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This quarter you'll find a report on Eye of Modernism, a group exhibition at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which is noteworthy because it claims contemporary artists working in a variety of styles as Modernists. This strategy has the (perhaps unintended) consequence of increasing the number of notable women modernists, but as reviewer Jill O'Bryan points out, it also empties the term Modernist of any specific meaning. An on-line symposium related to the exhibition is upcoming; the review tells where.

There are a juicy array of issues for feminists to think about in considering the recent exhibition Freestyle, originated at The Studio Museum in Harlem and opening September 28 at the Santa Monica (CA) Museum of Art. The exhibition features a variety of work, in keeping with its title. As the curator, Thelma Golden, explains in the catalog (page 15): "In the parlance of popular music, freestyle is the term which refers to the space where the musician (improvisation) or the dancer (the break) finds the groove and goes all out in a relentless and unbridled expression of the self."

Golden has succeeded in generating dialogue about the concept of post-black art by naming the work in Freestyle post-black. In the exhibition catalog she defines the term: "It [post-black] was a clarifying term that had ideological and chronological dimensions and repercussions. It was characterized by artists who were adamant about not being labeled as 'black' artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness. In the beginning, there were only a few marked instances of such an outlook, but at the end of the 1990s, it seemed that post-black had fully entered into the art world consciousness. Post-black was the new black." (See page 14, Golden, Thelma with Christine Y. Kim, Hamza Walker, et al. Freestyle. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 2001)

One response to Golden's exhibition was a substantial article by art critic Holland Cotter in The New York Times: Beyond Multiculturalism, a Way to a New Freedom in Art? (Sunday, July 29, 2001, Arts and Leisure, pages 1 and 28). It's interesting because it talks about the practical implications for artists of changing "isms" in the art world. Cotter points out how the commercial art market benefited from the identity politics exhibitions of the 1990s, and reviews the progression of multiculturalism in the art world from a utopian ideal to an effective means of limiting access to the power center. She calls for the art world to change; it seems a bit of a change to find such sentiments prominently featured in the Times art section.

Some of the issues that are emerging from the "post-black" idea are thought-provoking when applied to the change from feminist to post-feminist in the art world. Feminist artists have been confined to the periphery of the art world, however celebrated they were on the sidelines. There never was a market embrace of feminist art during its heyday in the 1980s. Unlike the very limited number of artists privileged by the marketplace in the multicultural era, feminist artists didn't see their work ushered out of prestigious galleries to the collections of wealthy individuals and the museums they support. Perhaps the reason there hasn't been more of an emphasis on post-feminist art is that the market never profited from feminist art in the first place.

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