John Shipman at Nuit Blanche

“…the intention was to select an imaginary lover’s sex and gender…”

Never before have I arrived at a subway station, turned around, and left because the lineup not only filled the staircase but exceeded single file. Until last night. Hordes of people squeezed into Kipling station, presumably to head to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, the all-night art festival in Toronto. I don’t want to sound like an old fogey, but I have fond memories of walking through the drizzling rain with my sister in the first year of Nuit Blanche. Bumping into mutual acquaintances before all the hype, it felt, dare I say, magical? I would compare the next visit to my first experience at a music festival wherein I got caught in a Ministry mosh pit—I remember grasping for hands in the crowd of art lovers at the University of Toronto and feeling empathy for those afflicted by claustrophobia. That experience caused me to avoid attending last year, even though I was in a show at Red Head Gallery. This year, I decided to wise up and brave the crowds once again.

After failed attempt #1, my husband and I returned home and set out again at midnight. Arriving at a heritage church at about 12:45 am, I thought to myself wryly, “Well, I’ve never been to church this early on a Sunday.” I was too tired to laugh at my own joke, let alone share it with my husband. However, I was determined to catch this particular show. In St. Matthew’s United Church in Zone A, Toronto-based John Shipman exhibited Listening to Love: Next Time Can We Choose Our Gender? Incidentally, Shipman was part of a three-person installation last year in the same location. In it, the artists invited visitors to explore their own mortality through condolence books and CoffinPhones containing audio tracks of expressions of grief.

This year, the entrance contained artifacts from the so-called Museum of Gender Archaeology. Mounted on a hut-like structure were vestiges of our gender binarism, like figurines with arms amputated by pink and blue razors (pink for girls and blue for boys, of course). There were also signs of hope, like a tongue-in-cheek gadget called the ‘gender changer’ and an unaltered sign for a unisex bathroom, which are becoming mandated at more and more schools.

In the church proper, last year’s CoffinPhones were replaced by GendeRphones. I got myself situated and looked at the dials containing the bathroom pictograms for male/female and the letters XX and XY. I had to remind myself which gender is XX and which is XY. “Oh right,” I thought, “Henry VIII had no right to be upset with his wives for not giving him a son because it’s the man who contributes the determining chromosome.” (My father and high school biology teacher must have been rolling in his grave). Looking at the press release in retrospect, I realize that the intention was to select an imaginary lover’s sex and gender, which underscores society’s tendency to lump them together. Mistakenly, I thought it was an opportunity to select my own gender and my prospective lover’s gender. No matter. I think it engaged the same principles of fantasy and open-mindedness.

The digitized voice made endless loving statements in the same static voices library phone systems use, which turn my name into ‘Heether.’ It was a quirky contrast to the sentiment of the expressions, especially “I hear your voice on my skin.” Some were clichés, some were so poetic you can’t imagine anyone actually saying them, some were riddled with everyday references (I love kissing you when you’ve been drinking diet Coke) and others had contemporary references (I love how Facebook tells me we are in a relationship). Most were outpourings of love but some were invitations to love. In terms of the latter, I imagine I was not alone in having a hard time feeling an affinity with the disembodied digital voices. Thus, it was appropriate that business cards were inserted throughout the installation that quoted Marshall McLuhan: “When you are on the phone...you have no body.”

It was a challenge to hear the digitized voices because of the music playing in the church. When there was a pause between songs, you could hear overlapping female and male audio tracks on the phone but otherwise, it was pnly possible to make out the dominant track. I found myself wishing the music were off so I could enjoy this element. That impulse went away when Leonard Cohen’s incredible song, Hallejlujah, belted out over the speakers. For the duration of the song, I was overcome by hope for freedom in the realm of gender identity and knew it was worth it that I’d be crawling into bed at 2 am with my XY.

This woman's work...

“…craft and art have become rather comfortable bedfellows.”

The apparent absence of external signage for Project Space worked out alright last night because my husband and I took in many of the sights and sounds of Supercrawl before attending the opening that brought us to Hamilton. A few that come to mind are a child transfixed by a harp, a chorus belting out a song with lyrics consisting of but one word (meow), street planters adorned with cozy wraps containing messages like ‘fail better.’

