The Very Best of NYC Art

Pictures by Women, Haunted and more!

For much of photography’s 170-year history, women have expanded its roles by experimenting with every aspect of the medium. Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of Modern Art now through March 21, 2011 presents a selection of outstanding photographs by women artists, charting the medium’s history from the dawn of the modern period to the present. With over two hundred works, this exhibition features celebrated masterworks and new acquisitions from the collection by such figures as Diane Arbus, Imogen Cunningham, Roni Horn, Lucia Moholy, Kiki Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others.

Haunted: Contemporary Photography |Video| Performance at the Guggenheim Museum through Sept. 6 examines myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice, and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession, both collective and individual, with accessing the past. The works included in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, to videos, both on monitors and projected, as well as to ilm, performance, and site-specific installations.

Check out American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Aug. 15. The first Costume Institute exhibition drawn from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Met, it explores developing perceptions of the modern American woman from 1890 to 1940 and how these perceptions have effected the way American women are seen today. Focusing on archetypes of American femininity through dress, the exhibition reveals how American women initiated style revolutions that mirrored their social, political, and sexual emancipation.


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