Past Exhibitions

!!!techn010ffspring!!!

Immerse yourself in a world where art meets science in Sarah Buckius' “!!!techn010ffspring!!!” Explore key intersections of feminism, invention, & technology while discovering the history of women inventors. This special exhibit critiques patriarchal paradigms in STEM through pieces that combine tech, performance art, and the complexities of women's social roles.

On display October 2023

"I have a crisis for you": Women Artists of Ukraine Respond to War

Featuring work by Kinder Album, JT Blatty, Oksana Briukhovestka (MFA, Stamps School of Art and Design), Oskana Kazmina, Sonya Hukaylo, Svetlana Lavochkina, Kateryna Lisovenko, and Lyuba Yakimchuk

In February 2022, the world witnessed the invasion of Ukraine and all-out war of aggression by the Russian Federation. Since this time, massive casualties, human rights violations, and an unprecedented refugee crisis have ensued. Women artists of Ukraine have responded. They paint on found materials in refugee housing, illustrate in bomb shelters, photograph their shelled cities wearing press passes and bulletproof jackets. They document, create, and share. They post their daily journals and images on social media. They perform at the Grammy Awards. They know their message is powerful, and the amplification of their voices is critical for victory in a very real battle for survival.Curated by Grace Mahoney (U-M Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Jessica Zychowicz, Ph.D. (Fulbright Ukraine and U-M Alumna), "I have a crisis for you": Women Artists of Ukraine Respond to War showcases work created by women artists in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The involved artists are painters, photographers, filmmakers, poets, translators, and textile artists. Many of the works exhibited demonstrate a continuity of engagement by the artists with the topic of war, especially since 2014 when the people of Ukraine gathered in a “Revolution of Dignity” against attempts by the Russian Federation to control the country’s independence resulting in Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and backing of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east. The featured artists have also been selected because of their prominent interest and exploration of issues relating to gender in their works. The title for this exhibit comes from a poem of the same name by Lyuba Yakimchuk:

“— our love’s gone missing, I explain to a friend/ it vanished in one of the wars/ we waged in our kitchen/ — change the word ‘war’ to ‘crisis,’ he suggests/ because a crisis is something everyone has from time to time.”

Like in Yakimchuk’s poem, many of these artists approach the war with personal perspectives. They intertwine, juxtapose, and disrupt experiences of war with the intimacies of personal relationships, the workings interior lives, and perceptions of social roles. The featured artworks and documents engage a range of subjects from women volunteering as combatants to the processes of grieving and reflect ongoing discourses in Ukrainian feminist scholarship.

On Display Fall 2022

Invisible Women: Portraits of Aging in Ukraine

Photographs by Ashley Bigham and Watercolors by Grace Mahoney

In this exhibition, artists Bigham and Mahoney investigate the visibility and social role of Ukraine’s older generation of women embodied in a figure both iconic and ubiquitous: the babusya. Seen in public transport, in the market, and on the street, each babusya has a story to tell. Each has something to say, something to gossip about, and something to complain about.

The current generation of Ukrainian grandmothers survived World War II and multiple repressions. The oldest were children during the famine-genocide of 1932-33 known as the Holodomor. They carry with them deep and complex memories that reflect the histories they have lived through. These experiences make them unexpected agents of protest and resistance to corruption, intimidation, and war.

Although civic activism is often thought to be the province of the young, many babusyas joined in the actions of Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv and similar protests that occurred throughout the country. Now they witness the war in their country. Viral photos and videos of babusyas carrying kalashnikovs in plastic shopping bags and handing sunflower seeds to enemy soldiers with a curse that something grow from their graves have become icons of resistance since the beginning of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But they are also an extremely vulnerable population with little access to aid and technology. Many of them have lost their homes and some of them have lost their children and grandchildren. The generation called, “The Children of War” are now seniors of war.