This woman’s work… is on show at Project Space until October 1. Curated by Sally Frater, it features textile-based work by seven female artists from southern Ontario. Amongst the emerging artists is Shelley Niro, who acts as a keystone. Maybe the spectrum of emerging to established artists would feel more palatable in a larger exhibition, with the inclusion of other artists of her ilk to create balance. As is, the closest thing is a reference to Joyce Wieland, in Erika De Freitas’ Oh Canada, In Conversation, an embroidery which is a nod to Wieland’s print of lip marks while singing the national anthem. The date of Niro’s works, the oldest being 1993, makes her something of a double anomaly in relation to the rest of the show, which features mostly new work. It was back in 1993, incidentally, that Estella Lauter wrote of the legitimization of craft in art as being “still partial” (1). Today, though, the Project Space show is promoted by Toronto Craft Alert, and craft and art have become rather comfortable bedfellows.

Some of the works are almost too easy of a fit for the theme, such as Hitoko Okada’s intricately constructed beehive dress. Emphasis on construction of the work is apparent in most works, like the needles hanging from red threads that in turn descend from the pubic area of Insoon Ha’s all-white nightgown; the half-covered hanger amidst traditional Hungarian (I believe) stitching by Ingrid Mayrhofer; areas of concentrated pins puncturing the whitish-pink surfaces of Simone Aziga’s sculptural dress-like forms that hang overhead; and Colina Maxwell’s machine-stitched cityscape made from a sweater, accompanied by a video of its production. The latter is another example of work that, on the surface, makes sense in the mix, but ultimately seems to be less about the convergence of feminism and craft and more about other issues (in this case, recycling and, by virtue of its floral motif shifting vertically in the collage process, the downsides of urban sprawl).

References:
(1) Estella Lauter, “Re-enfranchising Art: Feminist Interventions in The Theory of Art,” pp. 21-34, quotation p. 28, in Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds., Aesthetics In Feminist Perspective. (Hypatia, Inc.).

!Women Art Revolution

"Altogether, 12,428 minutes of footage were 'patched together like a quilt'."

Amidst graffiti that spelled ‘vomit,’ neighbourhoods of dilapidated homes, and scenes like this one my husband shot, we found ourselves in a stunningly beautiful place in downtown Detroit last week-end. We attended the final night of the summer film series at the Detroit Institute of Arts in this stellar auditorium: (click here). I was as excited about the venue as I was about the film: !Women Art Revolution, directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson (a featured artist in the exhibition whose catalogue I worked on at the Neuberger Museum of Art earlier this year, The Deconstructive Impulse).

Leeson recounts in !W.A.R. how she wrote reviews of her work pseudonymously when she was an emerging artist, resulting in her first exhibition. Her next big accomplishment was a major sale of her work, but the collector backed out upon learning her gender because he said it would be a poor investment to buy the work of a female artist. Today, that body of work by Leeson is valued at 9,000 times its original price. Look who’s laughing now. Impressively, Leeson financed the film with sales from her own work, which makes me want to promote it even more.

!W.A.R. is not unlike The Heretics, which I blogged about last year. That’s not a criticism, and it may be inevitable given that both documentaries cover similar time periods, with Leeson’s being about the development of feminist art in America and Joan Braderman’s The Heretics being about the development of a magazine in New York City about feminist art. !W.A.R. is a great counterpart to The Heretics, in part because much of the footage was filmed on the opposite coast, from her living room in Berkeley, California. Some interviews were filmed elsewhere, like the one with Judy Chicago in a bathroom noted for its decent acoustics. Many of the same artists and critics, such as Harmony Hammond and Lucy Lippard, are interviewed in both films. And both films have a quirky sensibility, complete with sound effects and playful cartoons/animations. For example, !W.A.R. shows a cartoon of Nancy Spero being forced to show her portfolio to a gallerist on the floor instead of on a nearby sculpture stand. That is the least of the unconscionable behaviour discussed in the interviews. As in The Heretics, many of the women interviewed by Leeson root the feminist art movement in social justice and general consciousness raising. For me, there are two unforgettable clips in !W.A.R.. One is Arlene Raven’s deadpan description of her effectively going on strike as a domestic servant, followed almost immediately by the collapse of her marriage; right when you might laugh at the absurdity of cause and effect, she reveals that she was raped three days later. The other clip is of African American artist, Howardena Pindell, remembering how as a child, she was tied to her cot during nap time to prevent her from using the same bathroom as the white children. The film balances these sobering tales by including interviews with the likes of Marcia Tucker, who notes that humour is the greatest tool in fighting adversity. And it is interesting to hear from artists like Faith Wilding, who didn’t feel feminist rage as a newly married woman but found herself in the movement nonetheless.

