Claude Cahun: Pioneering, Gender-Defying, Jewish Radical

Thursday, May 9, 2019 | 6:30–8pm

ADMISSION: Free for Members; $12 general; free for students with ID. Tickets include Museum admission.

Jennifer Shaw and Tirza True Latimer—two scholars who have been instrumental in repositioning Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore in the canon of early twentieth-century avant-garde art—come together for the first time in conversation to explore Cahun and Moore’s work, legacy, and Jewish life. Come early for a short tour of tour of Show Me as I Want to Be Seen with curator Natasha Matteson. Presented in conjunction with Show Me as I Want to Be Seen.

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about the speakers

Jennifer Shaw is Professor of Art History at Sonoma State University. Her work explores issues of gender and identity in art and literature. She is author of several books and articles including Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism and the Fantasy of France (Yale University Press, 2002); Paris and the Countryside: Modern Life in Late-19th-Century France (2006); Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals (2013); and Exist Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun (2017). She recently spent a month in Iceland on a writer's residency where she completed the manuscript of her first novel.

Tirza True Latimer is Professor in Visual Studies and Interim Chair of the Visual Studies program at California College of the Arts. Her teaching, publications, and curatorial projects reflect on visual culture and visual politics from queer feminist perspectives. She has written extensively on lesbian artists practicing in France between the two World Wars, focusing in particular depth on the creative partnership between Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Her latest book Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art, was released by University of California Press in 2016. Her scholarship and critical writings have appeared in such journals as Art Journal, American Art, Archives of American Art Journal, GLQ, English Language Notes, Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle, Art Practical, SFMOMA's OpenSpace, and CAAreviews as well as dozens of exhibition catalogues and edited collections.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

How do we depict “the self” if it is unknowable, inherently constructed, and ever changing? How does the concept of portraiture shift when categories are in crisis, and visibility itself is problematic? Jewish thought on performed and fluid identity can be interpreted in the book of Esther, and in the notion of G-d as “I am that I am,” ineffable and non-binary. These ideas uphold a Jewish understanding of the self as intrinsically mutable, unknowable, and yet self-determined, themes that animate Show Me as I Want to Be Seen.

Tschabalala Self, Perched, 2016. Oil, acrylic, flashe, handmade paper, fabric, and found material. Courtesy of the artist and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. Photo: Elizabeth Bernstein.

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