Painting Themselves Out of a Corner : Women’s Works at UCI’s Fine Arts Gallery Chip Away at Male-Dominated Societies

Female artists made substantial strides in the 1980s, with Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherri Levine and other leading voices addressing such areas of contemporary culture as the objectification of women, materialism and racism.

Those artists, however, worked mostly in photography. Female painters received scant attention during the decade, says Deborah Kass, a New York painter who has organized a group exhibit, running through Nov. 8 at UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Gallery, that attempts to address the void.

“There haven’t been any major women painters since the mid-’70s” when Elizabeth Murray, Pat Steir, Jennifer Bartlett and a few others were interrupting men’s long-held dominance in the field, Kass said in a recent interview on campus.

“Painting Culture” contains 19 works, most from the ‘90s, by Kathe Burkhart, Jane Hammond, Kass, Kay Miller, Marilyn Minter, Kay Rosen, Susan Silas, Julia Wachtel, Mary Weatherford and Sue Williams. Most are in their late ‘30s or early ‘40s, Kass said, and all work in New York City, except for Miller, who lives in Colorado.

Kass previously organized a six-artist version of the show with Jose Freire at his Fiction/Nonfiction Gallery in New York. It premiered there last fall and is one of a growing number of exhibits of funny, satiric or flat-out angry, confrontational feminist art.

It was content that drew Kass to the stylistically diverse works she picked for the show, which one New York critic called “shock therapy.” The paintings aggressively, at times satirically, explore child abuse, pornography, sexism and art history, among other topics.

“These artists seem to be dealing with content in a real way,” she said. “Most painters of the past 100 years have been (concerned with) the apotheosis of form . . . versus an in-your-face, throw down the gauntlet analysis of social mores.”

Silas’ “Thurber Carnival/Staples for Our Time” “sets the tone” for the exhibit, Kass said. The conceptual word piece retells humorist James Thurber’s version of “Little Red Riding Hood” in which Little Red, realizing that it’s not Grandma in bed, takes “an automatic out of her basket” and shoots “the wolf dead,” as the painting states. The moral of the story: “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.”

Perhaps the most challenging work is Williams’ “Girl With Kitten,” an apparent indictment of molestation. A little girl, peeking out from between a nude man’s hairy legs, clutches her kitten, and each cries a single tear. His buttocks face the viewer; his penis dangles near the girl’s face.

Kass’ contribution, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” mimics a painting by ‘80s New York art-world superstar David Salle, who often depicts nude women in compromising positions. Kass offers viewers a crotch shot of a man with an erection, over which is superimposed an imitation of a Picasso self-portrait. It’s an understatement to say it questions male artists’ lock on power.

“Democracy is really built on some people having equality and others not,” said Kass, a mid-career artist with a painting degree from Carnegie-Mellon University who has had several solo gallery shows but no museum exhibits. She elaborated by citing a line from her curatorial statement that quotes feminist New York art critic Laura Cottingham.

Painting’s “dominant history, after all, is a celebration of the reactionary ideologies of Eurocentricity, Christianity, various monarchies and male supremacy,” Cottingham wrote in 1990.

“I’m saying unless (painting) can speak from something other than a Eurocentric, male point of view, then it deserves to be dead,” said Kass, who says “Painting Culture” has helped keep the medium alive.

“I think there’s a new critical way to see paintings. I think we’ve extended to painting a lot of the dialogue of the ‘80s (during which other media addressed) originality, social critique and female subjectivity.”

Ironically, the current economic slump hasn’t hurt the cause, Kass said, explaining that because sales are down, artists have nothing to lose by speaking their minds.

“We’re in the middle of the worst recession since the ‘70s, and women and people of color are getting attention,” she said, adding, “It doesn’t cost anything to pay attention.”

“Painting Culture” continues through Nov. 8 at UC Irvine’s Fine Art Gallery. Hours: noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Free. (714) 856-6610.