Best Art Exhibitions of 2021

by Jillian Steinhauer, The New York Times

This was the year when public awareness of ecocide reached at least an orange alert level. Direct response from museums and galleries remained muted, with notable exceptions being “Diane Burko: Seeing Climate Change,” a solo exhibition of paintings at the Katzen Arts Center of American University in Washington (through Dec. 12); and a survey of early work by the ecofeminist artist Betsy Damon at La MaMa Galleria in Manhattan.

Art We Saw This Fall

by Jillian Steinhauer, The New York Times

It can be hard to grasp the power of Damon’s pieces secondhand, but what comes through is her embrace of vulnerability and commitment to community. She opened herself up and challenged others to as well — and the photos suggest that she succeeded.

Betsy Damon: Passages: Rites & Rituals

What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries Right Now

by Jillian Steinhauer, The New York Times

It can be hard to grasp the power of Damon’s pieces secondhand, but what comes through is her embrace of vulnerability and commitment to community. She opened herself up and challenged others to as well — and the photos suggest that she succeeded.

Emergency Art History. Monika Fabijanska in Conversation

by Adam Mazur, Blok Magazine

Feminists also rejected the concept of a finished masterpiece and sought to create art that rendered natural life cycle and changes such as growth or aging (Helène Aylon, Agnes Denes). All this led to a radical departure from traditional art presentation in gallery space: ecofeminists, especially “Garbage Girls” as Lucy Lippard jokingly called them, that is artists who deal with pollution and the remediation of waste, have pushed the boundaries of the definition of art and proposed the most radical art forms so far – the art of repairing environmental damage (Betsy Damon, Aviva Rahmani, Agnes Denes).

What Ecofeminist Artists Learned from Indigenous Cultures

Holland Cotter masks up on the Lower East Side and SoHo; Jillian Steinhauer discovers eco-feminist art taking root in Chelsea.

by Louis Bury, Art in America

Designed to facilitate such cross-era and cross-genre comparisons, “ecofeminism(s)” feels a bit like a family reunion—not so small as to be insular, but not so large as to be overwhelming. One great pleasure is seeing lesser-known works situated in kindred context. Bilge Friedlaender’s cluster of nine ochre linen-paper tubes, Cedar Forest (1989), for example, chimes with Damon’s textured cast of a dry riverbed, The Memory of Clean Water (1985), and encapsulates the exhibition’s mood of gritty tenderness. Helène Aylon, who recently died from COVID-19, was better known than Friedlaender but still under-recognized. Her performance The Earth Ambulance (1982)—in which a group of women used an ambulance to “rescue” soil from Strategic Air Command nuclear military bases, then stowed it in pillowcases (“another kind of sack”) and took it along to peace demonstrations—is an iconic fusion of ecological and geopolitical art.

As Galleries Reopen, Two Critics Find Rewards Eclipse the Angst

Holland Cotter masks up on the Lower East Side and SoHo; Jillian Steinhauer discovers eco-feminist art taking root in Chelsea.

by By Holland Cotter and Jillian Steinhauer, The New York Times

The ambitious show (through July 24) features 15 artists of different generations whose feminism is grounded in ecological concerns. It includes important works that have been shown recently, like Agnes Denes’s “Rice/Tree/Burial” (1977-79/2020) and one of Ana Mendieta’s “Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures)” (1981/2019), but widens our landscape of understanding with lesser-known, though no less impactful, historical works, like Aviva Rahmani’s “Physical Education” (1973), a Conceptual work centered on written instructions that outline a series of actions representing our disregard for the planet, and Betsy Damon’s “The Memory of Clean Water” (1985), a cast of a dry riverbed spilling down from the wall. The lineage extends to the present with Eliza Evans’s “All the Way to Hell” (2020-ongoing), a project in which she doles out the mineral rights to several acres of her land in Oklahoma to 1,000 people (you can buy in for $10) to prevent fossil fuel development.

Over the past few months, as I’ve been consumed by the pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprising, art has often looked marginal to me, at best. But “ecofeminism (s)” was one more visceral reminder that our world has been in crisis for centuries. As artists, writers, and humans, what choice do we have but to keep searching for points of connection and creative ways to respond?

