WOMEN IN THE CITY

Women in the City, the First Public Initiative Organized By West of Rome’s Non-Profit Organization, Features Works by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman On view throughout Los Angeles, February through March 2008

Los Angeles, CA (January 17, 2008)—Curator and gallerist Emi Fontana launches new public art non-profit organization West of Rome and its first public art initiative, Women in the City, featuring works by renowned female artists Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman on February 9, 2008. On view throughout Los Angeles beginning February 9, 2008 and organized by Emi Fontana, Women in the City appropriates traditional methods of advertising and promotion as well as places works in unique settings to create a public exhibition of works by four internationally recognized leaders of the feminist movement in contemporary art. Timed to coincide with the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a major moment in L.A.’s cultural history, Women in the City is on view at over 50 locations from Venice Beach to Pasadena and activates the relationship between art and the urban experience while investigating trends in consumerism and the language of popular culture.

Holzer, Kruger, Lawler, and Sherman belong to the first generation of female artists that were embraced by the international art system—a historical breakthrough at the time in the early 1980s. Similarly in the ’80s, theories about gender, cultural identities, and the gaze, were further defining the idea of post-feminism, differentiating it from the historical feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this time, women began reestablishing cultural discourses and reconstructing female icons from their newly empowered perspective. In the 10 distinct works that are on view during Women in the City, Holzer, Kruger, Lawler, and Sherman each address these changing ideals and perspectives. Once shocking and audacious, Women in the City recontextualizes many of the works of art in our time to mark the current successes of women working, living, and even running for political office in the city.

Appealing to a contemporary “flaneur,” the person who contemplates the city while casually exploring urban modernity, Women in the City showcases works at highly visible sites typically used for advertising—billboards, LED screens, marquees, promotional stickers, and wild postings — that cater to the unique landscape of Los Angeles’ vehicle and pedestrian traffic. At these chosen media sites, which include the Standard Downtown, Hollywood & Highland Center, billboards on Sunset Boulevard, and wild postings from Venice Beach to Pasadena, among other locations, the works of art are camouflaged in L.A.’s landscape, which creates a deliberate interaction between art and urban life, and, more conceptually, between authenticity and commodification. True to the nature of West of Rome, Women in the City activates this important relationship between art and the city.

Jenny Holzer appropriates texts from common colloquialisms to manipulate the language of popular culture. Women in the City features Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays, Survival Series, and Truisms, which are diffused in the city as posters, stickers, and LED signs throughout Los Angeles, that challenge the viewer to react to the often-aggressive slogans. For the first time in the U.S., Survival Series are translated into Spanish to further impact L.A.’s constituency.

Barbara Kruger employs imagery from mass media to create works concerned with feminism, gender, and power. Women in the City debuts a new video work by Kruger, Plenty (2008), which similarly appropriates advertisements and stereotypes commenting on consumerism. Plenty will be screened daily on video billboards at the Key Club, on Sunset Strip across from the Hyatt Hotel, and at LACMA West at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which faces 6th Street.

Louise Lawler questions the authenticity of the display and exhibition of contemporary art, and Women in the City includes two audio installations that follow this theme. Birdcalls (1972/81) uses the phonetic pronunciation of the names of male artists as sounds that mimic the cry of birds. Lawler transforms names synonymous with success into mating calls as a means to comment on the divide between male and female artists at the time. Birdcalls is installed at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Also, on February 14, Lawler reprises her 1979 work, A Movie will be shown without the picture at the same location of its original debut, the Aero Theater. The work is a full-length feature film, shown without the picture, solely with the audio soundtrack, and screened in a typical movie theater setting.

Women in the City marks Cindy Sherman’s first public project. Sherman as the auteur and the subject of her photographs creates a new spin on gaze in her conceptual self-portraits. For this exhibition, Sherman reproduces four distinct Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) from her well-recognized series which are installed on billboards in the midst of Hollywood including locations at Hollywood & Highland Center, on Sunset Boulevard at Olive Street, and on Wilshire Boulevard at Fairfax Avenue.

OVERVIEW OF WORKS AND LOCATIONS Installations begin February 9, 2008, unless otherwise noted.

