Category: Visual Arts

Activities of ASWM and its members in the area of the Visual Arts

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Remembering the Work of Judith Anderson

This article recently came to our attention. Judith was a wonderful visionary artist  of archetypes of women and nature, who passed away in 2008. (Our thanks to Lauren Raine and Max Dashu for the reference.) The Encyclopedia of  Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History says that Judith “used womb/vagina imagery explicitly as devotional work dedicated to the goddess.”

In the Dark Speech of Praise and Birth:  The Prints of Judith Anderson 

by Catherine Madsen

“Missa Gaia: This is My Body,” Judith Anderson, etching, 1988

Describing her process of printmaking, Judith said,

“The germ of the idea for a particular print develops over many months or sometimes years. Images from reading, dreams, relationships, pictures, plants and animals will gather and cluster until a beginning form for the print emerges. The main image grows and changes, often in surprising ways, during the long process of working on the plate, which may be several months. Only some time after a print is finished do I come to understand intuitively more about its origins and implications.”  (from Art of the Print website)

Here as well is artist Alicia Blaze Hunsicker’s blog post about Judith.

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“Masks of the Goddess” On View in Retrospective Exhibition

Featured ASWM artist Lauren Raine is holding a retrospective art show of her beautiful Masks of the Goddess Project.  She describes her work this way:
In May I will be concluding the 20 year MASKS OF THE GODDESS PROJECT, which began as an Invocation to the Goddess at Reclaiming’s Spiral Dance in San Francisco in 1999.  I have been so privileged to collaborate with Priestesses, Playwrights, Dancers, Ritualists, Community Organizers, Photographers, Choreographers, Writers, Singers, and Psychologists in sharing the “Faces of the Goddess”. The spirits of so many collaborators are in every mask and photograph.  It’s my hope that as the masks leave me, they’ll go out to be used by others, to continue their work in some way. 
Just want to thank you and all of the amazing women I met at the Women and Mythology Conferences I have attended.  If you or anyone you know will be in SF at that time, please be most cordially invited to the Opening, or to see the show.
She has also just revised and added to my book “The Masks of the Goddess”, which is a collection of photos and archives, and  is available at http://www.blurb.com/books/9353862-the-masks-of-the-goddess .

May 5-July 28  at Arise Gallery at Womanchurch

678 Portola Drive, San Francisco, CA

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“Still Powerful,” Feminist Art by Rae Atira-Soncea

Still Powerful: Artworks by Rae Atira-Soncea

Feminist visionary artist Rae Atira-Soncea passed away ten years ago. Now in a new retrospective show, her dynamic work will be on display again in the Spring of 2019.  A longtime leader of the arts community and a disability rights activist, Rae was featured at the first symposium of ASWM in 2008. Her work also appears in ASWM’s proceeings volume, Vibrant Voices: Women, Myth, and the Arts.

“Still Powerful: feminist revisioning of domestic objects by Rae Atira-Soncea,” will be March 23-31, 2019, on the 3rd floor Common Wealth Gallery, 100 S Baldwin, Madison WI 53703  Open 10-4 weekdays, and 9-5 on the 24th, 30th and 31st.

Reception will be Saturday, March 23, 2018 4-7:30PM.  Much of the art featured in her blog will be on display and on sale.

Rae working on her Earth Goddess for “The Yurt”
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Magic of Ice Age Cave Comes to Chicago

Lasc.horse-aurochs

There are ways in which modern technology can serve the most ancient landscapes of myth and art.  A prime example is a special exhibit currently showing at the Field Museum in Chicago:  Scenes from the Stone Age: The Cave Paintings of Lascaux.   Interior rooms of the magnificent Lascaux cave are reproduced to provide a simulated experience of the art of our ancient ancestors.  The Field web site invites us to

Walk through exact cave replicas by flickering light, marveling at full-size copies of the paintings—including some never before seen by the public—and see them through the eyes of ancient artists. Deconstruct the paintings’ many layers of complexities, meet a lifelike Stone Age family, and discover why the true meaning and purpose of the caves remain a mystery even today. 

The exhibit runs from March 20-September 8, 2013.

lascaux.fieldmuseum.org

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A Web Tour of Goddess Megaliths with Max Dashu

La Dame de St. Sernin, a wonderful example of mythic megaliths

Last night I sat down at the computer with a cup of tea, a pen and a tablet, ready to experience “Ancestral Stones of the Elder Kindreds.” It was Max Dashu’s visual tour of the megalithic standing stones of Europe.  I thought I was ready for the course, but I found myself writing and sketching all over my tablet until I had 6 pages of scribbled notes.

Deanne Quarrie (Bendis), a scholar and author in her own right, also took the class.  She says,

I sat enthralled before my computer, enjoying Max’s collection of images of standing stones and menhirs from France, Spain, Germany, areas around the Mediterranean, and from Africa, clearly representing woman’s forgotten place in our ancient heritage.  I am going to be taking her course (also online) and can hardly wait – I am so excited!

 

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