In addition to their historic significance as a generation, these women are present in the spheres of daily life throughout the country. Often overlooked in society, these women are vibrant and active in the public spaces of contemporary Ukraine. Working in the open-air bazaars, resting on public park benches, or strolling through cemeteries, these women stake their claim on the urban space—blending, coalescing, disappearing. This exhibit endeavors bring visibility to these grannies. It’s an invitation to look closer, to see the stories which are written on their faces—they are old and tired, but not invisible.

New York City's Vanished Cafeterias

Photography exhibit by Marcia Bricker Halperin

View this exhibition online

The streets of New York City were filled with hundreds of cafeterias, self-service eating establishments, during the early to mid-20th Century. Their growth paralleled the rise of the office worker, women’s evolving roles in the work force, immigration, American love of efficiency and novelty, the growth of cities, the impact of Prohibition and the Depression, the labor movement, and American eating habits. Not one cafeteria from that era remains in New York City today. One particular restaurant, Dubrow’s Cafeteria in Brooklyn, was a legendary institution that served as a second home for many of the neighborhood’s elderly residents. Along with another Dubrow’s, a hub of the Garment Center, they provided a restaurant-cum-social club or “third place” for a generation of Jewish New Yorkers. New York City-based photographer Marcia Bricker Halperin documented Dubrow’s and other cafeterias in their waning days, drawn to the memorable faces and the liveliness and sorrow of urban life in that vanished world.Marcia Bricker Halperin is a Documentary Photographer who has been photographing the characters and landscapes of NYC since the 1970s. Born in Brooklyn, NY, she received a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Brooklyn College, where she studied painting with Phillip Pearlstein and Jimmy Ernst, sculpture with Lee Bontecou and photography with Walter Rosenblum. In photographing she hopes to relate a human story of a specific time, capture a places’ essence, and freeze details of life. | www.marciabricker.com

Whose Streets? Our Streets! New York City, 1980-2000

New York’s streets were turbulent and often violent in the 1980s and 1990s, as residents responded to social changes in their city as well national and international developments. The culture wars wracking the nation had particular resonance in New York. The City was ground zero for the AIDS epidemic and a center of avant-garde art as well as queer and feminist activism. It was also home to the Vatican’s spokesman in the U.S. and a significant culturally conservation Roman Catholic population.

Featuring photographs by Nina Berman, Donna Binder, Donna Decesare, Ricky Flores, Frank Fournier, Lori Grinker, Meg Handler, Lisa Kahane, Gabe Kirchheimer, Carolina Kroon, Meryl Levin, TL Litt, Dona Ann McAdams, Thomas McGovern, Tomas Muscionico, Brian Palmer, Clayton Patterson, Sandra-Lee Phipps, Sylvia Plachy, Alon Reininger, Richard Renaldi, Joseph Rodriguez, Linda Rosier, Q. Sakamaki, Richard Sandler, Catherine Smith, and Les Stone.

This exhibition was curated by Tamar W. Carroll, Meg Handler, Mike Kamber and Josh Meltzer with support from the Bronx Documentary Center and the Rochester Institute of Technology. More information is available at the project website, www.whosestreets.photo.

Maya Healers

A collection of photographs take by Fran Antmann from 2006 to 2017, Maya Healers documents the life and culture of indigenous communities along the short of Guatemala's Lake Atitlán. In addition to chronicling daily activities, Anthmann's photos also reveal the spiritual and religious elements of Mayan culture, in which women have historically played a key role. Maya Healers provides a portrait of indigenous cultural endurance despite decades of genocide and suppression.

On display Fall 2018

Labors of Love and Loss

Repurposing everyday items like ironing boards, safety pins, and even hair and bone, Marianetta Porter and Lisa Olson's Labors of Love and Loss explored the intertwined lives of caregivers and their charges. Focusing on lived experiences, the exhibit examined how African American women's lives in the nineteenth century were affected by their relationships and occupations.

On display Winter 2018

Chicana Fotos: Nancy De Los Santos

Featuring photographs by filmmaker and artist Nancy De Los Santos, this exhibit explored struggles for social justice among Mexican Americans throughout the 1970s. Featuring rare images of of the United Farm Workers of America organizing activities in Chicago, protests against police brutality and for farm worker rights in Texas, and the first global conference on women, the International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, Chicana Fotos offered a distinct perspective on the role identity plays in grassroots political organizing.