Jenny Holzer Inflammatory Essays, 1979-82/2008 Multi-colored posters of texts in English and Spanish that were influenced by major political figures including Emma Goldman, Mao Tse-Tung, Vladimir Lenin. Texts are posted in storefronts, alongside billboards, and in heavily trafficked vehicle and pedestrian areas Standard Hotel, Downtown LA, 550 S. Flower at 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071 Large poster-sized reprints of essays posted at 75 locations throughout Silver Lake, Melrose, Hollywood, Venice Beach, and at construction sites throughout the City of Pasadena

Survival Series, 1983-85/2008 Set of aggressive phrases and slogans printed on stickers in English and, for the first time in the U.S., in Spanish, and distributed through established avenues of product marketing and event promotion 250,000 stickers distributed in the LA Weekly’s February 14 issue Distributed at various theaters, night clubs, concert venues, boutiques, music stores, hotels, metro stations, and cafes

Truisms, 1977-79/2008 A series of slogans constructed deliberately to challenge viewers to address stereotypes and presented on marquees, LED screens, and the Jumbrotron. Specific locations include: Hollywood & Highland Center, 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028, featured on the Zipper screen and on the plaza’s Jumbotron Roosevelt Hotel, 7000 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028, featured on the hotel’s marquee

Barbara Kruger Three video billboards screen Kruger’s new video work fragmented between advertisements or on continuous loop

Plenty, 2008 3 min. 15 sec. 8410 W. Sunset Blvd (opposite Hyatt Hotel), West Hollywood, CA 90069 (Daily, fragmented between advertisements) Key Club, 9039 Sunset Blvd, West Hollywood, CA, 90069 (Daily, fragmented between advertisements)
LACMA West at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036, visible from Fairfax Ave at 6th Street (Screened daily on continuous loop)

Louise Lawler Audio installations presented in Pasadena and Santa Monica and online on womeninthecity.org

Birdcalls, 1972-81/2008 Birdcalls mocks the inequity between male and female representation in the art market of the time. By recreating the phonetic pronunciation of the names of male artists as sounds that mimicked the cry of birds, Lawler transforms surnames synonymous with success into mating calls. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108 Visiting hours: Monday through Friday, 12-4:30pm; Sat/Sun 10:30am-4:30pm; Closed Tuesdays. Broadcast on www.womeninthecity.org

A Movie will be shown without the picture, 1979/2008 February 14, 7:30pm American Cinematheque, Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90405 The work, screened solely with audio, was originally presented at the Aero Theater in 1979, where it will be reprised this Valentine’s Day.

Cindy Sherman: Four of Sherman’s iconic film stills are installed on billboards throughout Los Angeles.

Untitled, 1980/2008 Hollywood & Highland Center, 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028 Facing Orange Street

Untitled, 1977/2008 Hollywood Plaza at Hollywood & Highland Center, 6801 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028

Untitled, 1980/2008 8400 block W Sunset Boulevard (approximate) at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Olive Street, West Hollywood, CA 90069 On view February 27, 2008

Untitled, 1978/2008 Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Billboard at 6100 Wilshire Boulevard (approximate) on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard at Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90048 On view February 19, 2008

ABOUT THE ARTISTS Jenny Holzer began to appropriate the text of common colloquialisms to manipulate the language of pop-culture early in her career. Holzer was born in Gallipolis, Ohio in 1950. She holds a BFA from Ohio State University, Athens (1972) in printmaking and design, and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Following graduation, Holzer enrolled in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and began creating her first all text series, Truisms (1977), which she printed on paper and anonymously pasted throughout New York City to deliberately challenge the viewer to question stereotypes. Holzer has continued to create thought provoking works that have used appropriated political texts, slogans, and other writings from leading cultural figures and to distribute these works virally, and often subliminally, throughout urban environments. For Women in the City, Holzer translates her texts into Spanish to further impact the Los Angeles community.

