After the Revolution

In 1971, art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked, “Why have there been no great women artists?” This year’s Director’s Dialogue aims to assess the progress women have made in the art world and the pitfalls they still face.

Our panel features the authors of the 2007 book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art: Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal, and Sue Scott. Joining the four critics and curators is acclaimed artist and Ohio State professor of art Ann Hamilton, who is one of the twelve artists featured in the book.

The Wexner Center’s annual Director’s Dialogue is made possible in part by a lead endowment gift from an anonymous donor.

Keep reading for more information on the panelists.

Panelists

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations, often immersive, site-responsive environments experienced through multiple senses. She participated in New Works for New Spaces, the last of the Wexner Center’s three inaugural exhibitions, in 1990 and was subsequently the recipient of a Wexner Center Residency Award in visual arts that culminated in 1996 with a touring exhibition and an accompanying book and CD-ROM publication. Among her many other honors are a MacArthur Fellowship and a United States Artists Fellowship. In 1992, she established her home and practice in Columbus, where she is a professor in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.

Eleanor Heartney is an arts writer and cultural critic based in New York City. She has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such periodicals as Art in America (contributing editor) and Artpress (contributing editor), as well as for Artnews, Art and Auction, the Washington Post and the New York Times. She was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and has served as president of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. Her book publications include Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (collected essays), Postmodernism, and Art and Today.

Helaine Posner is an independent curator and an adjunct curator for the American Federation of Arts in New York, for which she organized the first mid-career survey of work by Lorna Simpson (a former Wexner Center Residency Award artist). She previously served as curator at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, chief curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and as curator and director of the University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. Posner, who has worked with artist Ann Hamilton on major installations at MIT and as the U.S. co-commissioner at the 1999 Venice Biennale, authored the section on the artist in After the Revolution.

Nancy Princenthal is a senior editor for and frequent contributor to Art in America and has also written for such publications as the New York Times, the Village Voice, Artforum, Art News, Art/Text, and Parkett. She has contributed essays to numerous books and exhibition catalogues (including the Wexner Center’s Carmel Buckley: Tools for the Imagination in 1994), among them monographs on Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, and Robert Mangold. A frequent teacher and lecturer, she has taught at Princeton, Yale, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and New York University. Princenthal is based in New York City.

Sue Scott is an independent curator and writer living in New York. She served as an adjunct curator for the Orlando Museum of Art for 19 years, organizing solo exhibitions of works by such artists as Jane Hammond, Kerry James Marshall, Alex Katz, and Jennifer Bartlett, as well as varied group exhibitions. She also developed exhibitions for other institutions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts. She is currently copublishing rock and shift, a monograph on Suzanne McClelland’s prints and paintings.

Image Info
Ann Hamilton
reflection • 12:55, 2000
Iris print
Courtesy of the artist.