September 19 - December 9, 2007

Don't Let the Boys Win
Kinke Kooi, Carrie Moyer, and Lara Schnitger

Wednesday, September 19:
Opening Reception: 5:30-7:30 pm, Art Museum
Artist's Lecture by Kinke Kooi: 7:30-8:30 pm, Danforth Hall, Art Building

Curated by Jessica Hough, director, Mills College Art Museum

The Mills College Art Museum presents Don't Let the Boys Win, featuring the dynamic work by nationally and internationally recognized artists Kinke Kooi, Carrie Moyer, and Lara Schnitger.


Don't Let the Boys Win is curated by Jessica Hough. This is Hough's first exhibition in her new position as director of the Mills College Art Museum. She was previously curatorial director at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum where she worked for over nine years.



Each of the artists in Don't Let the Boys Win, through different means, produces work that is imbued with an empowered female perspective. Boldness and humor characterize the work and many of the pieces are unapologetically erotic. Ornament and texture is integral to each of the artists' practices, and a hippie-inspired aesthetic is also at work. The title of the exhibition, borrowed from a sculpture of the same name by Schnitger, highlights the provocative playfulness of the work in this exhibition. Don't Let the Boys Win, 2003 Tricot, plaid, fake fur, wood, tennis balls, pins 69 x 59 x 22 in. Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York

In her drawings on paper and on photographs, artist Kinke Kooi, based in Arnhem, Netherlands, imbues such things as human eyes, a hand, or an ordinary apartment building with a talisman-like quality. Kooi fills the space around the objects in her compositions with a dense swirling line pattern that gives the air a pillow-like effect. It is as if each object is cushioned by its surrounding, and at the same time is setting into motion the atmosphere around it.

New York-based Carrie Moyer balances specific Feminist and other art historical references in her paintings with a seemingly effortless painting style. References to the history of abstract painting are evident, even as she seems to re-claim that history for her own end. Her process combines paint applied with a brush, with large areas of translucent poured pigment. In some paintings she mixes glitter with the pigment-risky business for most artists but Moyer makes it a seamless part of her seductive surfaces. The Stone Age, 2006, Acrylic, glitter on canvas, 60 x 84 inches, Collection of Stephen Hilton, New York

Los Angeles-based Lara Schnitger's sculptures have an animated physical presence that makes it seem as if they might begin to move around the gallery. Each work is composed of a sewn fabric "skin" stretched over a wooden armature. The wooden structures are made from a series of joined long, narrow pieces, which point out into space and threaten to puncture the fabric into which they push. The literal tension on the fabric adds to the already emotional quality of the works.
 

September 19 - December 9, 2007

Laleh Khorramian: Surface to Air

Curated by Jessica Hough, director, Mills College Art Museum

Laleh Khorramian: Surface to Air brings together two video animations by this New York-based artist for her west coast debut.

Khorramian's work of the past ten years, primarily drawing and painting, centers on theater and the spectacle as its point of departure to explore aspects of human nature and emotional states and the possibilities of drawing as a medium. Her recent work combines animation and drawing into loosely-narrative animations which focus on a central pregnant female character who we witness in self-transformation.

Sophie and Goya (2004) and Chopperlady (2005) were both made using the artist's unique process of taking footage from the surface of her paintings to provide an explorational ground for the animations. Khorramian uses the monoprint technique in her work (along with drawing and painting). In this process the paper is lifted from the plate which causes a branch-like pattern in the paint that resembles veins or tributaries. This rich surface texture, when filmed up close, provides a starting point onto which the artist then builds a story.

The artist describes her filmmaking process, "Stop-motion animation can alter the representation of time, while the magnified monoprint details can give mundane scenarios a mythical, out-of-time quality allowing me to stage narratives that are make-believe accounts of historic events, ancient myths, and imagined spaces. By removing cultural and historic specificity from these narratives, I examine the essence of their visual forms and emotional content."

Khorramian is ultimately working toward a cycle of five animations, each related to one of the five elements (land, air, water, fire, and space). Sophie and Goya and Chopperlady represents land and air, respectively. Khorramian is at work on her third animation, which she will preview and introduce for an audience on Sunday, September 23, 2007, 3:30 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building.

Chopperlady was described by Jerry Saltz in The Village Voice as "absorbing" and "compelling." He writes, "The stories that take place here are simultaneously about love, war, politics, and the self, and are as cosmological as they are scatological and strange."

