Ana Mendieta. Creek, 1974 (still); Super 8 film, silent.

Two distinct rooms in two different Bay Area museums from early November 2016 to mid-February 2017 displayed the work of two major artists, one of whom killed the other. One was male and one was female, one was born in 1948 in Havana and one was born in 1935 in Quincy, Massachusetts. One showed at the Guggenheim, one won the Rome prize. Although these identifiers are in some ways useless, they put these differences into dialog. In 1988 Carl Andre was famously acquitted for the death of Ana Mendieta, his wife with whom he had been fighting with loudly just before she fell thirty-four stories. This tragedy holds resonant meaning for many people, but none of it gets carried by the museums and galleries who support Andre’s work. The ruling was based on insufficient evidence but is countered by many facts; it is contested by a significant number of people and not currently accepted by Mendieta’s family and friends, or by many fellow artists and curators. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art displays a room of Andre’s sculpture on their fifth floor. Ten of his works are owned in their collections, as well as three of Mendieta’s. The Berkeley Art Museum exhibited the luminous exhibition Covered in Time and History: the Films of Ana Mendieta last winter. The museum holds six of Andre’s works in their permanent collection and one of Mendieta’s. Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place recently opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the retrospective Dia: Beacon exhibited in 2015 to hearty protest. An action protesting the exhibition includes many Los Angeles curators, one of whom is a former curator at the museum itself.

Mendieta’s death occurred during roiling aesthetic, political, and intellectual struggles in the art world. In the 1970s and ’80s, art emerged as socially confrontational and performative, and at turns conceptual and semiotic. The context of an emerging international contemporary art market attenuated these differences and raised all stakes. A few years earlier, Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) opened new possibilities for the body in art; its messy, anarchic conglomeration of bodies answered male abstract expressionism. In 1976 Lucy Lippard published the book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art. Film theory propagated new feminist logics and lexicons. In her writing and performance, conceptual artist Adrian Piper parsed racism and worked through philosophy. Mendieta used her face and body as a Bataillean challenge, and later developed an articulated decolonial praxis. From her lecture, “The Struggle for Culture Today Is the Struggle for Life,” Mendieta writes, “The U.S., the greatest imperialist power, rich in material as well as technological resources, maintains some of the most shameful, hurting, and inhuman forms of racial, economic, and social descriminations [sic] amongst its own people. The overflowing of its frontiers, aggressions, and military occupations, and colonial and neo-colonial politics of the United States imperialism, have denaturalized and violated cultural and artistic tradition of other peoples as well as within the U.S. itself.” Her death was imbued with an uncanny feeling. Their fight in the New York high-rise apartment was about the minimalist Andre getting (in his words) “more exposed to the public” than Mendieta.

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Andrea Bowers. Throwing Bricks (Johanna Saavedra), 2016; archival pigment print; 77 1/2 x 57 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

As more feminist marches, protests, and gatherings organize in the wake of the new U.S. administration, critiques of contemporary feminist approaches also emerge. Two of the largest issues that feminism faces today are the exclusion of transgender and non-White cultural perspectives and representations. The Intersectional Self at 8th Floor Gallery answers the call for the need of these inclusions by assembling myriad identities to center the conversation around feminism and gender.

Andrea Bowers’ Trans Liberation: Beauty in the Street (Johanna Saavedra) (2016) photograph features Saavedra, a trans Latina immigrant activist, walking down a street in Los Angeles, throwing a symbolic brick. Its portrayal of a woman-identified person with multiple other melding identities is a striking example of communicating resilience and intersectionality. The piece, which recalls the Stonewall Riots, exemplifies that the ongoing fight for equality will not be forfeited until it is achieved for all.

The exhibition also utilizes a wide range of media, including video, photography, sculpture, collage, and printmaking, to explore how femininity and thus masculinity have morphed along with definitions of gender identity in recent history. A majority of the works in the show, whether representational or abstract, are self-portraits, hence the “Self” in the exhibition title. In Thump (2016), renowned feminist Martha Wilson dresses in drag as a sickeningly orange, vastly double-chinned Donald Trump. Giving the thumbs-up sign, while standing in front of a classical statue with the word “Force” engraved onto it, Wilson utilizes herself as a feminist icon to ironically subvert the image of the oppressor.

Ana Mendieta also manipulates the gender boundary through Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants) (1972), in which she adheres a man’s beard to her own face as he shaves it off throughout a series of photographs, defying what is expected of male and female surface appearances. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s piece, My Funny Valentine (2013), depicts an ambiguous, kaleidoscope-like up-skirt shot in which red panties are remnant of a repeating heart shape. The inclusion of P-Orridge also promotes that gender and the body itself are not solidified concepts, but malleable vessels for the person, which exists only in the mind.

The Intersectional Self sets a precedent on how to present a feminist exhibition. The widely Instagrammed, White cis-woman in her bright pink Pussy Hat should not be the poster-image of the contemporary feminist movement. This exhibition addresses women who are trans, queer, immigrants, and of color as the engine of real change.

