response is one of revulsion — then, for some, an overwhelming curiosity to explore every wrinkle and bodily detail. The card on the wall nearby explains that the artist is interested in “transgenic beings — organisms into which genetic material from unrelated organisms have been artificially induced,” eventually to be used for growing human organs. Piccinini is concerned with whether our moral boundaries can keep up with science, but the crowds alternately hurrying away and huddled around this work seem to prove that progress never happens all at once. While some may celebrate genetic engineering as innovation and progress, others balk at the same ideas. This sculpture puts that chasm on display for us in the microcosm of the museum setting.


Fall, Charlotte Gyllenhammar

Entering into the first main room of the exhibition, one encounters the area themed around the body. One work takes up most room in this space: it is the video installation by Charlotte Gyllenhammar called Fall. Fall is made up of two screens, one mounted on the ceiling and one mirroring it on the floor. The one above features an upward, square shot of a woman hanging, head down, arms dangling toward us, chiffon skirts billow around her. The one below depicts two men sleeping on a bed, sunken in the floor below the viewer. All of the figures and their respective accoutrement are framed by black backgrounds and lit by an ethereal bluish-white light. The image of the woman with her soft swaying movements reminds us of the liminal space that women spend so much mental time and energy negotiating — both soft and strong, at work and at home, in control and carefree, never still or completely rooted in one place. As the title indicates, the female figure is falling, yet she will never pass through the space between her screen and that of the men sleeping below her, leaving her in a space of infinite ambiguity. Spending some time looking at this piece might leave any viewer in a similar state.


In the adjoining room, the focus turns implicitly to the experience of women and race. A group of Alison Saar’s sculptural work is featured here. The majority of these works are made of mixed natural and man-made materials that evoke a sense of the handicraft, from dark paint colors, to wood, to rusty metals. Epitomizing her style at the center of this room is Pressed — a wooden, carven head lying on its cheek with flowing hair of wires falling to the floor. Amid the wires, old, rusty clothing irons are tangled up and suspended in the cascade of hair. This work in particular invites us to think about the definition of beauty in American society, the irons evoking the process that many women go through every morning of straightening our hair. It’s an aggressive act, really, even the words we use — the taming and application of heat to a part of ourselves, especially for those whose bodies are not white.

Pressed, Alison Saar

This exhibition was well named — Revival. It revives the ideas that we have held for centuries — even millennia — around women’s bodies, behavior, appearance, place in the world, but through a different lens. In this space, on the second floor of the National Museum for Women in the Arts, we are invited to consider the ideas we hold about women through their own eyes. What most impressed me about this exhibition is that these objects seem so disparate, yet they are brought together because they each demand careful, attentive looking.

This is not an exhibit that you can take a cursory stroll through — the works draw you in to spend time with them. While those outlined here are the ones that drew me in the most, you might find others more interesting if you go yourself.

Revival is open at the National Museum of Women in the Arts through September 10, 2017.

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Gloria Huangpu

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Ramblings on art, architecture, and the world around us.

730DC

730DC

Connecting Washingtonians to their city, to their communities, and to one another.

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