“The Reckoning: Women Artists in the New Millennium” Book Signing and Panel

Join Parsons Fine Arts for an event that brings together the authors of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium (Fall ’13), Eleanor Heartney, Nancy Princenthal, Helaine Posner and Sue Scott for an discussion on the work of women artists born after 1960, with a focus on changing attitudes toward the body and sexuality; the globalization of social and political issues; introspection, dream and fantasy as subversive strategies; and contemporary responses to society’s mixed messages about gender roles and the domestic sphere.

November 22, 2013
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Theresa Lang Auditorium
55 W. 13th, 2nd floor

Does it still make sense to talk about art by women as a distinct category? How does the work of women artists reflect contemporary concerns? How are women artists faring vis-a-vis men in the hyper-commercialized contemporary art market? This panel explores the evolving status and concerns of women artists who followed the pioneering feminist artists of the 1970s.

The Reckoning, which will be available for purchase and signing, focuses on 24 acclaimed international women artists who came of age after the feminist revolution of the 1970s, including: Ghada Amer, Janine Antoni, Yael Bartana. Cecily Brown, Tania Bruguera Nathalie Djurberg, Tracey Emin, Cao Fei, Kate Gilmore, Sharon Hayes, Justine Kurland, Katarzyna Kozyra, Klara Liden, Julie Mehretu, Liza Lou, Teresa Margolles, Wangechi Mutu, Catherine Opie, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Kara Walker, Jane and Louise Wilson, Lisa Yuskavage and Andrea Zittel.

The book includes essays on each artist organized around a set of four themes that reveal both the continuities and differences between women artists of different generations. It also presents statistics, compiled exclusively for this book, which reveal how women artists are faring vis a vis men in the marketplace, academe and in the museum and gallery worlds. This is the authors second book, following the prizewinning, After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art.

Author Bios

Eleanor Heartney is a Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other publications as Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and the New York Times. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992. Her books include: Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads 1997, Postmodernism 2001 Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art 2004, Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order, 2006 and Art and Today, 2008. She is the co-author of the award winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art published (Prestel, 2007) and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium to be released by Prestel in 2013. Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Helaine Posner is Senior Curator at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York.  Her exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum include Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels accompanied by a monograph (Prestel, 2011) and Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary.  From 1991-1998, she was curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA where she curated exhibitions of contemporary art and wrote the accompanying catalogues. Posner is the author of a monograph on artist Kiki Smith (Monacelli, 2005) and was U.S. Co-commissioner for the 48^th Venice Biennale where she organized Ann Hamilton: Myein.  She is the co-author of the award winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art published (Prestel, 2007) and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium to be released by Prestel in 2013. Posner was curator of a mid-career survey of the work of Lorna Simpson which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Miami Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based critic and former Senior Editor of Art in America, for which she continues to write regularly; she has also contributed to Art News, Artforum, Parkett, the Village Voice, and the New York Times. Her monograph on Hannah Wilke was published by Prestel in 2010; her essays have also appeared in monographs on Michelle Stuart, Shirin Neshat, Doris Salcedo, Robert Mangold and Alfredo Jaar, among others. At present Princenthal is writing a book about Agnes Martin. Having taught at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Princeton University; Yale University, RISD, Montclair State University and elsewhere, she is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts. She is the co-author of the award winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art published (Prestel, 2007) and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium to be released by Prestel in 2013.

Sue Scott is an independent curator and writer living in New York.  She was Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art for nineteen years, where she curated solo exhibitions of the works of Bryan Hunt, Jane Hammond, Suzanne McClelland, Katherine Bowling, Frank Moore, Kerry James Marshall, Jennifer Bartlett and Alex Katz, among others. Group exhibitions include Proof Positive: Forty Years of Printmaking at ULAE at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Witness Theories of Seduction for Dorsky Curatorial Programs, and The Washington Color School:  The First Generation and The Edward R. Broida Collection: A Selection of Works for the Orlando Museum of Art.  She is the co-author of the award-winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (Prestel, 2007), and of The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium to be released by Prestel in 2013.

Advance Praise for The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium

From Whitney Chadwick, author of Women, Art, and Society

“Feminism’s success as a cultural force can be measured in the ways that artists—men and women—have embraced, challenged and renegotiated its assumptions. In a brilliant and beautifully illustrated study the four authors of The Reckoning explore the ways that women artists born after 1990 are shaping visual culture worldwide. Elegant, moving and jargon-free, their account focuses on the artist as an active, empowered, critical subject whose works have the power to move, excite and provoke…. An indispensable contribution to the literature on contemporary art by women.”

From Holland Cotter, The New York Times

“In the 2007 book “After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art,” four writers — – Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott –set a new standard in documenting and evaluating the work of a dozen key women artists spanning generations between the 1960s to the 2000s.  In tracing their histories, the book effectively also defined the most important and influential art developments of the late 20th century.

The beat goes on with the appearance of “The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium,” written by the same authors in the same accessible scholarly style, but reflecting important historical changes over the past decade and more. In line with the increased presence of women in mainstream art, the book includes twice as many artists as its predecessor.  And its global reach has expanded vastly, stretching from Europe and the Americas to Africa and China.

What remains constant is the dynamism of art considered: boundless in its variety; committed but uncontainable in its politics; dauntlessly experimental in its approach to social and personal realities;  wise enough to have followed up Revolution with revolutions – many, constant – and to have made change itself an ongoing tradition, the big one.”