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1974, and emigrating to the United States as a child, Laleh Khorramian received her undergraduate education at the Rhode Island School of Design and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago before receiving her masters degree in Fine Arts at Columbia University in New York, where she continues to live and work. She is represented by Salon 94 in New York City. Chopperlady (video still), 2005 Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

Artist Lecture Series:
All lectures will take place in Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building

Kinke Kooi, September 19, 2007, 7:30 pm
Laleh Khorramian, September 23, 2007, 3:30 pm
Carrie Moyer, October 17, 2007, 7:30 pm

All receptions and the lectures are free and open to the public.

Read Kenneth Baker's review of the exhibition in The San Francisco Chronicle.

June 20–August 5, 2007

Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam

Dang Thi Khue, Dinh Thi Tham Poong, Dinh Y Nhi, An-My Le, Ly Hoang Ly, Ly Tran Quynh Giang, Nguyen Bach Dan, Nguyen Thi Chau Giang, Phuong M. Do, and Vu Thu Hien

Curated by Dr. Nora Taylor

Organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC, and supported in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. Educational activities made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Hanoi office, and fiscally administered by the Institute of International Education.

Opening reception: Wednesday, June 20, 5:30–7:00 pm.

Curator's Talk: June 20, Danforth Lecture Hall, 7:00 pm

Performance by Ly Hoang Ly followed by a conversation between the artist and Dr. Taylor: July 11, Art Museum, 7:00 pm

First Exposures: Bay Area Youth Photography

Curated by the Museum Studies Workshop at Mills College

Faculty Advisor: Sharon E. Bliss

Project Coordinator: Terrie Vevea

First Exposures is a youth mentorship program of San Francisco Camerawork that was formed in 1993 by a group of photographers interested in sharing their artistic skills with at-risk youth in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Opening reception: Wednesday, June 20, 5:30–7:00 pm.



April 29-May 27, 2007

PathoLogical: Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition
www.mills.edu/mfa2007



March 28-April 15, 2007

Swell: Senior Thesis Exhibition

The Senior Thesis Exhibition is in memory of Jae Carmichael and was made possible through the generosity of her many friends.


January 17-March 15, 2007

Take 2: Women Revisiting Art History
Curated by Janet Bishop

According to Bishop, “Take 2 presents the work of prominent women artists whose artistic strategies include reinventing established art historical conventions. The exhibition examines the conceptual, political, and often very personal motivations for the use of visual tropes ranging from scientific drawings, silhouettes, and South Asian miniatures to traditions and icons within western art history.”

The artists featured in Take 2 are:

Janine Antoni (b. 1964 The Bahamas; lives and works in New York; photography and sculpture)

Beate Gutschow (b. 1970 Mainz, Germany; lives and works in Berlin; photography)

Sherrie Levine (b. 1947 Hazleton, Pennsylvania; lives and works in New York; sculpture, photographs, and works on paper)

Cindy Sherman (b.1954 Glen Ridge, New Jersey; lives and works in New York; photographs)

Shahzia Sikander (b.1969 Lahore, Pakistan; lives and works in New York; works on paper)

Stephanie Syjuco (b.1974 Manila, Philippines; lives and works in San Francisco; sculpture and works on paper)

Sam Taylor-Wood (b.1967 London; lives and works in London; films)

Catherine Wagner (b.1953 San Francisco; lives and works in San Francisco; photographs)

Kara Walker (b.1969 Stockton; lives and works in New York; works on paper)

Bishop points out several exhibition highlights: “Through sculptural pieces based on a billiard table in a Man Ray painting or Duchamp's famous Large Glass, Sherrie Levine complicates issues of gender and authorship via direct riffs on the work of canonized male artists.  Stephanie Syjuco points to the strange and unfamiliar nature of contemporary technological hardware through prints that treat their parts like botanical specimens.  Catherine Wagner presents photographs from her project titled Re-Classifying History, in which chairs from the de Young Museum's decorative arts collection serve as surrogates to explore human relationships. 

“In addition, Walker makes provocative cut paper pieces inspired by Victorian silhouettes to focus on issues of race, violence, and slavery in the antebellum South, and Shahzia Sikander fuses elements from the ancient practice of miniature painting and contemporary western culture in small-format works that function metaphorically in a permeable global society.  The exhibition will also include photographs by Beate Gutschow, Cindy Sherman, and Janine Antoni, as well as film by Sam Taylor-Wood, all of which explore classic subjects within European painting such as landscape, still life, portraiture, biblical characters, and genre painting.”

Janet Bishop in conversation with Stephanie Syjuco
February 7, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building

Artist Lecture: Shahzia Sikander
February 28, 7:00 pm, Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building