Lisa E Bloom

This spring a ground-breaking exhibition appeared at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA). Titled, About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging, the exhibition challenges standard curatorial processes when exhibiting work by Black artists and points to a new role that university art museums should adopt in the coming years. Working with the constraints of limited space and resources, two Berkeley professors, Lauren Kroiz and Leigh Raiford and their graduate students began with the challenge: what if the museum could be viewed “as a space of care” rather than as an institutional setting that typically excludes and marginalizes Black art or relegates it to temporary exhibitions designed to “correct” the historical failure of the Black survey exhibition.

The chapter as a whole illustrates some of the possibilities and problems currently haunting the area of Jewish participation in the making and the history of feminist art in the United States.The signficance that gender, class, Jewishness, Marxism, and nationalism have for Martha Rosler is evident throughout her work, though her artistic practice has only recently been written about from such an intersectional perspective.

This article draws attention to how photography is changing art, by imagining a politics through which to structure a future around something other than the failed visions of technological modernization and nuclear expansion. Focusing on the ongoing environmental damage of events such as Chernobyl 32 years later, the author considers the Swedish artist Lina Selander's 'Lenin's Lamp Glows in the Peasant Hut' to examine how photography and video may work together to address the present and future force of that disaster's ongoing environmental aftermath with history's failed Soviet dream of progress. She proposes that 'Lenin's Lamp', in its work with the temporality of material remains and impressions, is a work of hauntological environmental art that engages viewers in hope and dread. How the work stages this dual affective response through its work with the temporalities of photographic and filmic artifacts is the subject of this article.

This chapter focuses on environmental work by activist artists and experimental filmmakers on the polar regions that attempt to visually address new forms of art, feeling, and sociality that are coming into being in the age of the Anthropocene (arguments here build on those developed in Bloom 1993; Bloom, Glasberg and Kay 2008; and Bloom and Glasberg 2012). Art and experimental film practitioners are starting to make a significant contribution to the field of Arctic discourses. The chapter analyzes how the artists and filmmakers under consideration, Ursula Biemann and Brenda Longfellow and the Yes Men, here develop a unique aesthetic language to explore their concern with the Arctic, the anthropocene and how it relates to the very concrete realms of the fossil fuel industry, capitalist development, and political notions of territory in the Canadian Tar Sands and the Russian Arctic. It is concerned with the very scope of witnessing, as the extraction of peak oil changes climates in countries very far afield from where oil is produced.  These artistic projects also seek to draw connections between the strategies oil companies used to conceal the world’s largest and most unsightly sites of resource extraction and processing from view, and the ways that both  nonhumans and the poor and racially minoritized humans have long been disproportionately exposed to the harmful by-products of the oil industry as well as the harshest effects of a warming planet.

Guest-edited with co-authors Elena Glasberg and Laura Kay. The entire issue is online at: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ice/index.htm.
The works featured in "Gender on Ice" demonstrate the way historical and contemporary representations of the poles are far from gender neutral, and in fact, beg for feminist critique and perspective to dismantle, or at least disrupt, the older histories that have formed public and scholarly imaginations to date.

Challenges the politics of gender and race underlying the practice of art history. Edited anthology. Contributors: Jennifer Gonzalez, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Aida Mancillas, Francette Pacteau, Ann Pellegrini, Griselda Pollock, Irit Rogoff, Shawn Smith, Ruth Wallen, Margie waller.

Given the ongoing political upheavals in the US, and the EU, what kind of artists’ work is relevant in an age of populist uprisings, when the far right is gaining power throughout the world? Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl: War Games, one of the most important exhibitions of the year, offers compelling evidence in answer to such a question. This affectively and intellectually intriguing exhibition is noteworthy in demonstrating the surprising affinities and shared concerns across countries (US and Germany) and generations (60s and 90s) of two renowned women artists. Both are theoreticians and creative practitioners whose work reveals the capacity of art to understand and transform the violence which shapes our world.

This chapter focuses on Clement Greenberg, the New York art world's foremost Jewish critic during the postwar period, for the purposes of bringing to the surface the unacknowledged role of Jewish and their negotiations of their place in the history of American art, the "New York art world," and art criticism, In this book, Greenberg serves as a place holder for naming a set of problems around the whitening of Jewish immigrants and immigrant culture in the United States, a process that indeed established a monolithic and flattened idea of Jewishness in the 1940s. The mechanisms through which the American art establishment banished specificity with claims to the universal, most notably through the writings of Greenberg, promoted art world dogmas and norms (Abstract Expressionism, the myth of the individual genius, New York as the center of the art world) that silenced Jewish specificity and Jewish identity, just as Jews were becoming, for the first time, a strong visible presence in the arts.

Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art is a study of Jewishness and US feminist art practices aimed at understanding a past that no longer exists but continues to haunt the present with its assumptions and omissions. The book addresses the unacknowledged but powerful roles of assimilation and Jewish identities in US feminist art, especially in light of renewed critical interest in these issues in both within the US and internationally. This study is based on both historical research and oral interviews with artists, and traces the various ways in which Jewishness and feminism were marked in the 1970s, both in various Southern Californian artistic communities and in urban centers such as New York and Chicago.

Why, after so many years of relative neglect, write on questions of gender, geographies, nationalism and jewish identities in the 1970s California art world? The difficulties feminist art historians have confronted in dealing with racial, ethnic, and generational differences from the 1970s has let me to revisit the work of Eleanor Antin, who stands out as one of the few artists who actually foregrounded in her work these intractable differences. The article provides a critical account of different kinds of  practices in Antin's work.