The Intersectional Self will be on view at 8th Floor in New York through May 19, 2017.

Jasa McKenzie is a curator and artist based in New York City. She is currently a fellow in Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts.

Ana Mendieta, "Silueta Works in Mexico," 1973–77, Details, Color photographs. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

In 2002, feminist matriarch Judy Chicago co-curated an all-women art exhibition in China, in a place called Lugu Lake, historically a matriarchal society. At the last minute, just before the show’s opening, another curator, a man, arrived with a piece his wife had made. “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that was by a man,” Chicago said to a friend. As it turned out, it was. “The guy used his wife’s name and thought he’d put one over on me,” recalled Chicago, who has looked at countless artworks by men and women and become an expert at distinguishing the sometimes slight differences in perspective. After all, telling the girls from the guys is a necessary ability when your aim is getting more girl artists onto the playing field. Though, in the past six decades, the girls have often made announcing their gender key to their projects.

Two shows up in Los Angeles right now feel like smart reunions of member of an all-girl gang, one that banded together in the 1960s then began to thrive ‘70s and continued into the early ‘80s. Not all the key members actually knew each other. But they probably knew of each other, given that they shared a goal: to show how much women mattered and how criminal it was they’d been excluded from art, which stood in for life at large.

The Personal is Political, a headily titled exhibition of work culled from the collection of MOCA Los Angeles, includes some goose-bump worthy gems. Ana Mendieta’s gently insidious Siluetas, showing of the outline of the artist’s petite body in blood, sand, dirt and greenery; pages of handwriting by Adrian Piper, chronicling the artist-philosopher’s youthful, overtly optimistic dive into Kantian metaphysics; Alice Neel’s figure painting, defiant yet wholly comfortable in its own skin. Most of the women in this compact exhibition seem bent on proving the mind to be as potent and powerful as the body, a project particularly feminine since the minds of women had been downplayed for eons.

Mary Beth Edelson, "The Last Supper," 1972.

Only a few miles away, at Subliminal Projects in Echo Park, a similar sort of corroboration plays out in an exhibition called Eve. Artists Mary Beth Edelson, Judy Chicago, Lisa Steele and Hannah Wilke—women who also belonged to the groundbreaking girl gang—again assert themselves as bodies with minds that deserve a place in history. There’s an urgent energy to their work, most of which aims to reform the art world itself. Edelson superimposes the heads of female artists on figures in da Vinci’s The Last Supper—Georgia O’Keefe appears as Christ—and Hannah Wilke poses topless in a print that posits feminists as fascists, warning the art world to watch out.

It’s a lot of fun to immerse yourself in history through these artists, especially since art has that singular ability to not just record what happened but to be what happened. Edelson’s Bringing Home the Evolution (1979), which puts maternal mastermind, sculptor Louise Bourgeois in revolutionary garb at the helm of a peace walk, not only reflects a sentiment of the time. It actually is the means Edelson used put that sentiment into the world.

But here’s the problem with Eve at Subliminal Projects, and other shows like it: in attempt to trace a trajectory, it includes work by younger female artists, who, perhaps with the exception of politically pointed Ayanah Moor, clearly do not belong to the same gang. This makes the younger artists seem more diffuse and undirected than they otherwise would.

Born in 1969 and after, they’re barely old to have witnessed third wave feminists and, as much their work grapples with experiences of women, it doesn’t aggressively assert this experience, or carve a place for itself in spheres of culture. Kim McCarty’s flowing figures are ghostlike and lost in themselves. Alex Prager’s well-dressed ladies are lost in thought as well, and the photos live in a psychological space that sometimes becomes Lynchian, while Stella Vine’s dripping, big-eyed paintings of Princess Di or Lisa Lopes humanize celebrity.

Alex Prager, "Christine," 2007.

There are other women artists who would probably fit better into the legacy of 1970s feminism than those presented here. But the point is that time has changed enough that women working today feel comfortable in a space of ambiguity. Not only has this resulted from their far less dire circumstances—women now have retrospectives at MoMA and MOCA, they get gallery shows, etc.—but out of a changing cultural landscape.

When she reviewed the feminist blockbuster exhibition WACK!, critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp commented that the catalog cover, a sea of sexy naked bodies culled from pop culture by Martha Rosler was originally a “critique of representation.” But, “Today, it looks like an advertisement for The L Word.”  Explicitness doesn’t have the same sway as it did forty and fifty years ago, but, at least in Eve, putting ambiguous artists next to the explicit, driven women of first and second wave feminism, makes the former appear weak-willed. It’s not fair, and it’s not informative. There’s something to be said for letting history stay in the past.

DS: So!  Since I haven’t seen you in a while, are you closest to Man, Woman, or Child?

CS: Closest to Child!  But since I’m doing these hair events, I’ve been growing the beard back.  It’s just not very long.  I have scruff, but it’s not a “beard” beard.

Chris Sollars, "Man Woman Child," 2011. 3 Framed C-prints, 20" x 26" each.

DS: I have to ask, which came first, the beard or the art?

