Soft and Wet: Publication Launch & Conversation

Presented by EFA: Project Space Program. Co-sponsored by Independent Curators International (ICI) and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

Please join us for the closing event and launch of Soft and Wet, a publication reflecting on the exhibition of the same title curated by Sadia Shirazi. The evening will feature readings of excerpts from the Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States (1980) catalog by Kazuko Miyamoto, Howardena Pindell, and Judy Blum Reddy. The curator will read excerpts from the newly commissioned texts for the publication it accompanies, followed by a conversation with the speakers about “Third World Women Artists” in the 1970s and 80s and the linkages with Soft and Wet.

The exhibition Soft and Wet, features works by Arooj Aftab, Beverly Buchanan, Crystal Z Campbell, Caroline Key, Ana Mendieta, Andy Robert, Julie Tolentino, Zarina, and Constantina Zavitsanos. During the event, copies of Directions to My House by Zarina Hashmi with Sarah Burney will be available for purchase.

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Kazuko Miyamoto is a preeminent feminist figure of minimalism, and a pioneer of a new and radically warm brand of rigorous abstraction, introducing handmade, irregular, and intimate elements that both modulated the movement’s unforgiving visual language and advanced it, by critique. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Miyamoto moved to New York in 1964, studied at the Arts Student League, and assisted Sol LeWitt, she helped produce and execute his open cube sculptures and early wall drawings. Miyamoto’s work has shown in numerous institutions and galleries, both domestically and internationally, including Paula Cooper Gallery, Daimler Contemporary, Lentos Museum, Linz, Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, A.I.R. Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, P.S.1 Contemporary, among many others, and is represented by Exile Gallery, Berlin.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years (1967–1979). In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where she is now a full professor. Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo-exhibitions include: Spelman College (1971), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983), Just Above Midtown (1977), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989), Cyrus Gallery (1989), G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006), Garth Greenan Gallery (2014), and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (2015).

Judy Blum Reddy lives and works in New York. Blum received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York and has exhibited internationally since the 1970s. Most recently she has exhibited at CCS Bard (2019), the Stedelijk Museum Bureau (2015), Irish Museum of Modern Art (2016), Villa Vassilief (2016), Dak’Art Biennale of African Contemporary Art (2016), Station Independent Project (2015), 33 Orchard (2016), FIAC (2016), Clark House Initiative (2014-16), Asian Cultural Centre (2016), and Art Dubai (2015). Reddy’s work is included in public collections at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Fond National d’Art Contemporain and Centre National d’Art de Grenoble, France.

Sadia Shirazi is a writer, art historian, curator and sometimes architect based in New York. Her reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, MoMA post, C Magazine, The Funambulist, Jadaliyya and ArteEast and she has written monographic essays on Zarina and Jessica Vaughn. Shirazi has curated exhibitions internationally including Three days in the desert at the Lower East Side Printshop (2018), welcome to what we took from is the state at the Queens Museum (2016), and 230 MB/Exhibition Without Objects at Khoj Artists’s Association in Delhi (2013). Her work has been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Performance Space New York and the Devi Art Foundation. Shirazi holds a MArch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from the University of Chicago. She is the Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP), teaches at The New School and Cooper Union, and is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.