Soft and Wet Publication Launch & Conversation
featuring Kazuko Miyamoto, Howardena Pindell, Judy Blum Reddy, and Sadia Shirazi

Please join us at EFA for the closing event and launch of Soft and Wet, a publication reflecting on the exhibition of the same title curated by Sadia Shirazi. The evening will feature readings of excerpts from the Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States (1980) catalog by Kazuko Miyamoto, Howardena Pindell, and Judy Blum Reddy. The curator will read excerpts from the newly commissioned texts for the publication it accompanies, followed by a conversation with the speakers about “Third World Women Artists” in the 1970s and 80s and the linkages with Soft and Wet.

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and early arrival is recommended

RSVP here.

About the Participants

Kazuko Miyamoto is a preeminent feminist figure of minimalism, and a pioneer of a new and radically warm brand of rigorous abstraction, introducing handmade, irregular, and intimate elements that both modulated the movement’s unforgiving visual language and advanced it, by critique. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Miyamoto moved to New York in 1964, studied at the Arts Student League, and assisted Sol LeWitt, she helped produce and execute his open cube sculptures and early wall drawings. Miyamoto’s work has shown in numerous institutions and galleries, both domestically and internationally, including Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria; Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, New York; A.I.R. Gallery, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary, New York; among many others, and is represented by Exile Gallery, Berlin.

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, Howardena Pindell studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. After graduating, she accepted a job in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, where she remained for 12 years (1967–1979). In 1979, she began teaching at the State University of New York, Stony Brook where she is now a full professor. Throughout her career, Pindell has exhibited extensively. Notable solo-exhibitions include: Spelman College (1971, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York), Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2014), and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta (2015).

Pindell often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. She cuts canvases in strips and sews them back together, building up surfaces in elaborate stages. She paints or draws on sheets of paper, punches out dots from the paper using a paper hole punch, drops the dots onto her canvas, and finally squeegees paint through the “stencil” left in the paper from which she had punched the dots. Almost invariably, her paintings are installed unstretched, held to the wall merely by the strength of a few finishing nails. The artist’s fascination with gridded, serialized imagery, along with surface texture appears throughout her oeuvre. Even in her later, more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses in order to address social issues of homelessness, AIDs, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid.

Judy Blum Reddy lives and works in New York. Blum received her BFA from Cooper Union, New York and has exhibited internationally since the 1970s. Most recently she has exhibited at CCS Bard, 2019; the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2015; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2016; Villa Vassilief, Paris, 2016; Dak'Art Biennale of African Contemporary Art, Senegal, 2016; Station Independent Project, New York, 2015; 33 Orchard, New York, 2016; FIAC, Paris, 2016; Clark House Initiative, Bombay, 2014-16; Asian Cultural Centre, Gwangju Biennale, 2016; and Art Dubai, 2015. Reddy's work is included in public collections at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Fond National d'Art Contemporain and Centre National d'Art de Grenoble, France.

Sadia Shirazi is a writer, art historian, curator and sometimes architect based in New York. Her reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, MoMA post, C Magazine, The Funambulist, Jadaliyya and ArteEast and she has written monographic essays on Zarina and Jessica Vaughn. Shirazi has curated exhibitions internationally including Three days in the desert at the Lower East Side Printshop (2018), welcome to what we took from is the state at the Queens Museum (2016), and 230 MB/Exhibition Without Objects at Khoj Artists’s Association in Delhi (2013). Her work has been shown at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, Performance Space New York and the Devi Art Foundation. Shirazi holds a MArch from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from the University of Chicago. She is the Instructor for Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP), teaches at The New School and Cooper Union, and is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.

This event is presented with support from ICI and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, with special thanks to A.I.R. Gallery.

Independent Curators International (ICI) produces exhibitions, events, publications, research and training opportunities for curators and diverse audiences around the world. Established in 1975 and headquartered in New York, ICI is a hub that connects emerging and established curators, artists, and art spaces, forging international networks and generating new forms of collaboration.

The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University was established in 1996 in response to student interest combined with the University’s commitment to global excellence. It provides a space in which research and public programs, with a focus on community and intercultural studies, are made accessible to faculty, students, and the New York community within a broad, rigorous international and comparative framework.

The A/P/A Institute at NYU produces programming, publications, exhibitions, new research, and a long-running artist-in-residence program, attracting leading academics and practitioners. The Institute's multiple archival collection initiatives have also continued to build a foundation of, and preservation and access to, important historical documents and previously overlooked materials for present and future researchers and students.

Located in Greenwich Village, the Institute serves the community highlighting research, cultural production, and scholarship on contemporary issues facing Asian/Pacific American communities, and provides a nexus for scholars, community leaders, and artists who are working on advancing scholarship in the field and bringing theory into practice.

During the event, an A/P/A representative will be present with copies of DIRECTIONS TO MY HOUSE by Zarina Hashmi with Sarah Burney for purchase. “Memory is the only lasting possession we have,” begins Zarina Hashmi, the A/P/A Institute at NYU’s 2017-18 Artist-in-Residence. In the pages that follow, the artist writes about her life for the first time—her family’s experience during the 1947 Partition of India, her long career as an artist, and the many cities that she has called home. The book includes never-published material, and chronicles the artist’s travels and life around the world through a collection of essays, poems, artworks, and personal photographs. More information on the publication can be found here.