The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith
January 22 through April 10, 2005

21st Century Odyssey, 1991-1993 Smith as Odysseus, performance documentation, digital prints

Since her first groundbreaking performances in the late 1960s, Barbara Turner Smith has been at the forefront of feminist, body, and performance art in Southern California. “The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith,” is a retrospective of this important artist’s performances and includes the newly edited video of The 21st Century Odyssey. Smith created durational performances in which she used her own body, often at some personal risk, as her artistic medium. Her work is remarkable for its courage, inventiveness, intensity, and poignancy. Working in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Smith, with artists such as Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow, Suzanne Lacy, and Paul McCarthy, redefined the very nature of art-making.

This exhibition, curated by Rebecca McGrew and Jennie Klein, has the distinction of being Barbara T. Smith’s first retrospective and appropriately is presented at Pomona College where Smith began her career as an undergraduate art major. It will then travel to the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University. The exhibition includes never-before-seen photographs, videotapes, ephemera, and other performance relics. Beginning with Ritual Meal (1969), it covers over two decades of work, including the pivotal performances Celebration of the Holy Squash (1971), Feed Me (1973), Birthdaze (1981), and The 21st Century Odyssey (1991–93).

Barbara Smith began her artistic career (in painting) at Pomona College, from which she graduated in 1953. After raising three children, she returned to graduate school at UC Irvine, turned to body and performance art, and, with fellow classmates, founded the influential F Space Gallery. Intensely aware of feminist thought and activity of the mid-60s and early 70s, Smith was among the first to reassert the primacy of female body/experience and autobiography in contemporary art. Even before the establishment of the Feminist Arts Program (1971) and the Woman's Building (1973), Smith was foregrounding her own corporeal, gendered experience in experimental performances.

A substantial, illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition (140 pp, illus, paper bound, $30.00). It includes essays by Jennie Klein, Moira Roth, Kristine Stiles, and Jenni Sorkin; a performance chronology; biography; checklist to the exhibition; and detailed descriptions of some of Smith’s most significant performances. The seminal 1974 interview by Moira Roth that accompanied Smith’s first exhibition is reproduced with a new introduction. Co-curator Jennie Klein tackles the formidable task of setting the stage for Smith’s work and framing it within contemporary scholarship. Internationally renowned scholar of performance and body art Kristine Stiles interrogates the deepest core of Smith’s work, illuminating her courage, passion, and vision. Art historian Jenni Sorkin looks at the lighter side of Smith’s oeuvre, examining her use of parody and humor. Together, these essays offer eloquent testimony to the significance of Smith’s work and place her, appropriately, alongside the greatest performance artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.


 
Project Series 25: Karen Carson
January 22 through February 27, 2005

Karen Carson Double Dragon Fire. 2004 Silk dye, acrylic, metallic textile paint on silk. 55” x 14’ 2” (2 panels). Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio

Karen Carson creates paintings and drawings that mine the conceptual and emotional terrain of popular culture. It is territory she has explored for over three decades. For Carson, style has always been at the service of the ideas she is exploring and her work encompasses a wide range of media, including process-oriented “zipper” pieces of the early 1970s; abstract cubist-derived investigations of painterly space in the 1980s; large-scale Las Vegas-inspired vinyl banners of the 1990s; and her most recent depictions of fires. Carson transmutes popular culture and art historical references through dynamic graphics, vibrant colors, and poetic texts, into personal, idiosyncratic, work.  More...

Project Series 26: Judie Bamber
March 5 through April 10, 2005

September 6, 2002 4:00PM, 2004 Oil on canvas on board 30 X 36 inches

For nearly fifteen years, Los Angeles painter Judie Bamber has created exquisitely crafted representational paintings that investigate illusion, memory, perception, and temporality. Bamber incorporates traditional image making strategies that interrogate both the veracity of the photographic image and the artificiality of a painted image. Painting from photographic sources, she blurs the boundary between a mechanical record and a human mark. The diverse subject matter she has addressed encompasses culturally and auto-biographically charged content ranging from explicit paintings of female genitalia to nostalgic watercolors of photographs of her father to seductive seascapes.  More...

From the Heart: Gene Crain and the California Scene
April 20 - May 15, 2005

Pomona Student Exhibition
April 15 – April 27, 2005

The annual Pomona Student Exhibition is open to all students enrolled in studio art classes at the College. Participation is competitive and work is juried by members of the Art faculty. The resulting exhibition, which helps students learn to prepare their work to be shown publicly and allows them to see it in the context of a professional museum, reflects the high quality an exciting diversity of the Pomona College Studio Art program.

Pomona College Senior Exhibition
May 4 – May 15, 2005

All studio art majors, along with media studies majors concentrating in studio art, are required for graduation to undertake a final project culminating in exhibition. The graduating seniors, who are responsible for all aspects of the exhibition's organization and presentation, gain professional experience while giving the public an opportunity to view their work. The exhibition remains open through Commencement weekend.

Introduction: Pomona College Art Faculty
April 29 - May 15, 2005

This exhibition presents recent work by Pomona College studio art faculty members. Faculty exhibitions, which the Museum offers on a regular basis, provide insight into the College’s studio art programs and an opportunity to celebrate the extraordinary artists in our midst.