In This Issue
• Famke Janssen Celebrates Women Artists
• Centre Pompidou Devotes Entire Museum to Women
• Congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow!!
• Other SWAN Day Announcements
Famke Janssen Celebrates Women Artists
Famke Janssen
For this year’s International Women’s Day, we are delighted to share a new SWAN Day video featuring film and television star, Famke Janssen.
Janssen is best known for her role as the super-hero Dr. Jean Grey/Phoenix in the blockbuster action film trilogy X-Men (2000), X2 (2003), and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). She won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in X-Men: The Last Stand, a movie that ranks #82 in all-time world-wide ticket sales ($459 million).
Off-screen Janssen is thoughtful and articulate. She is pursuing her interests in writing and directing as well as acting, she is an animal rights activist, and she was recently named as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.
In the interview, Janssen shares her passion for the emotionally intense work of sculptor Louise Bourgeois, and speaks about the power of art to communicate internationally. She urges women artists to share our visions with the world on SWAN Day and every day. Watch the video>>
Centre Pompidou Devotes Devotes Entire Museum to Women
On International Women’s Day, we want to salute the visionary leadership of Camille Morineau, the curator of elles@centrepompidou, the massive exhibit of women’s art that is currently at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and will run until February 21, 2011.
The Centre Pompidou has the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe, but this year they are showing only their works by women. They have filled the walls of the entire museum with over 500 works by 200 women artists from the 20th century to the present. Their goal is to show the history of art for this period entirely through the works of women artists – recognizing women as central forces in the art of their times, instead of considering them as footnotes in a history created by men.
Elles@CentrePompidou
Morineau discovered gender issues and women’s studies when she came to the U.S. to attend Williams College twenty years ago. When she returned to France, she worked for ten years at l’Ecole du Louvre and tried to create a gender studies program there with no luck. It took her six years to win support and shape the exhibit at Centre Pompidou. As Morineau said in an interview with the LA Times, “Excluding men and showing only women is a revolutionary gesture of affirmative action.
In the States, you think about women’s art. In France, never. It’s not a subject. If the subject does not exist, there is no possibility of discussion. For me, that’s the big issue about doing this. We are turning it into a subject.”
If you can’t make it to Paris, you can still enjoy a lot of the work online. There is a cool interactive video on the website for the exhibit. This section of their site is in French, but just click on the woman with orange hair to see the video. Even if you don’t speak the language, you can see the artist’s names and look at the images. On the website page, if you click on “Plan de l’exposition” in the upper right part of the screen, it will take you to a map of the exhibit – you can click on each room to see images of the art inside. If you click on “Fresque Chronologique” in the lower middle part of the screen, you will see an interactive timeline of women’s art. You can click on the images on the timeline and see videos of the artists. A catalogue in English is also available which you can order online for approximately $75 US.
Congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow!
Kathryn Bigelow made history at this year’s Oscars by becoming the first woman to win in the category of Best Director for her film, “The Hurt Locker”, which also won for Best Picture. Hurray, Kathryn!
Only three other women have been nominated for Best Director in the 82 year history of the Oscars – Linda Wertmüller for “Seven Beauties,” 1976; Jane Campion for “The Piano,” 1993; and Sofia Coppola for “Lost In Translation,” 2003.
Although there is still a long way to go for women to have true equality in the film industry, Bigelow’s win feels like a victory for all of us who are working so hard to fight discrimination against women in the arts. Slowly but surely, our ability to inspire each other and support each other is showing results. Congratulations to Kathyrn Bigelow and to all of us!
Two SWAN Day Organizers Seek Visual Art
Two SWAN Day organizers are collecting visual art to exhibit as part of their SWAN Day celebrations.
SWAN Day Berlin in Germany has posted guidelines in English at: http://www.swandayberlin.org/english/2010/downloads/Application.pdf and in German at: www.swandayberlin.org/2010/downloads/Bewerbung.pdf
SWAN Day of the Greater South Bay in San Jose, California is creating a SWAN Online Studio at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/swanonlinestudio/ If you have questions about their guidelines, please email swanonline@yahoo.com
Be Sure to Post Your SWAN Day Events
If you are planning a SWAN Day event, be sure to post it on our
SWAN Day events calendar>>
If you are still looking for ways to participate in SWAN Day, check out our list>>
WomenArts is a community of artists and allies dedicated to celebrating and supporting art by and about women. For an overview of our programs and services, please see the About Us section of our web site.