Altogether, 12,428 minutes of footage were “patched together like a quilt.” A highlight of the film is its inclusion of archival footage other than interviews. It was a real treat to see the opening of the Womanhouse installation in which CAL ARTS students each took over a room in an old house; Congress debating whether Judy Chicago’s installation, The Dinner Party, was pornographic; and protests at the Guggenheim when a survey exhibition excluded female artists and included Carl Andre, who was acquitted controversially shortly beforehand in the murder of his artist-wife, Ana Mendieta, who fell to her death from their New York apartment.

The focus of !W.A.R. is definitely on the 1970s, but it does extend to later developments, such as the creation of the Guerilla Girls (the mask-wearing educators who continue to ask pointed questions of institutions through posters, protests, and lectures to remedy the double standard facing women artists). Also included is a discussion of the major feminist exhibition, WACK!, and interviews with several contemporary feminist artists. The one that stood out for me as a librarian was Janine Antoni saying that she couldn’t find library books on any of the feminist artists her professors suggested she research.

Towards the end, film critic B. Ruby Ritch expresses concern that the survivors of the feminist artist movement are like old KGB agents, relegated to a scrapbook that no one’s interested in now. With its poignant interviews and its plethora of images by women artists, !Women Art Revolution will hopefully prove otherwise.

The Ardours of Youth

“The titillation factor of the show is striking…”


The other day, I was surprised to read that Nirvana’s Nevermind album was released 20 years ago. Has that much time really gone by since my high school friends and I donned plaid shirts and made moon-eyes at boys playing Nirvana covers in local bands? Gulp. It seemed timely that the latest exhibition at The Art Bar at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel featured a collective named for a Nirvana song. And it seemed fitting, at least for me personally, that the theme of the collective’s recent photo shoot in Vice magazine, many of whose images are in the show, was crushes.

The international collective Ardorous is spearheaded by eighteen-year-old Petra Collins, an incoming OCADU student. I was eager to catch the show before it closed today, to support young female artists and to see what all the buzz was about. The collective’s first exhibition is called In Bloom. Given my fixation on signifiers of femininity in my own work, I was keen to see a show emphasizing “girly imagery of flowers, hearts and the colour pink” (1). The curatorial statement noted that the show was a “response to what has been ingrained in our hearts as ‘feminine[,]’ which we have chosen to embrace and celebrate.” (2) Not knowing if ‘we’ meant society or the collective, I felt some trepidation. The word ‘celebrate’ had come up recently in another curatorial text, in relation to Alex Prager’s CONTACT installation, and that didn’t sit so well with me. It was unclear whether In Bloom would be a critique of society’s celebration of femininity and be heavy on irony, or if it would simply be a celebration.

The show struck me not as ironic but as—to use 2.0 parlance—WYSIWYG. The soft focus and 1960s-style colour of the photographs make them easy on the eyes, but what defines them as eye candy is the subject matter. The statement for the collective explains the origin of its name beyond its namesake by including the definition of ardour (sexual excitement and a temporary feeling of warmth). The titillation factor of the show is striking: young women in the shower, a young woman’s buttocks poking out of denim shorts, long blond hair brushing against the waistband of a pair of tighty whities, etc. It made me wonder, does placing images of sexy young women in a bar complicate the art viewing experience? There was one gratuitous online comment about the collective that turned my stomach, causing me to doubt whether the combination of alchohol and these images is advisable. Also, in light of the recent controversy surrounding ten-year-old model, Thylane Loubry Blondeau in Paris Vogue, how young is too young for sexy photos? In spite of a risqué reading, there is an earnest quality throughout In Bloom that is a welcome change to the plethora of garish images exploiting sexuality and going viral these days. Perhaps fresh-faced sexuality verges on “girl power” (3) after all, because the young women are controlling their presentation as in classic boudoir photos. ‘Boy of my dreams’ hand-written over the pubic area on floral cotton briefs is far less disturbing than the phrases silkscreened onto store bought underwear; obsessive though it may be, the writer is thinking with her own mind. Or heart. Or libido.

