With 37 contemporary artists featured, “She Said, She Said” at the Akron Art Museum offers a range of thinking on a variety of topics, from issues of representation in art to depictions of bodies to consumer culture.
The exhibit title is a variation on the phrase “he said, she said,” which carries the connotation a conclusion can’t be reached and has historically been associated with cases of sexual assault.
“By switching that up a little bit and saying, ‘She said, She said,’ it's really, one, centering women's voices,” said Akron Art Museum Curator Wendy Earle. “But also, I think, maybe alluding to the fact that we can get to some truth here.”
Organized in partnership with the Rubell Museum, Akron added some pieces of its own to the traveling collection. A 1989 print by the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist artists, directly critiques the lack of representation of women artists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Research from 2019 shows disparities persist in U.S. art museums, with works by female-identifying artists making up just 11% of acquisitions.
Another piece from Akron’s collection, a chair covered with soft sculptures done by Yayoi Kusama in 1962, represents both her innovative use of sewing and how contemporary male artists “borrowed” from her style, Earle said.
A recent sculpture in silicone by Cajsa von Zeipel accumulates in a different way, with cultural adornments like Crocs charms, a mermaid tail, stuffed animals and macaroons accessorizing a seated figure.
“It is interesting in contrast to what is understood as portraiture in general,” said Jenny Gerow, chief curator at Akron Art Museum. “When we're thinking about self-portraiture, often we overlook the kind of daily additions that we make to our bodies and what that says about us and then how people kind of view us through those additions.”
In the same gallery of the exhibit, there are several other examples of portraiture sparking conversations, including a painting that set in motion Nina Chanel Abney’s career. “Class of 2007” is a self and group portrait of Abney’s MFA cohort at Parsons School of Design in New York.
“She's a Black female, but everybody in her class was white, and so she did a reversal, right, where she is the white femme prison guard and then the students of the class are the Black inmates,” Gerow said.
The exhibit is organized around themes of representation and self, the body, appropriation and gestural abstraction, although many pieces connect to more than one theme.
An untitled sculpture of braided straw, rope and beads by Brazilian artist Maria Nepomuceno fills the center of one gallery, hanging from the ceiling and taking the form of female anatomy. Nepomuceno also utilizes spirals in the weaving, “making that connection from the origin of life to the broader universe,” said Jeff Katzin, senior curator at Akron Art Museum.
“I hope that people are excited by how this material is being used, how straw could be something pretty typical, not too exciting, maybe you'd find it on a farm, maybe you'd it in a utilitarian object, and here it is made into something totally different, really vibrant, really lively,” Katzin said.
The range of media featured in the exhibit includes video, collage and photography. The fact that the artists in the show share a demographic is less important to Katzin.
“You can think of it as a survey of what women have been doing in art over the last decades, but you can just as easily think it as a survey of what has been going on in contemporary art, period.”
“She Said, She Said” is on view through Aug. 10 at the Akron Art Museum.