CS: Well, even before the beard, I’ve always known that I wanted to make a wig of my long hair, which I’ve had since high school, and wear it at a later date. That’s why the title is Hair and the subtitle is When I’m 64.  I like the collision of those two moments of time—wearing hair from when I was thirty-four when I’m sixty-four.  So I think that piece came first.  As for the beard, I started growing it, and it just turned into its own thing.  My girlfriend took a long trip and by the time she got back, I already had a bunch of things I wanted to do with it.  Before I cut it, I wanted to let it grow a little longer and let it live on its own, and it inspired a series of works.  I’d done a performance in 1998 at Skowhegan where I went to a tool shop in Maine with a lot of old tools and was drawn toward this long handled axe… I personally tried to sharpen it and make a video of me shaving with it.  Of course, I didn’t have much hair back then, because I was 22, and I didn’t have the capacity to grow hair like I do now.  Anyway, I decided that with this new beard I wanted to do it again, with an axe.  Working with my wigmaker, however, I had to grow the beard as long as possible, and if I was going to shave it off with an axe, it wouldn’t work as a wig.  It’s a really a rare thing, to make a wig out of someone’s own beard hair, because you’re hand-knotting, and working with different clumps of hair—looping it like a rug—and it’s a difficult thing, even if your beard is really long, because it’s still so short.

Chris Sollars, "Hair: When I'm 64," 2011-2040. Hand-knotted wig made of human hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard," 2011. Hand-knotted facial hair. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: It’s probably pretty brittle, too.

CS: Yeah. So I decided to do the beard wig first, and then grow back a beard that was substantial enough to shave off with an axe.  So that was the process.  And in between, before I cut off all the hair, I wanted to do a series of related videos.

DS: Were you intentionally trying to touch on issues of gender and masculinity?

CS: Well, yeah.  I named the triptych (the photographs of myself) Man Woman Child (2011) on purpose, because… Well, a child would never have a beard like that and a woman would never have a beard to that extent.  I’ve always had fine hair, and I’ve always been in between being kind of “girlie” and, well, not.

Chris Sollars, "Shave," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: Shaving your beard with an axe is such an over the top gesture!  And you’re wearing this plaid flannel.  But I noticed that as you started to talk about your work, you weren’t talking about gender as much as you were talking about intersecting moments in time, or an interest in working with certain tools.

CS: Well, [the interest in the axe] led to that.  It led to the absurdity of knowing that I could cut down trees, but that I could also cut my face with the thing!  There’s a moment in the videos where there’s a cut or change or rupture that happens.  I’m thinking of the video edit like I am cutting hair, so there’s a real switch that happens, a change of one’s look, or the change that can happen with a cut when you juxtapose one image with the next.  Leading up to the show, in fact, and even currently, I’ve been hiding out a little bit, just until people have seen that work [and realize that Sollars is now totally clean-shaven]. It’s kind of a strange performance that’s still going on.  I was even wearing costumes to change my identity around town. I didn’t want to reveal that I’d cut my hair until the show had opened.  I realized as soon as I cut my long hair that that pieces like mine and like Chris Burden’s I Became A Secret Hippy (1971) don’t exist as just performances, but as pieces of our identity from that point forward.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Lay," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Hair Ball," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Chris Sollars, "Beard Rub," 2011. Video still. Image courtesy of the artist.

DS: What about race? Does that play in at all?  I might be reading more into the project than what you intend, but I read an article in the New York Times about Matta Clark’s Clock Shower (1973), and writer’s spin was about how it was this glorious time in New York when this guy could walk to the top of the Clocktower building and cover himself in shaving cream and then diddle with the clock.  And my thought was yeah, if he’s white, he can do this.  Going from that thought, and looking at your work, which includes this golden ball of hair surveying a forest and the golden blonde Hair Lays and the Beard Rubs, which seem to be about marking or claiming in certain ways, I’m just curious if there are any thoughts about…

CS: …about identity in relation to race?  Well, I think that perception of where I exist culturally, or politically or socially, changes with the haircut.  Going back to Burden’s Secret Hippy, you might be a countercultural person, but you’re wiped of that in terms of your identity.  I guess that’s why I also looked at Ana Mendieta’s piece with the transplanting of the man’s beard onto her face, taking on that masculinity.  Or Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being.  So I’m aware of these female performances and cross cultural performances with hair and identity, and I was thinking, okay, so if there’s this white man art with these things opposed to it or juxtaposed against it, what is white male identity art?  Or what is it specifically to me?  I guess that’s why I focus so much on the hair as a material, like with close-ups of the hair grain, which I think of as wood grain.  Kind of just investigating what is it that my being is made up of.  You know, the scraggly curly beard hair, the long fine hair… What happens when I change?  When I’m separated from it?  How does it exist on its own as an abstraction, like with the Hair Lays, or the beard itself rubbing on things?  I think the masculine action of shaving with an axe kind of completes the picture of that identity of that person.  And I’ve been so influenced by a lot of that ‘70s work that I was curious about performing that investigation on myself.