On display Fall 2017

Moving Through the Centuries: The Empowerment of U-M Women Through Physical Activity

Part of the U-M's Bicentennial Celebration, this collection of photographs and memorabilia showcased women’s physical activity at the University. From early and restrictive physical education to D1 athletics, the exhibit explored early participatory nature of women’s movement. Despite inequities faced by women regarding physical activity, women have danced, flexed, fought, and championed for future women athletes at the university and beyond!

On display Winter 2017

Swallowed Whole: A Visual Journey Through Trauma and Recovery

Created by Heidi Kumao, this exhibition consisted of large-scale staged photographs and video, all of which drew upon U-M Stamps School of Art & Design Professor Heidi Kumao's experiences with a broken back and cancer treatment in 2011-12. Combining humor and stark imagery, the work playfully embraces the absurdity and isolation that accompanied these medical traumas.

On display Fall 2016

Above Ground: 40 Moments of Transformation

Stories of Mothers Lost: The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood

This quilt exhibit was made possible by the White Ribbon Alliance (WRA) for Safe Motherhood, an NGO whose goal is to reduce rates of maternal and child mortality. The initiative to obtain these stories was made possible by a United Nations Population fund grant to the WRA. Following a global call, there was an overwhelming response of 120 panels from 46 organizations.Stories of Mothers Lost - a collection of internationally sourced, hand crafted panels commemorating mothers lost – allowed families to express grief and also plays a powerful role as a mechanism for advocacy and communication on an issue that transcends country borders.

On display Fall 2015

Re-imaging Gender

This exhibit featured the work of 15 promising artists who rendered the modern spectrum of gender, going beyond the simple male/female binary to include a wide variety of identities and sexualities. The Re-imaging artists, MFA students enrolled at CIC universities, responded to a Call for Art issued by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. The result was an exhibition of 17 works in a variety of media, including photography, paint, lithograph, mixed media, and video, which reflected new understandings of gender.

On display Winter 2015

Salamander

This is an exhibit of photographs and text created by The Olimpias artist collective, a group of disability culture activists and their allies, led by artistic director Petra Kuppers, Professor of English, Theater and Dance, Art and Women’s Studies. The artists use underwater photography, dry performance workshops, creative writing and video to find their disabled beauty emerging from the deep, the wild aesthetic of water.

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!!!techn010ffspring!!!

"I have a crisis for you": Women Artists of Ukraine Respond to War

Invisible Women: Portraits of Aging in Ukraine

New York City's Vanished Cafeterias

Whose Streets? Our Streets! New York City, 1980-2000

Maya Healers

Labors of Love and Loss

Chicana Fotos: Nancy De Los Santos

Moving Through the Centuries: The Empowerment of U-M Women Through Physical Activity

Swallowed Whole: A Visual Journey Through Trauma and Recovery

Above Ground: 40 Moments of Transformation

Stories of Mothers Lost: The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood

Re-imaging Gender

Salamander

4000 Years of Choice

Sustainable Activism and Beloved Communities of Detroit

Interrupted Life: Incarcerated Mothers in the United States

Claiming Citizenship: African Americans and New Deal Photography

Women's Studies 40 Years: Memorabilia

SuperWomen

A Women’s Place is in the Struggle: Gender, Race, and Nation

we will not be silent: photographs by ellen eisenman

Contours

Guerrilla Girls

In Times of War: Her Untold Story

Haiti

Landscapes

Carry On

Jake in Transition from Female to Male

Nicole Gordon

Bollywood Satirized

Southern Saddlebags and Shotgun Houses

Visualizing Women in Science, Mathematics and Engineering

MOLAS: Kuna Women's Visions from Kuna Yala, Panamá

Red Bibs: Common and Uncommon Occurrences

Cuadros from Pamplona Alta, Peru

Women and War

Sentenced

Village Works

Matuschka

Flint Photovoice

Women at the University