Ecofeminist Art Takes Root

ecofeminism(s) at Thomas Erben Gallery offers an urgent reminder of our present climate and human rights emergencies. Likewise, the works featured imply that another world is, and has always been, possible.

by Cassie Packard, Hyperallergic

Betsy Damon’s “The Memory of Clean Water” (1985) is another such touchstone. Using handmade paper pulp, Damon made a 250-foot cast of Utah’s Castle Creek riverbed before the river was dammed. The sculpture climbs the gallery walls and spills onto the floor. It is as delicate as it is massive, its fragile multicolored surface pockmarked with small holes and natural detritus. Damon made the work with a traditional art context in mind. However, when she learned about pollutants in the river she “woke up”, realizing that she wanted to turn her focus toward community organizing, teaching, and founding a water-related nonprofit. The sculpture is a landmark work in Damon’s oeuvre, but it also signifies a moment of reckoning in which she decided that her activism had to employ new tactics and take new forms to be effective.

ecofeminism(s)

by Alex A. Jones, The Brooklyn Rail

ecofeminism(s) is a group show with an ambitious curatorial stance. It looks at the mutual development of feminist and ecological art in the 1970s and ’80s, while highlighting recent ecological art by women. Curator Monika Fabijanska casts ecofeminism not as a discreet movement but as an expansive concept, one that can historicize an underrecognized current in women’s art and help us reimagine the role of the artist in times of collective struggle.

The most striking physical presence in the show is Betsy Damon’s The Memory of Clean Water (1985), a paper-pulp cast of a dry riverbed in Utah. It is a death mask of Castle Creek, which dried up after the construction of an upstream dam. Splotches of red and blue mineral pigments decorate the surface of the paper, which is otherwise colored by the dust of the riverbed and embedded with bits of grass and stone. It overflows the wall onto the floor and the ceiling, but this portion of the cast is only a fraction of the full, 250-foot-long work. Damon’s art is not well known today, in part because the process of making The Memory of Clean Water inspired her to dedicate her subsequent work to water remediation. She started a non-profit, Keepers of the Waters, to improve global water systems and educate people about water quality. The organization’s largest project to date is the Living Water Garden in the city of Chengdu, China, an ecological park that diverts polluted water from the Fu and Nan rivers into a wetland filtration system, from which it emerges clean enough to drink. The system doesn’t process enough water to change pollution levels in the massive river system, but it’s enough to make a point about what’s possible.

Water Works: Living Waters of Larimer

by Keith Goetzman, Public Art Review • Issue 49

Rather than allowing the water to run off the plateau and disappear into the pipes and buried waterways of the Pittsburgh storm water system, Damon and Bingham aim to collect and divert it to wetland and irrigation demonstrations, to cisterns for use in gardens or businesses, perhaps to an aquaponics greenhouse or a water park. This “integrated rainwater catchment infrastructure” is another way to say “using every last drop”.

Forecast Public Art

An American in Chengdu, China Finds Trial and Tribute in Water

by Matt Forney, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Ms. Damon's experience highlights a peril of environmentalism in China today. The Communist Party recognizes that festering rivers, denuded mountains and skies without stars have become a political liability, but it still restricts ordinary people from pressuring for change. Instead, it has tried to clean up the country through fiat. That often leads to political struggles, with different government offices vying to protect or exploit scarce resources.

Ms. Damon persevered, and is now one of China's most sought-after environmentalists. Several cities have asked her to build similar parks, and the State Environmental Protection Agency offered her an office to work from as she coordinates work across China. "I guess in the end they realized that I'm just an artist who is nuts about water," she says.

The park she designed pumps water up from the city's river, then lets gravity stream it through pollution-absorbing plants like hyacinth, papyrus and duckweed; trickle it over mini waterfalls; and finally return it to the river noticeably cleaner than when it left. Barefoot children dash through the park's grass by day, lovers stroll its pebbled paths at night, and most people in Chengdu have seen television features introducing Ms. Damon as the woman who proposed the park.

