Art & Culture Center of Hollywood
The exhibition explores the phenomenon of cross-pollination that occurs at every level of arts production today. The work is selected from the Girls' Club collection. The project demonstrates the multi-faceted roles artists play in the contemporary art scene. Artists as curators exert a powerful influence on posterity, re-shaping the context in which artwork is seen and understood.
Girls' Club's second annual exhibition, Under the Influence, explores the phenomenon of cross-pollination that occurs at every level of arts production today. The work on view is selected from the Girls' Club collection of works by contemporary women artists and from other artists and other art collections. The presentation of this exhibition is a collaborative endeavor, co-presented by the Art & Culture Center in Hollywood, Florida. Both organizations are dedicated to enriching the arts community in Broward County, South Florida with cutting edge shows.
Under the Influence demonstrates the multi-faceted roles artists play in the contemporary art scene. Artists as curators exert a powerful influence on posterity, re-shaping the context in which artwork is seen and understood. The three curators/artists organizing the exhibition play multiple roles in the arts community, and their individual aesthetic and conceptual leanings will be felt. Under the Influence is assembled by a curatorial team of three artists - collector and Girls' Club founder Francie Bishop Good, Girls' Club Director and arts writer Michelle Weinberg, and Curator of Exhibitions at Art & Culture Center of Hollywood and art consultant Jane Hart.
Through local social networks and collaborations, mentor/student relationships, and by virtue of conceptual or aesthetic sympathies, artists affect one another. Art derived from social networking and patterned after do-it-yourself business models - so popular among emerging artists today - has an antecedent in the feminist collectives of the 70s and 80s that challenged the originality of the individual artist prominent at the time. Under the Influence will emphasize the connections among the artists across generations, such as the influence of feminist artist Nancy Spero on the younger generation, evident in the work of Kara Walker.
Several strands of artistic production will be highlighted in Under the Influence. Painters who work in a folkloric and illustrational narrative mode include Amy Sillman, Shazia Sikander, and Claire Rojas. Conventional craft media is re-invented by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Frances Trombly and Ghada Amer. Abstraction in which repetitive motifs and drawing systems create eccentric and visionary environments encompasses the work of Joanne Greenbaum, Lynn Gelfman, Elisabeth Condon, and Lisa Sanditz. Artists who use the photographic image of the female body to explore its elasticity and capacity for shapeshifting include Wangechi Mutu, and Quisqueya Henriquez. The video program for Under the Influence features work by Ann Hamilton, Mariko Mori and Pipilotti Rist. A video work by Jen Stark', Streaming Gradient, will be projected onto the exterior of the Girls' Club building, layering a hypnotic moving image onto the architecture itself.
Web projects for http://www.girlsclubcollection.org include essays by the artist curators, a new multimedia creative fiction by Denise Delgado, visual projects by Felice Grodin and Karen Snouffer, and commentary by Claire Breukel, director of Locust Projects in Miami and Elisa Turner, longtime Miami Herald arts correspondent. Relevant discussions and other public programming are planned at Girls' Club during the year-long exhibition.
Since opening in Fall 2007, Girls' Club has launched educational collaborations with non-profits serving women and girls in Broward County. The products of these workshops in digital imaging and multimedia will be exhibited in Under the Influence, demonstrating yet another way the work of artists can be a constructive catalyst for personal and social growth.
Girls' Club acknowledges the generosity of Dennis and Debra Scholl, who will lend works from their collection, and to the artists who have graciously loaned works.
Girls' Club is a private foundation established in 2006 by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz. Its mission is to increase awareness of contemporary art in Broward County and to spur greater cultural growth there. Girls' Club mounts thematic, curated exhibitions drawing from the Bishop Good/Horvitz collection and works from local, national and international contemporary artists.
Girls' Club
117 NE 2nd Street - Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301