Laid Bare in the Landscape

This exhibition assembles photographs, films, and performance documentation by women artists who situate the nude female body in outdoor landscapes. It is organized in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition of modern American photographer Anne W. Brigman, who was noted for her pioneering nude self-portraits made in the early twentieth century.

Laid Bare in the Landscape brings together a range of imagery: from beautiful and sensual self-portraits, to sometimes-surreal and provocative statements by feminist artists beginning in the 1970s. The artists interrogate ideas surrounding beauty, femininity, vulnerability, ritual, identity, and body politics, as they relate to nature and the environment. Artists in the exhibition include Laura Aguilar, Ruth Bernhard, Judy Chicago, Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Judy Dater, Mary Beth Edelson, Regina Jose Galindo, Sally Mann, Ana Mendieta, Otobong Nkanga, Joan Myers, Jo Spence, Carollee Schneemann, and Francesca Woodman.

To compare the proto-feminist landscape photographs of Brigman to her feminist counterparts of the latter twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries is to weave a new thread through generations of visionary women artists who have aimed to further alternative ways of seeing and knowing.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website