TIFFANY SHLAIN

About The Future Is Female 

​

On view throughout 21c St. Louis’ gallery spaces, The Future is Female highlights the impact of the art of the Second Wave Women’s movement on today’s cultural landscape while examining contemporary definitions of female identity and experience. Through the works of feminist artists such as Zoë Buckman, Vibha Galhotra, Frances Goodman, Jenny Holzer, Yvette Molina, Zanele Muholi, Michele Pred, Tiffany Shlain, Alison Saar, Mickalene Thomas, and others, the exhibition explores representations of the body, the influence of craft-based art making, and the evolution of definitions of gender and sexuality. 

​

The affirmation of the self as subject and the prevalence of craft-based practices such as sewing, weaving, embroidery, and appliqué in today’s art reflects the ongoing influence of feminist art of the 1970s, which merged art and activism, elevating everyday materials, methods, and experiences, and shifting art-making out of the isolated studio and hallowed institutions into both more intimate domestic and broader public spheres. The ensuing transformation ushered in generations of artists addressing identity, the body, and the validation of personal experience. 

​

“Today, feminist artists remain at the forefront of illuminating inequality and discrimination due to gender, race, and sexual identity, issues which often intersect with economic and ecological 

crises,” says 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites. “Varied, articulate, and often urgent, the voices and visions presented in this exhibition express the need for social, economic, and political change in order to build a more inclusive and equitable future.” 

​

The inventive use of language, whether printed, projected, or recorded animates works by Carrie Mae Weems, Jenny Holzer, and Nina Katchadourian, introducing unexpected voices into both art and history that resonate as private and public at once. Weems and Holzer use text to interrogate power through self-expression, creating new narratives for cultural and political resistance, while Katchadourian voices the frustrations of everyday life, inserting her artistic identity into the male-dominated history of portraiture. 

​

Featured prominently in the exhibition is the work of Zoë Buckman, a multidisciplinary artist who explores themes of gender, power, intimacy, and popular culture. Eight works from Buckman’s oeuvre, created over the last ten years, will be on view at 21c St. Louis, including Champ (2016) from her “Mostly It’s Just Uncomfortable” series, which the artist conceived as a response to the attack on Planned Parenthood; grow clumsier still, an embroidered, intimate portrait of a couple (2023); three works from her series, “Every Curve,” which explores the contradictory and complementary influences of Feminism and Hip-Hop; and three of Buckman’s boxing glove works from “Let Her Rave,” including Wakeful Anguish (2017), which comprises 18 boxing gloves and fragments of a vintage wedding dress hung on a chain. 

​

Expanding beyond the individual experience to a shared one, Vibha Galhotra and Alison Saar evoke Classical mythology mixed with grim reality to create culturally critical work addressing shared global concerns, connecting past and present adversities resulting from the intersection of environmental destruction and social inequality. The female population of Saya Woolfalk’s utopian vision transcends binary divisions. Inspired equally by science and science fiction, nature and technology, Woolfalk’s Empathics are hybrid creatures whose DNA combines genetic materials from humans and plants, a cross-species who are highly culturally adaptive and who feel and understand deeply the experiences of others. 

​

The intersecting relationship between ecological evolution and equal rights is evoked in Melanie Bonajo’s Matrix Botanica-Biosphere above Nations, a film both poignant and humorous about the treatment of “Mother Earth,” and in Tiffany Shlain’s Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring. Using pyrography, Shlain burned text into the lines of an ancient tree ring to tell a 50,000-year global history of humanity through a feminist lens, from the time of goddess worship through witch trials, the expansion of the right to vote, access to abortion and birth control, the election of women leaders in 86 countries, to the recent loss of women’s rights, including the repeal of Roe v Wade in 2022, the election of Vice President Kamala Harris and the election of the first trans Senator, Sarah McBride, and finally with the words “Today:”... serving as an invitation to the viewers to think about what they want to help make happen next. “I wanted to give a longer perspective on where we stand and show the back and forth of progress, and how we have to keep pushing for the world we want,“ explains the artist. “I have always been fascinated by the tree ring timelines at the entrance of Muir Woods or any National Park. However, I also felt like those timelines tell a colonialist and patriarchal story. Dendrofemonology: A Feminist History Tree Ring imagines what alternate histories could be told and reminds us we shape what comes next." 

​

Alluding to a phrase first popularized by a woman-centric bookstore in the 1970s, and revived in recent years as a mantra for the continuing demands for equal rights and challenging notions of binary identity, The Future is Female offers a timely exploration of gender politics through artworks that subvert, challenge, and reshape the constraints and conventions imposed by the patriarchy.