Mostly, however, I’m stumped by how the show portrays girl power, since the artists don’t seem to be fighting any of the restrictions placed on them. The one exception might be a photo by Swedish artist, Emma Arvida Bystorm of a young woman lying on the grass with her hands behind her head, with bright red lips, carefully coiffed hair, and unshaven armpits that buck Western convention. It’s the counterpart to the promotional image by the same artist used for the show: a close-up of a tangerine coloured bikini bottom, with sprawling pubic hairs that must have done wonders for attendance. Its title, Lolita, reveals cultural awareness. A risk of exhibiting at a young age is lacking sufficient artistic/cultural awareness: the image that comes to mind is from a heart-shaped montage of 4 x 6-inch prints without individual artists identified, in which two girls have their hair braided together in a fashion that is disturbingly derivative of Relation in Time (1977) by artist Marina Abramović.

The show was so heavily focused on photography that it would have been stronger with one medium. Ardorous' website takes this approach and feels substantially more cohesive. Besides photographs, In Bloom included a few paintings and multiple floral headbands (the latter caused me to wonder, “Is it art? Is it craft?” without like-minded works to build the case either way). Equally distracting was the Metro article on Collins, which was torn at the edges and attached to the wall in the middle of the show. Most distracting were the permanent botanicals strewn throughout the room, taking the interpretation of the ‘in bloom’ theme too far. The most curious installation of them was in a corner beside the montage of photos: on a pedestal surrounded by devotional candles, it functioned as a makeshift reliquary. On the one hand, it could be regarded as a commentary on the veneration of youth and beauty (which is a bit strange considering the irreverent quality of the show). On the other hand, with business cards on top, it could easily be seen as self-aggrandizement.

(1) (2) (3) Curatorial text by Madelyne Beckles.

For images, see www.theardorous.com.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (Don’t let the bastards grind you down)*

“...it’s difficult to bottom line a library.”

I can’t call myself a Torontonian without reservation: I was raised in a rural village two hours away and I only spend five days a week downtown for work. Cumulatively, however, I have had a Toronto address for exactly half of my adult life. Thus, I can relate to the swell of Toronto pride this week, apparent in others’ conversations and social media comments about “my [their] city.” It’s a direct response to the new era defined by the mayorship of Rob Ford.

Threats to close Toronto Public Library branches alarmed the masses, causing concerned citizens to camp out during the 24 hour City Council meeting. The concern is over what is at stake but also over the cavalier attitude that accompanies the push towards privatization. Rob Ford’s elder brother, Coun. Doug Ford, noted that his Scarborough neighbourhood has more libraries than Tim Hortons—as if the two are mutually exclusive? My hometown, incidentally, went for years without a Tim Hortons but I think if the library were missing, it would leave a gaping hole.

Celebrated author Margaret Atwood became the unofficial spokesperson for the fight to save TPL. Her alliances with the library world have been apparent for years, notably in her presentation at an American Library Association conference. At any rate, she appealed to fans through her Twitter feed on several occasions to sign an online petition. The surge of John Hancocks actually crashed the TPL Workers Union server, and at last count, I heard there were 39,000 signatures. On Tuesday, Coun. Doug Ford retorted that he didn’t know Atwood and wouldn’t even recognize her. Yet, this is a woman whose portrait has been painted by Charles Pachter. I can picture the low-brow response: Q-Who’s Charles Pachter? If he walked right past me, I wouldn’t recognize him. A-Oh bother! He painted the Queen. There you have it, Atwood is in line with the Queen…not in line to be Queen, but she is Canadian literary royalty, with a stunning 21 honourary degrees and myriad awards including the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Governor General’s Award. Even Indigo Chapters have acknowledged her heavyweight status by knocking 30 per cent off all Atwood titles until the end of July when customers present a Canadian library card.

