For Art's Sake-1

"Plants and flowers appeared throughout Frida Kahlo’s paintings, and although interpreting her art regularly evokes her biography of illness, injury, pain, and tumultuous love, the first exhibition to examine her work from a botanical perspective opens this week at a garden. Constructing a tribute to the flora of her Casa Azul home in Coyoacán south of Mexico City, which she shared off and on with muralist Diego Rivera, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in the Bronx pairs this assembly of cacti, succulents, perennials, and other leafy specimens from her garden with a small exhibition of 14 drawings and paintings."

Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life opens at the New York Botanical Garden (2900 Southern Boulevard, The Bronx) on May 16 and continues through November 1.

http://www.nybg.org/frida/

For women, photography was different, says Gabriele Schor, the Austrian curator of Bozar’s new exhibition, WOMAN: The Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, which stands as the centrepiece of the fifth biennial Summer of Photography festival in Brussels.

According to Schor, when women took up photography and other new media in the 1960s and ’70s, it was an act of artistic emancipation. “For the first time in the history of art, the ‘image of women’ was being created by women,” she says.

WOMAN, a collection of 450 works – mostly photographs – by 29 European and American female artists of the 1970s, sets the tone for this year’s festival, which takes a penetrating look into the world of gender and how it is performed and experienced in different societies.

Spearheaded by Bozar and in collaboration with 36 partners, Summer of Photography spreads across 20 locations in the Brussels-Capital Region, representing more than 85 artists.

Until 31 August 2014.

http://www.summerofphotography.be/

The Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York is holding a touching exhibition of thirty photographs of women taken from early last century up to the present day. In the many black-and-white photographs, the selection features many big names like Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Alexander Rodchenko, Sarah Moon...