Rare Chemistry: Art joins science in water projects

Artist fuses worlds to educate on ecology

Pioneer Press
By Charles Laszewski, Staff Writer

An Honest Look at Old Dreams

ITHACA NEW TIMES, OCTOBER 13, 1974

The hotel room is white, lit softly by a single boudoir lamp. A yellowed satin wedding gown hangs over the end of the bed. Its lace veil, brown with age, is laid out on a white table beside two white candles, a lamp, a small photograph taken long ago of a woman holding a bicycle, a fading lily, a dead white moth. On the rumpled chenille bedspread lies the naked white bride, her lips and legs slightly apart. But only a few black accents evidence the groom—his shoes, his tuxedo, his bow tie placed among the carefully arranged objects on the table.

The bride is plaster, the room a sculpture—for this is Sarah Tamor Oschrin's “Honeymoon Suite: My Childhood Wedding Night Fantasy.” A gauzy curtain separates this shrine to old dreams from the loft of the Feminist Studio at 136 E. State St., where a group exhibition by studio members was held in conjunction with the recent Feminist Celebration.

The overwhelming impression I received from the show was that the mantle of feminism rests easily on these artists. They are past cutting themselves off from their heritage as women, and are not ashamed or afraid of the cliches of femininity. As Oschrin's piece demonstrates, they are confronting the old myths and dreams, exploring their significance with sympathy rather than rejecting them out of hand.

“The name 'feminist' is a political statement of the reason that brought us together," says studio member Betsy Damon. "It shouldn't define the product of the group.”

The very media used by the group reflect a willingness to re-evaluate the past. There are an unusually large number of pastel drawings in the show. Colored chalk is one of the oldest artistic media, yet it has never conic into its own as one to be taken seriously, on a level with oils and stone. Artists have usually used it for studies for oil paintings; as a medium for finished works it has been largely unexploited by artists of the top rank (most of them male, according to the books), perhaps because the soft luminosity of carefully finished pastel "paintings," as opposed to quick, rough color studies, was considered too "polite," too "feminine," better left to the drawing-room amateur who wanted the color effect of oil painting without the mess or commitment. This sexist interpretation may he pushing things a hit, but it would appear historically that much of the serious work in pastel has been done by women, such as Mary Cassatt. or at least about them, as in the case of Degas' famous ballerinas.

The eight women—out of the dozen or so in the Feminist Studio show—who are using this medium are taking full advantage of its softness, haziness and the rich color and textural possibilities. The first dimension they have discovered is depth—a potent one in female symbolism. The core image is a dark, moist mystery which can represent a benign source of primal love and knowledge or a suffocating trap.

Oschrin's vaginal symbolism is pretty straightforward in drawings with titles like "Angry Rose Opening" and "Tunnel." She often uses cupped hands or the space between thumb and forefinger to delineate the image, juxtaposing traditionally passive and active metaphors. Others among the artists, especially Ann Hollingsworth, Joy Martin and the team of Betsy Damon and Debby Jones, use imaginary, somewhat surrealistic landscapes as the context for the subtler male implications of valleys, folds and undulations. A new dimension of female symbolism opens when the negative space of the vagina metamorphoses into a positive one through the shell.. Damon-Jones use it in "Homage to Georgia O'Keefe," then close the opening of the hollow to become smooth, round stones in their "Red Stone Landscapes" series. Stones then transform to the eggs that appear in almost all of these women's works; the circle is completed in the primary spherical image of Oschrin's "Uterus."

Of course, the content of pastels in the show is not limited to abstract symbolic forms; alongside the search for a new female ethos there is a purely artistic excellence in drawing. I was impressed by the sheer technical virtuosity in most of these drawings; they are as fully realized as any painting.

The show as a whole has a coherent group meaning because of this symbolic language, which extends through all media. Kathy Morris has a series of small acrylic still fifes, starkly realistic renderings of strange little knickknacks that look as if they'd been photographed with a box camera and a harsh direct flash; they, too, have eggs and shells amid the green plastic dinosaurs.

Damon and Jones are also working on a wood sculpture, "Ritual Boat," that is slung from the ceiling like the carved Indian canoes of the Northwest. Its lovely tactile surface seems to be developing in breast-like humps. Next to it on the floor is a group of hand-hewn wood "boulders" on a bed of shavings that look like nothing if not a nest of giant eggs.

There are a lot of collages, too, which, if not particularly stimulating in themselves, must have some meaning in terms of the entire studio output. And then there's the work of Susan MacKay, which defies categorization, but shows wonderful skill and imagination. The exhibit is encouraging and rich with value and significance for both sexes.

—Stephanie M. Brown