It was at my hometown library that I first made my way through the entire Atwood collection. Some of her sentences are such zingers that I would read them repeatedly before moving on, taking forever to finish a book. I wasn’t always a prolific reader. With great embarrassment, I remember being at the same library for preschool story hour and trying to convince a friend I knew how to read by mimicking silent reading. I knew reading was cool, and beyond that, it was empowering. How did I know that? Because I watched my mother do literacy tutoring with an adult at the library, something I did myself years later with not-for-profit organizations. (If it doesn’t break your heart to learn that illiterate adults get by in Toronto by doing things like memorizing the colours and murals at TTC subway stops, then society is doomed and we can congratulate Atwood on her dystopian visionary powers, revealed in such classics as The Handmaid’s Tale). I actually watched an adaptation of this book by the Canadian Opera Company, which you might argue is an economic benefit to Toronto of me having used a public library in Ontario years earlier. Do you think City Council would buy that as an argument for the butterfly effect?

Ultimately, it’s difficult to bottom line a library. The fact that my hometown library gave me my first art show and gave me an alternative to working in the tobacco industry for five years? Priceless. The impact of helping a user with a dictionary to decipher a letter from an employer? Priceless. Of helping a senior use a computer? Priceless. Of helping an adult read? Actually, you probably can put a price on that if you consider the increased employability of the individual.

Every story I’ve read about last night’s meeting quotes the same 67-year-old woman. Mary Trapani Hynes proposed that Toronto obliterate the public library system altogether, since the burdens of a politically aware and literate community are too great. Now that’s satire, Atwood style.



*From The Handmaid’s Tale, McClelland & Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

For background on the proposed cuts, which will be followed up in September, click here.

Artists in transit: Riding the rails with Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario

“Art in Motion…involved 30 artists travelling from Sudbury to Chapleau…”

Back in May 2009, I chose the title and concept of my blog on a whim and started the next day without a plan. As an artist-commuter, I wanted to write about my artistic experiences and influences in the context of transit. Over time, it became taxing to tie art and transit together creatively, but I still cherish the moments when they converge and present a potential hook for a new post. For instance, two days ago on the Go train out of Toronto, I was reading the Shout Outs in the t.o.night newspaper when I saw this compliment paid from one Go train passenger to another: “When Botticelli painted, he was dreaming of you.” Ha!



Images: Making a flip book (top), Arriving in Chapleau, ON (bottom)

By far, the best pairing of art and transit since I began blogging has been the residency and exhibition I participated in today with members of Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario. The theme was Art in Motion and involved 30 artists traveling from Sudbury (almost 5 hours northwest of where I live) to Chapleau (an additional five hours in the same direction). It's hard to believe it takes 10 hours to get from Mississauga to Mississagi River. I knew we were going into the great beyond when my cell phone lost service, and it sure felt off the grid when we reached our final destination and there was no Tim Hortons in sight. We travelled by Via Rail, making art en route from a Budd car. The scenery was spectacular and the ride was smooth—a relaxing combination conducive to art making, though my concept was actually rooted in tension.

I deviated from my usual practice of feminist fibre art and made a flip book called Les mots que je comprend (The Words that I Understand), based on snippets of French conversations surrounding me. I’ve been interested in the social element of language learning ever since I taught ESL after art school. Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the isolating nature of language—in preparation for a presentation at the International Conference on Image and Imagery at Brock University with the theme, Silence and the Silenced, I’ve been making sculptures with baby clothing containing perplexing statements like ‘Dangerously Cute,’ ‘I Heart Shoes,’ and ‘Gentil gamin, je suis très chic’ that speak for pre-literate girls. Back to the piece at hand, I was interested in the social experience of an Anglophone artist (me) amongst Francophone artists (including my husband), since I’m interested in the concept of the Other in general in my work. I wanted to capture the experience of being in transit and taking in conversations in a foreign language, where my impulse is to fixate on a familiar term until leapfrogging to the next one. The end result is a bit like poetry. I chose the flip book format because of its dependence on motion and its easy fit with the theme. Rather than creating an animated image, I opted for a nonsensical blur with overlapping words in keeping with the anxiety of FSL. I keep thinking if it were an instructional piece by Yoko Ono, it would go something like this: Ride a train in a foreign culture. Write a word you hear on each page of a small book. Watch the words fly. Serendipitously, the word I recorded on the final page of my notebook was ‘encore’; it was the perfect segue to volume 2, which I plan to make on the return trip tomorrow and display at the second Art in Motion exhibition at the train station in Sudbury.

Artists came from as far as Ottawa, Cochrane, and Thunder Bay and explored an impressive range of media: sculpture, works on paper, photography, film, relational performance, storytelling, poetry, and music. At the debut of the works tonight at Aux Trois Moulins Motel where we stayed, I lost at Bingo, got fingerprinted, and was implicated in a murder mystery (the last two were unrelated), but it was still a great day. À demain!