Holzer has received numerous awards including the Art Institute of Chicago’s Blair Award (1972) and the Golden Lion Award (1990) given at the Venice Biennale for best national pavilion. She has also created many public projects, among them a display of Truisms in Times Square in 1982, sponsored by the Public Art Fund, and, in 1989, a series of public spots for MTV. Her works have also been included in solo and group exhibitions. She has also published many books including A Little Knowledge (1979); Black Book (1980); Hotel (with Peter Nadin, 1980); Eating Friends (with Nadin,1981); Eating Through Living (with Nadin, 1981); and Truisms and Essays (1983).

Barbara Kruger’s internationally acclaimed artworks are primarily concerned with issues of feminism, consumerism, and power. Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She attended Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studied at Parson’s School of Design in New York. Her work emerged in the late 1970s, in an era that developed ideologies now considered postmodern, when artists began to appropriate and deconstruct images already in circulation. Kruger, having initially worked for Condé Nast publications as head designer at Mademoiselle magazine, buttressed a visual language informed by advertising. Reproducing the codes of mass media in an attempt to expose and disable them, she focuses on the de-construction of stereotypes and clichés through the pairing of images with text.

Since 1974, Kruger has had 48 solo exhibitions in galleries and museums including Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Gagosian, Los Angeles; Artist’s Space, New York; P.S.1, New York; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She represented the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1982 and 2005, when she was honored at the 51st Venice Biennale with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. In recent years, Kruger has extended her aesthetic project, creating public installations of her work in galleries, museums, municipal buildings, train stations, and parks, as well as on busses and billboards around the world.

Louise Lawler’s work questions how an artwork becomes historicized by capturing the social framework that surrounds it. Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. A member of the appropriationist movement (alongside figures such as Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger). Lawler is considered one of the most significant visual artists of the past three decades.

Since the 1970s, Lawler has tracked how the meaning of artworks changes radically in different contexts as they pass through museums, galleries, auction houses, and collectors’ homes. She therefore plays on the contrast between the way that a work of art is conventionally represented and the detail of its presentation. While Lawler is best known for her photography, she employs a range of media in her work, and Women in the City features two audio installations, Birdcalls and A Movie will be shown without the picture.

Louise Lawler’s work has been widely showcased at major solo exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Her photographs are also featured in the permanent collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover.

Cindy Sherman is a renowned American photographer and film director known for her conceptual self-portraits. Cindy Sherman was born in 1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and she lives and works in New York. Sherman emerged onto the New York scene in the early 1980s alongside post-feminism and punk, yet her language voiced through the medium of photography and self-portraiture was so unique that it defied categorization.

Sherman gained notoriety by acting as both auteur and subject in her early Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). In this series, she consciously emulated stereotypical roles of women and then reproduced them as excerpts from a film, appropriating the act of looking in order to transform it into a narrative in which all eyes focused on Cindy, but it was Sherman’s vision that directed the gaze. By casting herself as the object of desire, her work calls into question constructs of identity, voyeurism, the role of a woman, and the role of the artist.

In 1995, The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired all 69 of the black-and-white photographs in the series. Also in 1995, Sherman was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In addition to numerous group exhibitions, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1982) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1987). A retrospective organized by Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, traveled throughout Europe in 1996 and 1997.

SUPPORT Women in the City is made possible by generous support provided by François Pinault Foundation, The Broad Art Foundation and the Pasadena Arts Council.

Women in the City is produced with the help of partners including American Cinematheque, Background Images, the City of Pasadena Art and Culture Commission, the City of West Hollywood's Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission, ForYourArt, Hollywood & Highland Center, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, Internationalist Marketing/TheBooth.net, KCRW, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum/ of/ Traffic, National Promotions & Advertising, Primary Color, the Roosevelt Hotel, The Standard Hotel, Downtown, L.A.

ABOUT WEST OF ROME West of Rome, initiated in 2005, is an ongoing project throughout Los Angeles conceived and organized by Emi Fontana. It consists of a series of contemporary art exhibitions and public installation and events that activate the relationship between the audience and the city. The dynamic nature of the various sites, which exist according to conditions specified by invited artists, reinforces the collective experience often lost in traditional gallery or museum exhibitions.

With Women in the City, West of Rome launches its non-profit art organization that will continue to address the relationship between the audience and the city.

www.womeninthecity.org

WOMEN IN THE CITY
Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman