Julia Couzens / Julia Couzens

Julia Couzens | Stitch ‘n Bitch

 

Review in Squarecylinder by Mark Van Proyen

Exhibition Dates: April 3rd – May 22

► Listen to the Sorkin/Couzens Zoom Event!

✓ Book Signing: Saturday, April 17th, 1 – 3:30 pm.
☛ Stop by, you will be admitted as capacity allows.
☛ Reserve your signed catalog, Textile Tags / Julia Couzens.

*If your preferred time is not available in the Booking App please stop by, you will be admitted as capacity limits allow. 

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☛ In our May Zoom Event PSG is pleased to host Maria Porges in conversation with artist Julia Couzens.

In Conversation: Maria Porges & Julia Couzens 
Zoom Date: Saturday, May 8 at 1pm PST. Mark your calendars!!

► Listen to the Porges/Couzens Zoom Event!

☛ Don’t miss the catalog of exhibition images at the bottom of the page!!

Women’s position between chattel and agency are marked throughout education, politics, economics, social and religious life, disproportionally affecting women of color and LGBTQ communities across the world.  The fundamental question whether a woman’s body is autonomous and free from State or religious control is still offensively argued. Given the many suffrage and feminist movements, the question of ‘parity’ with men still remains disturbingly faulty.

However it’s Women’s History Month, a time to reflect on progress and battles left undone.  It’s also perfect timing for Julia Couzens’s exhibition Stitch ‘n Bitch. Couzens is an uncompromising artist and writer of discerning insight. Drawing upon over thirty years steeped in the vernacular of modernist and contemporary art history Couzens focuses her critical lens on gender disparity in the visual arts.

“Textile tags,” as she calls the collages on exhibition, began as an impulsive lark in the midst of her ongoing studio practice. Much like graffiti artists claiming territory by spray painting over signs, billboards, notices, and posters, Couzens deploys a needle, thread, and fabric scraps to tag pages of art publications featuring male artists.

A focus on historical patriarchy is borne out by a leisurely jaunt through these journals, which romance the mystique of male legitimacy and authority in the visual arts. Like a vandal seamstress, Couzens tears out these full-page ads and in the insouciant spirit of taggers, stitches over them with fabric, thread, embroidery, essentially neutering their masculinity. Money begets money, and male artists dominate covers, ads, articles, and profiles, they command greater remuneration in the marketplace enhancing the prospect of further promotion, which is then corroborated through museum and private collections.

Rather than a didactic critique of patriarchy, Couzens’s Textile Tags offer a wittily inventive foray through the generally esteemed lens of fashionable art speak and criticism. She asks us to consider with nimble panache the minimizing of women’s contributions to the arts by offering up a plethora of stunning visual and conceptual interventions!

Julia Couzens received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, New York and the Art Matters Foundation Award, New York. Collections include Yale University Art Museum, New Haven, CT; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; The Frederick Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA; University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco, CA. Exhibitions include Armand Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Las Vegas, NV among others.

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▶︎In our April Zoom Event PSG is pleased to host art historian Jenni Sorkin, in what promises to be a compelling conversation with artist Julia Couzens.

In Conversation: Jenni Sorkin & Julia Couzens 
Zoom Date: Saturday, April 10th at 1pm PST. Mark your calendars!!

✷RSVP to register

Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. Her publications include Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 1947–2016, and numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogs. She was educated at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bard College, and received her PhD from Yale University. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Craft.

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▶︎▶︎In our May Zoom Event PSG is pleased to host Maria Porges in conversation with artist Julia Couzens.

In Conversation: Maria Porges & Julia Couzens 
Zoom Date: Saturday, May 8 at 1pm PST. Mark your calendars!!

✷✷RSVP to register

Since the late ‘80s, Maria Porges has pursued dual practices as  both writer and artist, teaching in both areas at California College of the Arts. A graduate of Yale University (BA) and the University of Chicago (MFA), her critical writing has been published widely in Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture, American Ceramics, Glass, the New York Times Book Review, and a host of now-defunct art magazines. She has also authored essays for more than 120 exhibition catalogues and multiple book contributions. Her exhibition career of image/text sculpture and drawings has included solo shows at galleries, museums and alternative spaces. She is currently working on a book about mending as an art form across multiple platforms. Maria Porges is Professor at CCA, serving in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts, the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies and the undergraduate Fine Arts Program.

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A catalog has been published on occasion of the exhibition, Stitch ‘n Bitch. Julia Couzens, Textile Tags, includes multiple color plates, with essays by Jenni Sorkin and Maria Porges.

The book includes over 80 color plates. Essays written by contemporary art historian Jenni Sorkin, Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and visual artist/writer Maria Porges, Maria Porges, Professor at CCA, serving in the Graduate Program in Fine Arts, the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies and the undergraduate Fine Arts Program.