I’ll Be Your Mirror
By Kathy Battista
I’ll Be Your Mirror is borrowed from the title of Nan Goldin’s 1996 Whitney exhibition, which was inspired by the Velvet Underground song. The exhibition had an incredible impact: a woman artist occupying such a vast space of one of New York’s most important museums, and packing such a powerful, emotional punch by using personal, everyday experiences in art practice.
The artists in this exhibition reach across generations. Judy Chicago, Cheryl Donegan, Martine Gutierrez, Cindy Hinant, Narcissister, Tschabalala Self, and Betty Tompkins each engage with feminism from different perspectives, acting as mirrors of those who came before as well as for the practitioners who will come after. Today’s emerging artists–Gutierrez, Hinant, Narcissister–engage with forms of popular media to question the representation of female experience in our society. Tompkins and Donegan adopt an abstracted, more textual approach to consider similar issues. The works speak across and to each other from different generational perspectives.