Lynda Benglis at the New Museum

"All my art is erotic, suggestive..." — Lynda Benglis

After working for 15 days straight, I was thrilled to get away on the week-end before starting a new job this week. What does one do with exactly 12 hours in New York, besides feel badly about not having more time for social engagements? Between breakfast in Bryant Park, subway transit toward Coney Island surrounded by 14 matching mermaids, a Trivial Pursuit game at Brooklyn’s Pizza Plus (where, incidentally, I answered the question, “What noted women’s rights activist got married in 2000 in the home of Wilma Mankiller? (1)” correctly, thank-you very much), dinner in Hell’s Kitchen with an artist friend in her last week in the city, and a late night stroll through Greenwich Village, I managed to squeeze in a pit stop to the New Museum with my husband.

It was the closing week-end of Lynda Benglis’ first retrospective exhibition in 20 years, organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin) in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven). I was familiar with Benglis primarily as a counterpoint to my favourite artist, Hannah Wilke: besides both being Second Wave feminists who poured latex to create sculptures in the spirit of abstract expressionism, referenced Marcel Duchamp in performative work, and appropriated Greek costuming in self-portraiture, they upped the ante of nude self-advertising in lockstep. The culmination was Benglis unwittingly providing Wilke with a venue to undress in protest to Benglis’ infamous Artforum ad; not only was it at her exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, but it was at her opening reception (2). When I read this in Nancy Princenthal’s monograph, Hannah Wilke (Prestel, 2010), I sat on my little Ikea couch feeling stunned and somehow betrayed by my idol. Her audacity struck me as the antithesis of how my former colleague from SUNY Purchase, Julian Kreimer, described Benglis’ approach to art making: “respectful irreverence.” (3)

The fact that I have used Kreimer’s quotation out of context to home in on feminism substantiates Emily Nathan’s observation that the importance of concept and form in Benglis’ art are equally weighted (4). It is tempting to have a singular focus, and had I not traipsed through New York in the heat beforehand, I would probably have indulged in finding evidence of Benglis’ insistence that “All my [her] art is erotic, suggestive” (5). I was too fatigued to process innuendo-laden titles like Come (1969-74) for an amorphous floor sculpture until writing this post. So, form it was. The highlight of the amorphous sculptures was Phantom (1971), which has not been exhibited for the past 40 years; I actually exclaimed aloud when I entered a darkened room to find five large glow-in-the-dark sculptures reminiscent of the overlapping blobs and shards of ice that accumulate in Niagara Falls during the winter. As the air conditioning took hold and I moved through the other rooms, I was delighted to discover her wall-hung cocoon sculptures, not least because of my longstanding interest in the convergence of this medium and subject matter. These oblong panels were like cocoons cruelly bisected to reveal interlocking slick shapes in colours evocative of—strangely enough—gummy worms. In my state of probable dehydration, I fixated on these interlocking forms with each new piece, especially in the huge monocrhomatic abstract forms that deviated from the cocoon shape entirely. With no obvious focal point, they become an invitation to let the viewer’s eyes dance around the surface, which was a trance I welcomed. Although I was not in a position to make the most of this show, I was reminded that seeing work in person is always worthwhile, to appreciate some element that eludes reproductions. For me, this eureka moment was spawned by the cast lead version of the same double-headed dildo that divided the Artforum editors in 1974 when Benglis straddled it naked, save for a pair of sunglasses. Seeing nails positioned ever so precariously around the semicircular shaft to keep it in place, I couldn’t help but smile, which is fitting since that is the name of the piece.

For images, see the New Museum.

(1) Answer: Gloria Steinem.
(2) This intervention in New York in 1975 was entitled Invasion Performance.
(3) Kreimer, Julian. “Shape Shifter: Lynda Benglis”. Art in America. 12/1/09, pp. 95-101.Quotation ¶5.
(4) Nathan, Emily. "Lynda Benglis: Top Form". Artnet. February 11, 2011.
(5) Seiberling, Dorothy. “The New Sexual Frankness: Good-by to Hearts and Flowers”. New York Magazine, 8 (7), pp. 37-44. Quotation p. 42.