Hera Gallery is proud to present The American Woman; Feminist Futures, A National Juried Exhibition, juried by Amy Smith- Stewart, Chief Curator of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
As one of the oldest feminist art cooperatives in the United States, Hera Gallery is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024. In celebration of this milestone, we have chosen to revisit past exhibitions that continue to have relevance today. The American Woman was one of the first exhibitions on view at Hera Gallery in 1974, featuring work by founding members Barbara Johns Waterston and Connie Greene Alexander.
Participating Artists: Erin Adams, Margery Albertini, Valentine Aprile, Marilyn Artus, Marianna Baker, Tea Chai Beer, Andrea Borsuk, Alexandra Bowes, Julie Carcione Cavaz, Rachel Ivy Clarke, C.S Corbin, Dana Donaty, Aspen Golann, Marcelina Gonzales, Marcia Haffmans, Janalyn Kidd, Carole P. Kunstadt, Jo Lobdell, Paula Mans, Holly Ballard Martz, Rachel Merrill, Daisy Patton, Rebecca Tegtmeyer, Lehuanani Waipa Ah Nee, Sasha Waters, Emily Walker , Morgan Ford Willingham
Sasha Waters, VA Respiration, 16mm film 4:30, 2019
From inspiration to expiration, breathing is the only work to be enacted now. Respiration is a visual scrapbook-like meditation on river naiads and backyard deities – because nothing noticed is lonely.
As a moving image artist, I am committed to a feminist cinema of opposition that re-imagines personal and social histories in the spirit of engagement with an earlier age of radical-romantic image-making. Using anachronistic strategies of cinematic collage, I stitch together original and found 16mm footage into lyrical, unsentimental films that mine the tension between the subjective, lived experiences of mothers and other caretakers with our interior lives of fantasy and projection, mourning and dread.
Rachel Merrill, IA, It's Always a Competition- The Less Than, 6:49, 2019
In an act to be something I’m not, I expose what I really am—a stupid good sport. Using American sports competition (organized conflict) as a metaphor, I question the performative demands of womanhood, competition, and self-preservation. My current work is a cultural critique of stupidity, a vacuous display of self-importance. It’s an observation of pop culture sound bites, public spectacle, and a heavy dose of personal insecurity on instant replay.
These moments and memories of grand stupidity focus on embarrassing, awkward and painful parts of high performance spectacle in both grand and mundane senses. In an age of performance anxiety, we never quite measure up. Using the grand spectacle of American sport, I spend countless hours knitting, stitching, crocheting, drawing, sewing, painting, molding, crafting, watching, filming, photographing, composing, editing, preening, listening, reading, writing, obsessing, and reviewing. I (the good sport) survive using controlled behavior within organized conflict; all in an effort to just play nice.
Holly Ballard Martz, WA, danger of nostalgia in wallpaper form (in utero), Powder coated steel wire, brass nails, paint, $19,000.00, 2017-2023
From a distance, this installation appears to be an innocuously patterned wall, reminiscent of the designs of British Arts and Crafts founder William Morris. Closer inspection of the design reveals the installation to be made of dozens of wire coat hangers, shaped and soldered into the repeated diagrammatic form of the human female reproductive system.
By installing my piece in the style of ornate wallpaper, I manipulate a symbol of the days of desperate secret abortions – the horror and pain of which we believe to have been banished from any civilized society - into something seemingly fit to adorn even the most elegant drawing room: a bodily taboo hidden in plain sight.
I bend and form each piece of wire by hand—a slow and painful process, an exercise in endurance for my fingers, and a metaphor for the slow and painful trudge towards full reproductive rights for women in America. It is a vivid reminder of the extreme measures that may be taken when access to safe and legal abortion is denied.