Outdoor landscape settings offered Brigman, and the female artists who followed her, the freedom to confront art historical traditions, embrace nature, and re-claim a space for women through their art. To illustrate this, a companion exhibition to Anne Brigman’s, Laid Bare in the Landscape, assembles photographs, films, and performance documentation by women artists who also situate the nude female body in outdoor landscapes. From beautiful and sensual self-portraits, to sometimes-surreal and provocative statements by feminist artists beginning in the early 1970s, these women interrogate ideas surrounding beauty, femininity, vulnerability, ritual, identity, and body politics, as they relate to nature and the environment. According to Wolfe, “to compare the proto-feminist landscape photographs of Brigman to her feminist counterparts of the latter twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries is to weave a new thread through generations of visionary women artists who have aimed to further alternative ways of seeing and knowing.” The exhibition features: Laura Aguilar, Judy Chicago, Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Judy Dater, Mary Beth Edelson, Regina Jose Galindo, Kirsten Justesen, Ana Mendieta, Joan Myers, Otobong Nkanga, Cara Romero, Carollee Schneemann, Xaviera Simmons, Jo Spence, Sarah Trouche, and Francesca Woodman.
Anne Brigman: A Visionary in Modern Photography and Laid Bare in the Landscape are curated by Ann M. Wolfe, Andrea and John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director at the Nevada Museum of Art. The exhibitions open September 29, 2018 and remain on view through January 27, 2019 at the Nevada Museum of Art, Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts, E. L. Wiegand Gallery located in downtown Reno, Nevada.
