Artist explores women in combat in Artpace installation

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Margaret Meehan’s “Decoration Day” installation at Artpace deals with women’s history in combat in America’s wars.

SAN ANTONIO — In “They Fought Like Demons,” authors Deanne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook told the stories of women who fought in the Civil War, women such as Frances Clayton, who kept fighting even after her husband was killed in front of her at the Battle of Murfreesboro.

The 2002 book is the inspiration for Dallas artist Margaret Meehan’s “Decoration Day,” one of three installations in Artpace’s summer International Artist-in-Residence exhibition through Sept. 14.- Steve Bennett   Full article here.

#Repost from @artpacesa Summer 2014 International Artist-in-Residence Margaret Meehan gives a behind-the-scenes tour of her new #ArtpaceOriginal exhibition. Visit Wednesday-Sunday from noon-5pm to see her -1work.

Sex, Religion and War: International Artists-in-Residence

“The mighty N’Gone Fall, curator for this go-round of Artpace International Artists-in-Residence, is an art critic, consultant, educator and “cultural engineer” based in Dakar, Senegal and Paris, where she graduated from École Spéciale d’Architecture and worked as editorial director of the seminal contemporary African art magazine Revue Noire from 1994 to 2001. In addition to editing the books An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century (2002) and Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography: A century of African photographers (1999), Fall co-curated the African Photography Biennale in Bamako, Mali, in 2001, and the 2002 Dakar Biennale in Senegal.

Fall states her worldview in her essay “Providing a Space for Freedom: Woman Artists in Africa”: “Colonialism brought in its wake a host of other isms: primitivism … racism, imperialism, totalitarianism, traumatism. Moving beyond the isms is the challenge that the new generation of female artists is taking up.”

Three artists, albeit one of them male, go a long way in demonstrating the scars of these isms, in an unmissable nexus of nationalist ideology, melancholy and fascination. I visited the three artists in their Artpace workspaces to check out their progress and talk about their concepts.- Sarah Fisch, SA Current
Full article here.